But the literary form under which Scott made the deepest impression upon
the consciousness of his own generation and influenced most permanently
the future literature of Europe, was prose fiction. As the creator of
the historical novel and the ancestor of Kingsley, Ainsworth, Bulwer, and
G. P. R. James; of Manzoni, Freytag, Hugo, Mérimée, Dumas, Alexis
Tolstoi, and a host of others, at home and abroad, his example is potent
yet. English fiction is directly or indirectly in his debt for "Romola,"
"Hypatia," "Henry Esmond," and "The Cloister and the Hearth." In several
countries the historical novel had been trying for centuries to get
itself born, but all its attempts had been abortive. "Waverley" is not
only vastly superior to "Thaddeus of Warsaw" (1803) and "The Scottish
Chiefs" (1809); it is something quite different in kind.[34] The
Waverley Novels, twenty-nine in number, appeared in the years 1814-31.
The earlier numbers of the series, "Waverley," "Guy Mannering," "The
Antiquary," "Old Mortality," "The Black Dwarf," "Rob Roy," "The Heart of
Mid-Lothian," "The Bride of Lammermoor," and "A Legend of Montrose," were
Scotch romances of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In
"Ivanhoe" (1819) the author went to England for his scene, and back to
the twelfth century for his period. Thenceforth he ranged over a wide
region in time and space; Elizabethan England ("Kenilworth"), the France
and Switzerland of Louis XI. and Charles the Bold ("Quentin Durward" and
"Anne of Geierstein"), Constantinople and Syria ("Count Robert of Paris,"
"The Betrothed," and "The Talisman") in the age of the Crusades. The
fortunes of the Stuarts, interested him specially and engaged him in
"Woodstock," "The Fortunes of Nigel," "The Monastery," and its sequel,
"The Abbot." He seems to have had, in the words of Mr. R. H. Hutton,
"something very like personal experience of a few centuries."

Scott's formula for the construction of a historical romance was original
with himself, and it has been followed by all his successors. His story