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 writing
history and biography Scott has little or no advantage over very
inferior men. His pictures of Swift, of Dryden, of Napoleon, are in no
way very vivid. It is only where he is working from the pure
imagination,--though imagination stirred by historic study,--that he
paints a picture which follows us about, as if with living eyes,
instead of creating for us a mere series of lines and colours. Indeed,
whether Scott draws truly or falsely, he draws with such genius that
his pictures of Richard and Saladin, of Louis XI. and Charles the
Bold, of Margaret of Anjou and Rene of Provence, of Mary Stuart and
Elizabeth Tudor, of Sussex and of Leicester, of James and Charles and
Buckingham, of the two Dukes of Argyle--the Argyle of the time of the
revolution, and the Argyle of George II.
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