o-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.

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