But such materials abound in the history of every people. Men of genius
for the work find them scattered every where--in the peculiarities of
personal character developed in the contests of petty tribes or turbulent
burghers, as often as in the revolutions of empires. The value of
historical, as well as of other fictions, must be measured by the power
and the skill it displays, rather than by the magnitude of the events it
describes, or the historical importance of the persons it introduces; and
therefore no history can well be exhausted for the higher purposes of
fiction. Of what historical importance are the stories on which Shakspeare
has founded his _Romeo and Juliet_--his _Othello_--his _Hamlet_, or his
_Lear_? Does the chief interest or excellence of _Waverley_, or _Ivanhoe_,
or _Peveril of the Peak_, or _Redgauntlet_, or _Montrose_, depend on the
delineation of historical characters, or the description of historical
events? What space do Balfour of Burleigh, or Rob Roy, or Helen Macgregor,
fill in history? The fact appears to be, that, even in the purest
historical prose fictions, neither the interest nor the excellence
generally depend upon the characters or the incidents most prominent in
history. A man of genius, who calls up princes and heroes from the dust
into which they have crumbled, may delight us with a more admirable
representation than our own minds could have furnished of some one whose
name we have long known, and of whose personal bearing, and habits, and
daily thoughts, we had but a vague and misty idea; and acknowledging the
fidelity of the portrait we may adopt it; and then this historical person
becomes to us what the imagination of genius, not what history, has made
him, and yet the portrait is probably one in which no contemporary could
have recognized any resemblance to the original. But the characters of
which history has preserved the most full and faithful accounts, whose
recorded actions reflect most accurately the frame of their minds, are
precisely those which each man has pictured to himself with most precision,