c romance of the seventeenth century in prose and
verse, which often attempted historic, and almost always
pseudo-historic, guise. As has been seen in regard to such collections
as Croxall's, historical stories were freely mingled with fictitious:
and it could not be for nothing that Horace Walpole, the author of the
_Castle of Otranto_, was a rather ardent and even to some extent
scholarly student of the romance and the gossip of history. Much
earlier, Fielding himself, in his salad days, had given something of an
historic turn to the story of _A Journey from this World to the Next_.
And when history itself became more common and more readable, it could
not but be that this inexhaustible source of material for the new kind
of literature, which was being so eagerly demanded and so busily
supplied, should suggest itself. Some instances of late eighteenth and
early nineteenth century experiments have been given and discussed in
the last chapter: and when Scott (or "the Author of _Waverley_") had
achieved his astonishing success, some of the writers of these put in
the usual claim of "That's _my_ thunder." This was done in the case of
the Lees, it was also done in the case of Jane Porter, the writer of
the once famous and favourite _Thaddeus of Warsaw_ (1803) and _Scottish
Chiefs_ (1810): while, as we have seen, there had been historical colour
enough in Godwin's novels to make suggestion of _his_ "authorship of
_Waverley_" not absolutely preposterous. Even Mrs. Radcliffe had touched
the style; and humbler persons like the egregious Henrietta Mosse had
attempted it in the most serious spirit.

[18] Those who are curious about the matter will find it
treated in a set of Essays by the present writer, which
originally appeared in _Macmillan's Magazine_ during the autumn
of 1894, and were reprinted among _Essays in English
Literature_, Second Series, London, 1895.

But with their varying degrees of talent--with, in one or two cases,
even a little genius--all these writers had broken themselves upon one
fatal difficulty--that of anachronism: not in the petty sense of the
pedant, but in the wide one of the critic. The present writer is not
prepared, without reading _A Peep at Our Ancestors_ again (which he
distinctly declines to do), to say that there are, in that remarkable
performance, any positive errors of historic fact worse than, or as bad,
as those which pedantry has pointed out in _Ivanhoe_. But wher