But with their varying degrees of talent--with, in one or two cases, even a little genius--all these writers had broken themselves upon one fatal difficulty--that of anachronism: not in the petty sense of the pedant, but in the wide one of the critic. The present writer is not prepared, without reading _A Peep at Our Ancestors_ again (which he distinctly declines to do), to say that there are, in that remarkable performance, any positive errors of historic fact worse than, or as bad, as those which pedantry has pointed out in _Ivanhoe_. But whereas you may be nearly as well acquainted with the actual history of the time as the pedants themselves, and a great deal better acquainted with its literature, and yet never be shocked, disgusted, or contemptuously amused in _Ivanhoe_ by such things as were quoted from the _Peep_ a few pages back--so, to those who know something of "the old Elizabeth way," and even nowadays to those who know very little, and that little at second hand, Miss Lee's travesty of it in _The Recess_ is impossible and intolerable. When Mrs. Radcliffe, at the date definitely given of 1584, talks about "the Parisian opera," represents a French girl of the sixteenth century as being "instructed in the English poets," and talks about driving in a "landau," the individual blunders are, perhaps, not more violent than those of the chronology by which Scott's Ulrica is apparently a girl at the time of the Conquest and a woman, not too old to be the object of rivalry between Front de Boeuf and his father, not long before the reign of Richard I. But this last oversight does not affect the credibility of the story, or the homogeneity of the manners, in the least. Mrs. Radcliffe jumbles up two (or more than two) utterly different states and stages of society, manners, and other things which constitute the very atmosphere of the story itself. Perhaps (we have very few easy conversations of the period to justify a positive statement) a real Bois-Guilbert and still more a real Wamba might not have talked exactly like Scott's personages: but there is no insistent and disturbing reason why they should not. When we hear an Adelaise of the mid-twelfth century asking whether she does not receive her education from her mamma, the necessary "suspension of disbelief" becomes impossible.