_The Ruin_ (the finest thing perhaps in all Anglo-Saxon) is a sort of background study for something that might have been much better than _The Last Days of Pompeii_: and _The Complaint of Deor_, in its allusion to the adventures of the smith Weland and others, makes one sorry that some one more like the historian of a later and decadent though agreeable Wayland the Smith, had not told us the tale that is now left untold.

A crowd of fantastic imaginings or additions, to supply the main substance, and a certain common-sense grasp of actual conditions and circumstances to set them upon, and contrast them with--these are the great requirements of Fiction in life and character.

You must mix prose and poetry to get a good romance or even novel.

The consciences of the ancients revolted from this mixture of kinds; but there was no such revolt in the earlier moderns, and least of all in our own mediaeval forefathers.
So few people are really acquainted with the whole range of Romance (even in English), or with any large part of it, that one may without undue presumption set down in part, if not in whole, to ignorance, a doctrine and position which we must now attack.

This is that romance and novel are widely separated from each other; and that the historian of the novel is really straying out of his ground if he meddles with Romance.