The _Tales of a Grandfather_ were intended for the beginners who had never been infected by the common heresy concerning the dulness of history, and who were blessed with sufficiently active imagination to make the sugar-coating of fiction superfluous.[430] But great as was the interest that Scott took in the historical aspect of his work, his artistic sense guided his use of materials, and he was well aware of the danger of over-working the mine.

The principles on which he chose periods and events to represent are illustrated in many of the introductions.

Of _The Fortunes of Nigel_ he said: "The reign of James I., in which George Heriot flourished, gave unbounded scope to invention in the fable, while at the same time it afforded greater variety and discrimination of character than could, with historical consistency, have been introduced if the scene had been laid a century earlier."[431] His first published attempt at fiction-writing was a conclusion to the novel, _Queenhoo-Hall_,[432] of which his opinion was that it would never be popular because antiquarian knowledge was displayed in it too liberally.

"The author," he says, "forgot ...

that extensive neutral ground, the large proportion, that is, of manners and sentiments which are common to us and to our ancestors, having been handed down unaltered from them to us, or which, arising out of the principles of our common nature, must have existed in either state of society."[433] Scott's practice in regard to the language of his historical novels was based on much the same theory.