It is not surprising that he made the historical novel a literary vogue all over Europe.

In the second place, he began in his novels of Scottish character a sympathetic study of nationality.

He is not, perhaps, a fair guide to contemporary conditions; his interests were too romantic and too much in the past to catch the rattle of the looms that caught the ear of Galt, and if we want a picture of the great fact of modern Scotland, its industrialisation, it is to Galt we must go.

But in his comprehension of the essential character of the people he has no rival; in it his historical sense seconded his observation, and the two mingling gave us the pictures whose depth of colour and truth make his Scottish novels, _Old Mortality, The Antiquary, Redgauntlet_, the greatest things of their kind in literature.
(3) The peculiarly national style of fiction founded by Fielding and carried on by his followers reached its culminating point in _Vanity Fair_.

In it the reader does not seem to be simply present at the unfolding of a plot the end of which is constantly present to the mind of the author and to which he is always consciously working, every incident having a bearing on the course of the action; rather he feels himself to be the spectator of a piece of life which is too large and complex to be under the control of a creator, which moves to its close not under the impulsion of a directing hand, but independently impelled by causes evolved in the course of its happening.