A larger proportion of his criticism concerns itself with the eighteenth century, perhaps, than of his fiction,[2] and he often wrote reviews of contemporary literature, but on the whole the literature with which he dealt critically was representative of those periods of time which he chose to portray in novel and poem.

This evidently implies great breadth of scope.

Yet Scott's vivid sense of the past had its bounds, as Professor Masson pointed out.[3] It was the "Gothic" past that he venerated.

The field of his studies, chronologically considered, included the period between his own time and the crusades; and geographically, was in general confined to England and Scotland, with comparatively rare excursions abroad.

When, in his novels, he carried his Scottish or English heroes out of Britain into foreign countries, he was apt to bestow upon them not only a special endowment of British feeling, but also a portion of that interest in their native literature which marked the taste of their creator.