What a picture (and a very different one) again is that in
_Redgauntlet_ of Peter Peebles, the mad litigant, with face emaciated
by poverty and anxiety, and rendered wild by "an insane lightness
about the eyes," dashing into the English magistrate's court for a
warrant against his fugitive counsel. Or, to take a third instance, as
different as possible from either, how powerfully conceived is the
situation in _Old Mortality_, where Balfour of Burley, in his fanatic
fury at the defeat of his plan for a new rebellion, pushes the
oak-tree, which connects his wild retreat with the outer world, into
the stream, and tries to slay Morton for opposing him. In such scenes
and a hundred others--for these are mere random examples--Scott
undoubtedly painted his masculine figures from as deep and inward a
conception of the character of the situation as Goethe ever attained,
even in drawing Mignon, or Klaerchen, or Gretchen. The distinction has
no real existence. Goethe's pictures of women were no doubt the
intuitions of genius; and so are Scott's of men--and here and there of
his women too.
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