stifles, the flashes of
resentment to which she gives way, the triumph of policy over private
feeling, her imperious impatience when she is baffled, her jealousy as
she grows suspicious of a personal rival, her gratified pride and
vanity when the suspicion is exchanged for the clear evidence, as she
supposes, of Leicester's love, and her peremptory conclusion of the
audience, bring before the mind a series of pictures far more vivid
and impressive than the greatest of historical painters could fix on
canvas, even at the cost of the labour of years. Even more brilliant,
though not so sustained and difficult an effort of genius, is the
later scene in the same story, in which Elizabeth drags the unhappy
Countess of Leicester from her concealment in one of the grottoes of
Kenilworth Castle, and strides off with her, in 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 wri