ting
of fiction superfluous.[430]

But great as was the interest that Scott took in the historical aspect
of his work, his artistic sense guided his use of materials, and he was
well aware of the danger of over-working the mine. The principles on
which he chose periods and events to represent are illustrated in many
of the introductions. Of _The Fortunes of Nigel_ he said: "The reign of
James I., in which George Heriot flourished, gave unbounded scope to
invention in the fable, while at the same time it afforded greater
variety and discrimination of character than could, with historical
consistency, have been introduced if the scene had been laid a century
earlier."[431]

His first published attempt at fiction-writing was a conclusion to the
novel, _Queenhoo-Hall_,[432] of which his opinion was that it would
never be popular because antiquarian knowledge was displayed in it too
liberally. "The author," he says, "forgot ... that extensive neutral
ground, the large proportion, that is, of manners and sentiments which
are common to us and to our ancestors, having been handed down unaltered
from them to us, or which, arising out of the principles of our common
nature, must have existed in either state of society."[433] Scott's
practice in regard to the language of his historical novels was based on
much the same theory. He intended to admit "no word or turn of
phraseology betraying an origin directly modern,"[434] but to avoid
obsolete words for the most part; and he never attempted to follow with
fidelity the style of the exact age of which he was writing. The
translation of Froissart by Lord Berners seemed to him a sufficiently
good model to serve for the whole mediaeval period.[435] In his review
of _Tales of My Landlord_ he says of the proem to his book: "It is
written in the quaint style of that prefixed by Gay to his _Pastorals_,
being, as Johnson terms it, 'such imitation as he could obtain of
obsolete language, and by consequence, in a style that was never written
or spoken in any age or place.'"

His _Journal_ contains observations on several historical novels which
were of little consequence, as, for example, on one by a Mr. Bell,--"He
goes not the way to write it; he is too general, and not sufficiently
minute";[436] and on _The Spae-Wife_, by Galt,--"He has made his story
difficult to understand, by adopting a region of history little
known."[437] On the other hand he remarked, when someone had suggested a
n