him as a poet,--come out far above
Goethe. Excepting the hero of his first drama (Goetz of the iron hand),
which by the way was so much in Scott's line that his first essay in
poetry was to translate it--not very well--I doubt if Goethe was ever
successful with his pictures of men. _Wilhelm Meister_ is, as Niebuhr
truly said, "a menagerie of tame animals." Doubtless Goethe's
women--certainly his women of culture--are more truly and inwardly
conceived and created than Scott's. Except Jeanie Deans and Madge
Wildfire, and perhaps Lucy Ashton, Scott's women are apt to be
uninteresting, either pink and white toys, or hardish women of the
world. But then no one can compare the men of the two writers, and not
see Scott's vast pre-eminence on that side.

I think the deficiency of his pictures of women, odd as it seems to
say so, should be greatly attributed to his natural chivalry. His
conception of women of his own or a higher class was always too
romantic. He hardly ventured, as it were, in his tenderness for them,
to look deeply into their little weaknesses and intricacies of
character. With women of an inferior class, he had not this feeling.
Nothing can be more perfect than the manner in which he blends the
dairy-woman and woman of business in Jeanie Deans, with the lover and
the sister. But once make a woman beautiful, or in any way an object
of homage to him, and Scott bowed so low before the image of her,
that he could not go deep into her heart. He could no more have
analysed such a woman, as Thackeray analyzed Lady Castlewood, or
Amelia, or Becky, or as George Eliot analysed Rosamond Vincy, than he
could have vivisected Camp or Maida. To some extent, therefore,
Scott's pictures of women remain something in the style of the
miniatures of the last age--bright and beautiful beings without any
special character in them. He was dazzled by a fair heroine. He could
not take them up into his imagination as real beings as he did men.
But then how living are his men, whether coarse or noble! What a
picture, for instance, is that in _A Legend of Montrose_ of the
conceited, pragmatic, but prompt and dauntless soldier of fortune,
rejecting Argyle's attempts to tamper with him, in the dungeon at
Inverary, suddenly throwing himself on the disguised Duke so soon as
he detects him by his voice, and wresting from him the means of his
own liberation! Who could read that scene and say for a moment that
Dalgetty is painted "from the skin