It is hard on us when a portrait upsets all our preconceived ideas, when, for example, we see in the National Portrait Gallery a man with a noble, olive-tinted, poetic face, and with a start read beneath it that it is the wicked Judge Jeffreys.  Occasionally, however, as at Innsbruck, we are absolutely satisfied.  I have before me on the mantelpiece yonder a portrait of a painting which represents Queen Mary’s Bothwell.  Take it down and look at it.  Mark the big head, fit to conceive large schemes; the strong animal face, made to captivate a sensitive, feminine woman; the brutally forceful features—­the mouth with a suggestion of wild boars’ tusks behind it, the beard which could bristle with fury:  the whole man and his life-history are revealed in that picture.  I wonder if Scott had ever seen the original which hangs at the Hepburn family seat?

Personally, I have always had a very high opinion of a novel which the critics have used somewhat harshly, and which came almost the last from his tired pen.  I mean “Count Robert of Paris.”  I am convinced that if it had been the first, instead of the last, of the series it would have attracted as much attention as “Waverley.”  I can understand the state of mind of the expert, who cried out in mingled admiration and despair:  “I have studied the conditions of Byzantine Society all my life, and here comes a Scotch lawyer who makes the whole thing clear to me in a flash!” Many men could draw with more or less success Norman England, or mediaeval France, but to reconstruct a whole dead civilization in so plausible a way, with such dignity and such minuteness of detail, is, I should think, a most wonderful tour de force.  His failing health showed itself before the end of the novel, but had the latter half equalled the first, and contained scenes of such humour as Anna Comnena reading aloud her father’s exploits, or of such majesty as the account of the muster of the Crusaders upon the shores of the Bosphorus, then the book could not have been gainsaid its rightful place in the very front rank of the novels.

I would that he had carried on his narrative, and given us a glimpse of the actual progress of the First Crusade.  What an incident!  Was ever anything in the world’s history like it?  It had what historical incidents seldom have, a definite beginning, middle and end, from the half-crazed preaching of Peter down to the Fall of Jerusalem.  Those leaders!  It would take a second Homer to do them justice.  Godfrey the perfect soldier and leader, Bohemund the unscrupulous and formidable, Tancred the ideal knight errant, Robert of Normandy the half-mad hero!  Here is material so rich that one feels one is not worthy to handle it.  What richest imagination could ever evolve anything more marvellous and thrilling than the actual historical facts?

But what a glorious brotherhood the novels are!  Think of the pure romance of “The Talisman”; the exquisite picture of Hebridean life in “The Pirate”; the splendid reproduction of Elizabethan England in “Kenilworth”; the rich humour of the “Legend of Montrose”; above all, bear in mind that in all that splendid series, written in a coarse age, there is not one word to offend the most sensitive car, and it is borne in upon one how great and noble a man was Walter Scott, and how high the service which he did for literature and for humanity.