This is a description of a mere relationship between classes of a society. Scott sees in it a story. He divines in it just the situations and issues out of which a story can be made. He sees its implications in individual lives. Instead of contemplating its effects on future generations he lays bare its workings in the scheme of life of people who lived under it. Just as a prism catches the light and turns it into colours he stands between the historical generalisation and his readers and he breaks up the general into the particular and projects it as a picture. The result is like the condensing of a cloud into raindrops. Fiction is like the dust which creates a sunbeam and helps the sunlight to show that it is there. And in this way Scott does something for history that the historian by himself cannot do, or can seldom do; he recaptures the life of an age, and resurrects a picture of the past. The historical novelist receives his hint from history, but such examples as these from _Ivanhoe_ are enough to make it apparent that this hint need not necessarily be a story ready-made, a sequence of events to be followed. Many historical novels are stories straight from a history-book--the adventures of Guy Fawkes, the sorrows of Mary Queen of Scots--amplified and rounded off by fiction perhaps, and re-told with some variations. History may provide plot and adventure, and fiction may just fill in the lines where history is inadequate or idealise incidents and careers where history is incomplete or disappointing. It is claimed of some of Jokai’s novels that, staged as they are in lands where passion and action are intense and full of colour, and drawn as they are from a history that is crowded with romantic and thrilling episodes, they do not need an invention of incident or a perversion of history to make them complete, but are just a vivid re-telling of things that actually happened. The books of Dumas are filled with incidents and situations that are picked straight from history and are marvellously connected into an organised story. And many writers have assimilated into the body of their novels incidents that are true to fact or anecdotes from legend, and so have made history and fiction fit into each other in dovetail fashion. All this represents one way in which history can be incorporated into a novel, but it is not the only way; and the particular fact that is brought to light by the Introduction to _Ivanhoe_, as well as by other things, is the fact that history does not merely inspire fiction by providing a tale, a thread of incident, a network of action, to be re-told in story-book fashion; it may only provoke a tale, it may just provide situations and relationships and problems which give the right kind of issue that is needed in story-making. Scott saw implicit in the conditions of the age of Richard I a set of human relationships which were materials for a novel. He had the power of divining the implied