Scott’s feeling for dramatic situation is illustrated in several scenes that stand out in high relief after a hundred details have been forgotten:  one such is the trial scene in which Effie implores her sister to save her by a lie, and Jeanie in agony refuses; the whole management of it is impressively pictorial.  Another is that where Jeanie, on the road to London, is detained by the little band of gypsy-thieves and passes the night with Madge Wildfire in the barn:  it is a scene Scott much relishes and makes his reader enjoy.  And yet another, and greater, is that meeting with Queen Caroline and Lady Suffolk when the humble Scotch girl is conducted by the Duke of Argyll to the country house and in the garden beseeches pardon for her sister Effie.  It is intensely picturesque, real with many homely touches which add to the truth without cheapening the effect of royalty.  The gradual working out of the excellent plot of this romance to a conclusion pleasing to the reader is a favorable specimen of this romancer’s method in story-telling.  There is disproportion in the movement:  it is slow in the first part, drawing together in texture and gaining in speed during its closing portion.  Scott does not hesitate here, as so often, to interrupt the story in order to interpolate historical information, instead of interweaving it atmospherically with the tale itself.  When Jeanie is to have her interview with the Duke of Argyll, certain preliminary pages must be devoted to a sketch of his career.  A master of plot and construction to-day would have made the same story, so telling in motive, so vibrant with human interest, more effective, so far as its conductment is concerned.  Scott in his fiction felt it as part of his duty to furnish chronicle-history, very much as Shakspere seems to have done in his so-called chronicle-history plays; whereas at present the skilled artist feels no such responsibility.  It may be questioned if the book’s famous scenes—­the attempted breaking into the Tolbooth, or the visit of Jeanie to the Queen—­would not have gained greatly from a dramatic point of view had they been more condensed; they are badly languaged, looking to this result, not swift enough for the best effects of drama, whereas conception and framework are highly dramatic.  In a word, if more carefully written, fuller justice would have been done the superb theme.

The characters that crowd the novel (as, in truth, they teem throughout the great romances) testify to his range and grasp:  the Dean family, naturally, in the center.  The pious, sturdy Cameronian father and the two clearly contrasted sisters:  Butler, the clergyman lover; the saddle-maker, Saddletree, for an amusing, long-winded bore; the quaint Laird Dumbledikes; the soldiers of fortune, George Wilson and his mate; that other soldier, Porteous; the gang of evildoers with Madge in the van—­a wonderful creation, she, only surpassed by the better known Meg—­the high personages clustered about the Queen:  loquacious Mrs. Glass, the Dean’s kinswoman—­one has to go back to Chaucer or Shakspere for a companion picture so firmly painted in and composed on such a generous scale.