This explains why Hewlett is at home in a peculiarly romantic and coloured world like that of Renaissance Italy, and Dumas is really himself when his books are in an atmosphere of court intrigue and racy adventure, and Scott is a king in his kingdom when he is in the peasant-world of Scotland or when he is concerned with those Covenanting days of which he wrote “I am complete master of the whole history of these strange times.” These writers breathe in their novels a life that they have made their own, and that has become part of themselves. It is not a particular period of history but rather a particular phase of life, a certain type of experience, a definite sort of “world” that these writers have come to possess and can so describe with all appropriate atmosphere; and it is not necessarily when they change their period of history but when they move into a different world and concern themselves with a type of life and experience which they have not made their own by any “constant imaginative reference” that they find themselves out of their element. If they take up a fresh corner of life like this for their stories, they are unable to escape from the atmosphere that is really theirs, they cannot shake off the things that belong to the world which is their true world and which has become a part of their thinking; and either they give us no atmosphere at all, or (which is at bottom the same thing) they trail with them into this fresh world an atmosphere which is here alien and inappropriate but which has become part and parcel of themselves.