(2) His novels are on a vast scale, covering a very wide range of action, and are concerned with public rather than with private interests.  So, with the exception of The Bride of Lammermoor, the love story in his novels is generally pale and feeble; but the strife and passions of big parties are magnificently portrayed.  A glance over even the titles of his novels shows how the heroic side of history for over six hundred years finds expression in his pages; and all the parties of these six centuries—­Crusaders, Covenanters, Cavaliers, Roundheads, Papists, Jews, Gypsies, Rebels—­start into life again, and fight or give a reason for the faith that is in them.  No other novelist in England, and only Balzac in France, approaches Scott in the scope of his narratives.

(3) Scott was the first novelist in any language to make the scene an essential element in the action.  He knew Scotland, and loved it; and there is hardly an event in any of his Scottish novels in which we do not breathe the very atmosphere of the place, and feel the presence of its moors and mountains.  The place, morever, is usually so well chosen and described that the action seems almost to be the result of natural environment.  Perhaps the most striking illustration of this harmony between scene and incident is found in Old Mortality, where Morton approaches the cave of the old Covenanter, and where the spiritual terror inspired by the fanatic’s struggle with imaginary fiends is paralleled by the physical terror of a gulf and a roaring flood spanned by a slippery tree trunk.  A second illustration of the same harmony of scene and incident is found in the meeting of the arms and ideals of the East and West, when the two champions fight in the burning desert, and then eat bread together in the cool shade of the oasis, as described in the opening chapter of The Talisman.  A third illustration is found in that fascinating love scene, where Ivanhoe lies wounded, raging at his helplessness, while the gentle Rebecca alternately hides and reveals her love as she describes the terrific assault on the castle, which goes on beneath her window.  His thoughts are all on the fight; hers on the man she loves; and both are natural, and both are exactly what we expect under the circumstances.  These are but striking examples of the fact that, in all his work, Scott tries to preserve perfect harmony between the scene and the action.

(4) Scott’s chief claim to greatness lies in the fact that he was the first novelist to recreate the past; that he changed our whole conception of history by making it to be, not a record of dry facts, but a stage on which living men and women played their parts.  Carlyle’s criticism is here most pertinent:  “These historical novels have taught this truth ... unknown to writers of history:  that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state papers, controversies, and abstractions of men.”  Not only the