ies, we shall
often find that the love in them is merely a light by which the sterner
features of character are to be irradiated, and that the marriage of the
hero is as subordinate to the main bent of the story as Henry the
Fifth's courtship of Katherine is to the battle of Agincourt. Nay, the
fortunes of the person who is nominally the subject of the tale are
often little more than a background on which grander figures are to be
drawn, and deeper fates forth-shadowed. The judgments between the faith
and chivalry of Scotland at Drumclog and Bothwell bridge owe little of
their interest in the mind of a sensible reader to the fact that the
captain of the Popinjay is carried a prisoner to one battle, and returns
a prisoner from the other: and Scott himself, while he watches the white
sail that bears Queen Mary for the last time from her native land, very
nearly forgets to finish his novel, or to tell us--and with small sense
of any consolation to be had out of that minor circumstance,--that
'Roland and Catherine were united, spite of their differing faiths.'

Neither let it be thought for an instant that the slight, and sometimes
scornful, glance with which Scott passes over scenes which a novelist of
our own day would have analysed with the airs of a philosopher, and
painted with the curiosity of a gossip, indicate any absence in his
heart of sympathy with the great and sacred elements of personal
happiness. An era like ours, which has with diligence and ostentation
swept its heart clear of all the passions once known as loyalty,
patriotism, and piety, necessarily magnifies the apparent force of the
one remaining sentiment which sighs through the barren chambers, or
clings inextricably round the chasms of ruin; nor can it but regard with
awe the unconquerable spirit which still tempts or betrays the
sagacities of selfishness into error or frenzy which is believed to be
love.

That Scott was never himself, in the sense of the phrase as employed by
lovers of the Parisian school, 'ivre d'amour,' may be admitted without
prejudice to his sensibility,[164] and that he never knew 'l'amor che
move 'l sol e l'altre stelle,' was the chief, though unrecognised,
calamity of his deeply chequered life. But the reader of honour and
feeling will not therefore suppose that the love which Miss Vernon
sacrifices, stooping for an instant from her horse, is of less noble
stamp, or less enduring faith, than that which troubles and degrades