A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century

It was reserved for Walter Scott, "the Ariosto of the North", "the historiographer royal of feudalism", to accomplish the task which his eighteenth-century forerunners had essayed in vain. He possessed the true enchanter's wand, the historic imagination. With this in his hand, he raised the dead past to life, made it once more conceivable, made it even actual. Before Scott no genius of the highest order had lent itself wholly or mainly to retrospection. He is the middle point and the culmination of English romanticism.