at which is the more
agreeable to the art of fiction.

But he who wishes to avoid the ground pre-occupied by others, and claim
in the world of literature some spot, however humble, which he may
"plough with his own heifer," will seek to establish himself not where
the land is the most fertile, but where it is the least enclosed. So,
when I first turned my attention to Historical Romance, my main aim was
to avoid as much as possible those fairer portions of the soil that had
been appropriated by the first discoverers. The great author of Ivanhoe,
and those amongst whom, abroad and at home, his mantle was divided, had
employed History to aid Romance; I contented myself with the humbler task
to employ Romance in the aid of History,--to extract from authentic but
neglected chronicles, and the unfrequented storehouse of Archaeology, the
incidents and details that enliven the dry narrative of facts to which
the general historian is confined,--construct my plot from the actual
events themselves, and place the staple of such interest as I could
create in reciting the struggles, and delineating the characters, of
those who had been the living actors in the real drama. For the main
materials of the three Historical Romances I have composed, I consulted
the original authorities of the time with a care as scrupulous, as if
intending to write, not a fiction but a history. And having formed the
best judgment I could of the events and characters of the age, I adhered
faithfully to what, as an Historian, I should have held to be the true
course and true causes of the great political events, and the essential
attributes of the principal agents. Solely in that inward life which,
not only as apart from the more public and historical, but which, as
almost wholly unknown, becomes the fair domain of the poet, did I claim
the legitimate privileges of fiction, and even here I employed the agency
of the passions only so far as they served to illustrate what I believed
to be the genuine natures of the beings who had actually lived, and to
restore the warmth of the human heart to the images recalled from the
grave.

Thus, even had I the gifts of my most illustrious predecessors, I should
be precluded the use of many of the more brilliant. I shut myself out
from the wider scope permitted to their fancy, and denied myself the
license to choose or select materials, alter dates, vary causes and
effects according to the convenience of that more