Contention arises in a discussion of a mortal so good as Jeanie:  it would hardly be in the artistic temper of our time to draw a peasant girl so well-nigh superhuman in her traits; Balzac’s “Eugenie Grandet” (the book appeared only fifteen years later), is much nearer our time in its conception of the possibilities of human nature:  Eugenie does not strain credence, while Jeanie’s pious tone at times seems out of character, if not out of humanity.  The striking contrast with Effie is in a way to her advantage:  the weaker damsel appears more natural, more like flesh and blood.  But the final scene when, after fleeing with her high-born lover, she returns to her simple sister as a wife in a higher grade of society and the sister agrees that their ways henceforth must be apart—­that scene for truth and power is one of the master-strokes.  The reader finds that Jeanie Deans somehow grows steadily in his belief and affection:  quietly but surely, a sense of her comeliness, her truthful love, her quaint touch of Scotch canniness, her daughterly duteousness and her stanch principle intensifies until it is a pang to bid her farewell, and the mind harks back to her with a fond recollection.  Take her for all in all, Jeanie Deans ranks high in Scott’s female portraiture:  with Meg Merillies in her own station, and with Lucy Ashton and Di Vernon among those of higher social place.  In her class she is perhaps unparalleled in all his fiction.  The whole treatment of Effie’s irregular love is a fine example of Scott’s kindly tolerance (tempered to a certain extent by the social convention of his time) in dealing with the sins of human beings.  He is plainly glad to leave Effie an honestly married woman with the right to look forward to happy, useful years.  The story breeds generous thoughts on the theme of young womanhood:  it handled the problem neither from the superior altitude of the conventional moralist nor the cold aloofness of the latter-day realist—­Flaubert’s attitude in “Madame Bovary.”

“A big, imperfect, noble Novel,” the thoughtful reader concludes as he closes it, and thinking back to an earlier impression, finds that time has not loosened its hold.

And to repeat the previous statement:  what is true of this is true of all Scott’s romances.  The theme varies, the setting with its wealth of local color may change, the period or party differ with the demands of fact.  Scotch and English history are widely invoked:  now it is the time of the Georges, now of the Stuarts, now Elizabethan, again back to the Crusades.  Scott, in fact, ranges from Rufus the Red to the year 1800, and many are the complications he considers within that ample sweep.  It would be untrue to say that his plots imitate each other or lack in invention:  we have seen that invention is one of his virtues.  Nevertheless, the motives are few when disencumbered of their stately historical trappings:  hunger, ambition, love, hate, patriotism, religion, the primary passions and