Edward Bulwer-Lytton was a famously dreadful writer of historical romances, and, not-so-famously, the president of the British Archaeological Congress in the mid-19th century. This quotation is from the introduction to his historical romance called Harold: Last of the Saxon Kings.
So, when I first turned my attention to Historical Romance, my main aim was to avoid as much as possible those fairer portions of the soil that had been appropriated by the first discoverers. The great author of Ivanhoe, and those amongst whom, abroad and at home, his mantle was divided, had employed History to aid Romance; I contented myself with the humbler task to employ Romance in the aid of History;—to extract from authentic but neglected chronicles, and the unfrequented storehouse of Archaeology, the incidents and details that enlived the dry narrative of facts to which the general historian is confined,—construct my plot from the actual events themselves, and place the staple of such interest as I could create in reciting the struggles, and delineating the characters, of those who had been the living actors in the real drama.
Source
Edward Bulwer Lytton. 1869. Harold: The Last of the Saxon Kings Published by BiblioBazaar, LLC, 2007 ISBN 1426428839, 9781426428838 648 pages
