a fit of vindictive humiliation and Amazonian fury, to confront her with her husband.  But this last scene no doubt is more in Scott’s way.  He can always paint women in their more masculine moods.  Where he frequently fails is in the attempt to indicate the finer shades of women’s nature.  In Amy Robsart herself, for example, he is by no means generally successful, though in an early scene her childish delight in the various orders and decorations of her husband is painted with much freshness and delicacy.  But wherever, as in the case of queens, Scott can get a telling hint from actual history, he can always so use it as to make history itself seem dim to the equivalent for it which he gives us.

And yet, as every one knows, Scott was excessively free in his manipulations of history for the purposes of romance.  In Kenilworth he represents Shakespeare’s plays as already in the mouths of courtiers and statesmen, though he lays the scene in the eighteenth year of Elizabeth, when Shakespeare was hardly old enough to rob an orchard.  In Woodstock, on the contrary, he insists, if you compare Sir Henry Lee’s dates with the facts, that Shakespeare died twenty years at least before he actually died.  The historical basis, again, of Woodstock and of Redgauntlet is thoroughly untrustworthy, and about all the minuter details of history,—­unless so far as they were characteristic of the age,—­I do not suppose that Scott in his romances ever troubled himself at all.  And yet few historians—­not even Scott himself when he exchanged romance for history—­ever drew the great figures of history with so powerful a hand.  In writing history and biography Scott has little or no advantage over very inferior men.  His pictures of Swift, of Dryden, of Napoleon, are in no way very vivid.  It is only where he is working from the pure imagination,—­though imagination stirred by historic study,—­that he paints a picture which follows us about, as if with living eyes, instead of creating for us a mere series of lines and colours.  Indeed, whether Scott draws truly or falsely, he draws with such genius that his pictures of Richard and Saladin, of Louis XI. and Charles the Bold, of Margaret of Anjou and Rene of Provence, of Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor, of Sussex and of Leicester, of James and Charles and Buckingham, of the two Dukes of Argyle—­the Argyle of the time of the revolution, and the Argyle of George II., of Queen Caroline, of Claverhouse, and Monmouth, and of Rob Roy, will live in English literature beside Shakespeare’s pictures—­probably less faithful if more imaginative—­of John and Richard and the later Henries, and all the great figures by whom they were surrounded.  No historical portrait that we possess will take precedence—­as a mere portrait—­of Scott’s brilliant study of James I. in The Fortunes of Nigel.  Take this illustration for instance, where George Heriot the goldsmith (Jingling Geordie, as the king familiarly calls him) has just been speaking of Lord Huntinglen, as “a man of the old rough world that will drink and swear:”—­