SOURCE: "The Broken Years, 1817-1819," in Sir Walter Scott, Cassell and Company Ltd., 1932, pp. 167-201.

In the following excerpt, Buchan criticizes Ivanhoe 's pageantry and artificiality, as well as its concern with ornament, rather than with a more serious representation of medieval England.

In Ivanhoe Scott opened a new lode in the mine of his fancy, a vein of poorer but most marketable ore. He had read widely in the mediaeval chroniclers, and had in his head a mass of more or less accurate antiquarian knowledge, of arms, heraldry, monastic institutions, and the dress and habits of the Middle Ages. He chose the reign of Richard I as his period, and tumbled into it a collection of other things which had caught his fancy. To the forests of the English midlands he would fit the appropriate romance, and do for them what he had already done for the...