In _Kenilworth_ he represents Shakespeare's plays as already in the mouths of courtiers and statesmen, though he lays the scene in the eighteenth year of Elizabeth, when Shakespeare was hardly old enough to rob an orchard.

In _Woodstock_, on the contrary, he insists, if you compare Sir Henry Lee's dates with the facts, that Shakespeare died twenty years at least before he actually died.

The historical basis, again, of _Woodstock_ and of _Redgauntlet_ is thoroughly untrustworthy, and about all the minuter details of history,--unless so far as they were characteristic of the age,--I do not suppose that Scott in his romances ever troubled himself at all.

And yet few historians--not even Scott himself when he exchanged romance for history--ever drew the great figures of history with so powerful a hand.

In writing history and biography Scott has little or no advantage over very inferior men.