necessary to their fame and their figure in the
world. It is not difficult to recall examples of them. No one, for
instance, would talk of Scott's _Tales of a Grandfather_ as indicating
the power that produced _Kenilworth_ and _Guy Mannering_. Nevertheless,
without this chance minor compilation we should not really have the key
of Scott. Without this one insignificant book we should not see his
significance. For the truth was that Scott loved history more than
romance, because he was so constituted as to find it more romantic than
romance. He preferred the deeds of Wallace and Douglas to those of
Marmion and Ivanhoe. Therefore his garrulous gossip of old times, his
rambles in dead centuries, give us the real material and impulse of all
his work; they represent the quarry in which he dug and the food on
which he fed. Almost alone among novelists Scott actually preferred
those parts of his historical novels which he had not invented himself.
He exults when he can boast in an eager note that he has stolen some
saying from history. Thus _The Tales of a Grandfather_, though small, is
in some sense the frame of all the Waverley novels. We realise that all
Scott's novels are tales of a grandfather.

What has been said here about Scott might be said in a less degree
about Thackeray's _Four Georges_. Though standing higher among his works
than _The Tales of a Grandfather_ among Scott's they are not his works
of genius; yet they seem in some way to surround, supplement, and
explain such works. Without the _Four Georges_ we should know less of
the link that bound Thackeray to the beginning and to the end of the
eighteenth century; thence we should have known less of Colonel Esmond
and also less of Lord Steyne. To these two examples I have given of the
slight historical experiments of two novelists a third has to be added.
The third great master of English fiction whose glory fills the
nineteenth century also produced a small experiment in the
popularisation of history. It is separated from the other two partly by
a great difference of merit but partly also by an utter difference of
tone and outlook. We seem to hear it suddenly as in the first words
spoken by a new voice, a voice gay, colloquial, and impatient. Scott and
Thackeray were tenderly attached to the past; Dickens (in his
consciousness at any rate) was impatient with everything, but especially
impatient with the past.

A collection of the works of Dickens would be incomp