eas you
may be nearly as well acquainted with the actual history of the time as
the pedants themselves, and a great deal better acquainted with its
literature, and yet never be shocked, disgusted, or contemptuously
amused in _Ivanhoe_ by such things as were quoted from the _Peep_ a few
pages back--so, to those who know something of "the old Elizabeth way,"
and even nowadays to those who know very little, and that little at
second hand, Miss Lee's travesty of it in _The Recess_ is impossible and
intolerable. When Mrs. Radcliffe, at the date definitely given of 1584,
talks about "the Parisian opera," represents a French girl of the
sixteenth century as being "instructed in the English poets," and talks
about driving in a "landau," the individual blunders are, perhaps, not
more violent than those of the chronology by which Scott's Ulrica is
apparently a girl at the time of the Conquest and a woman, not too old
to be the object of rivalry between Front de Boeuf and his father, not
long before the reign of Richard I. But this last oversight does not
affect the credibility of the story, or the homogeneity of the manners,
in the least. Mrs. Radcliffe jumbles up two (or more than two) utterly
different states and stages of society, manners, and other things which
constitute the very atmosphere of the story itself. Perhaps (we have
very few easy conversations of the period to justify a positive
statement) a real Bois-Guilbert and still more a real Wamba might not
have talked exactly like Scott's personages: but there is no insistent
and disturbing reason why they should not. When we hear an Adelaise of
the mid-twelfth century asking whether she does not receive her
education from her mamma, the necessary "suspension of disbelief"
becomes impossible.

But these now most obvious truths were not obvious at all between 1780
and 1810: and it is perhaps the greatest evidence of Scott's genius that
half, but by no means quite, unconsciously he saw them, and that he has
made everybody see them since. It was undoubtedly fortunate that he
began novel-writing so late: for earlier even he might have been caught
in the errors of the time. But when he did begin, he had not only
reached middle life and matured his considerable original critical
faculty--criticism and wine are the only things that even the "kind calm
years" may be absolutely trusted to improve if there is any original
goodness in them--but he had other advantages. He had read,