that he has drawn. At the same time it must be admitted that merit
which is associated with dialect has such limitations that it can
never take the same place as work which makes an equal appeal to all
the world. On the whole, perhaps, "Quentin Durward," on account of
its wider interests, its strong character-drawing, and the European
importance of the events and people described, would have my vote
for the second place. It is the father of all those sword-and-cape
novels which have formed so numerous an addition to the light
literature of the last century. The pictures of Charles the Bold and
of the unspeakable Louis are extraordinarily vivid. I can see those
two deadly enemies watching the hounds chasing the herald, and
clinging to each other in the convulsion of their cruel mirth, more
clearly than most things which my eyes have actually rested upon.

The portrait of Louis with his astuteness, his cruelty, his
superstition and his cowardice is followed closely from Comines, and
is the more effective when set up against his bluff and war-like
rival. It is not often that historical characters work out in their
actual physique exactly as one would picture them to be, but in the
High Church of Innsbruck I have seen effigies of Louis and Charles
which might have walked from the very pages of Scott-Louis, thin,
ascetic, varminty; and Charles with the head of a prize-fighter. 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,