The conditions of the life of the present-day, the current habits of thought, the social relationships of men, the economic situation of the country, the welfare of family and Church, and the relations of those institutions and groups that make their conflicting claims upon the loyalty and cover so much of the activity of individuals, are rich with problems and anomalies, and situations and combinations of circumstance which are peculiar to the age, and are the source of most of the issues of the novel of the present-day. The entanglement of the individuals in these conditions produces problems of experience that are peculiarly modern. In the same way every set of circumstances produces its special set of human issues, every age has its own life-problems; and the novel of an age of monasticism will range through a different scheme of problems from that of an age of divorce-law activity, and the world of the Industrial Movement will show life dominated by issues different from those of the age of Chivalry. The twentieth century differs from the twelfth not merely in its language, its dress, its implements and armour, but in its whole experience of life. It is not merely in the suits and trappings that one age contrasts with another; and for this reason the historical novel is justified, as something more than picturesque scene-painting, for it treats of other ages’ experiments in living, and depicts human nature breaking in upon a different set of experiences, a different range of problems. When Scott in the Introductions to _Ivanhoe_ and to _The Monastery_ summarises a state of society therefore, and assumes a given set of human relationships as the basis of a novel, he is carrying with these things the whole range of experiences and issues that are involved in them and that are peculiar to them, and his purpose is to turn these into story as a present-day novelist turns the social conditions of the twentieth century into fiction. History, then, is not merely a taskmaster to the novelist. Too often the historical novelist has been spoken of as being hampered by history and tied down by chronological tables. He has been regarded as a novelist working under limitations and with one hand tied, history restricting his imagination, and setting him a boundary. But all that has just been said implies that history is not merely the chain that ties the novelist down; rather it is the wing that helps him to soar into a new range of problems and experiences. It is his inspiration, and not simply a tie. When Scott in his Introductions gave himself a basis for his novels it is true that he was accepting certain limitations and agreeing to work within a given set of facts, just as an Arctic explorer agrees to accept the hardships of cold weather; but at the same time he was opening up to himself a different world and a life that rested on a different basis and that so provided him with a host of fresh story-issues.