I think the deficiency of his pictures of women, odd as it seems to say so, should be greatly attributed to his natural chivalry.  His conception of women of his own or a higher class was always too romantic.  He hardly ventured, as it were, in his tenderness for them, to look deeply into their little weaknesses and intricacies of character.  With women of an inferior class, he had not this feeling.  Nothing can be more perfect than the manner in which he blends the dairy-woman and woman of business in Jeanie Deans, with the lover and the sister.  But once make a woman beautiful, or in any way an object of homage to him, and Scott bowed so low before the image of her, that he could not go deep into her heart.  He could no more have analysed such a woman, as Thackeray analyzed Lady Castlewood, or Amelia, or Becky, or as George Eliot analysed Rosamond Vincy, than he could have vivisected Camp or Maida.  To some extent, therefore, Scott’s pictures of women remain something in the style of the miniatures of the last age—­bright and beautiful beings without any special character in them.  He was dazzled by a fair heroine.  He could not take them up into his imagination as real beings as he did men.  But then how living are his men, whether coarse or noble!  What a picture, for instance, is that in A Legend of Montrose of the conceited, pragmatic, but prompt and dauntless soldier of fortune, rejecting Argyle’s attempts to tamper with him, in the dungeon at Inverary, suddenly throwing himself on the disguised Duke so soon as he detects him by his voice, and wresting from him the means of his own liberation!  Who could read that scene and say for a moment that Dalgetty is painted “from the skin inwards”?  It was just Scott himself breathing his own life through the habits of a good specimen of the mercenary soldier—­realizing where the spirit of hire would end, and the sense of honour would begin—­and preferring, even in a dungeon, the audacious policy of a sudden attack to that of crafty negotiation.  What a picture (and a very different one) again is that in Redgauntlet of Peter Peebles, the mad litigant, with face emaciated by poverty and anxiety, and rendered wild by “an insane lightness about the eyes,” dashing into the English magistrate’s court for a warrant against his fugitive counsel.  Or, to take a third instance, as different as possible from either, how powerfully conceived is the situation in Old Mortality, where Balfour of Burley, in his fanatic fury at the defeat of his plan for a new rebellion, pushes the oak-tree, which connects his wild retreat with the outer world, into the stream, and tries to slay Morton for opposing him.  In such scenes and a hundred others—­for these are mere random examples—­Scott undoubtedly painted his masculine figures from as deep and inward a conception of the character of the situation as Goethe ever attained, even in drawing Mignon, or Klaerchen, or Gretchen.  The distinction has no