Black Knights, and what not, that constitute the thrill of Ivanhoe. But in the end we go away with empty hearts. There is neither an epic feeling, nor a religious feeling, nor even a lyric sentiment of love in this famous novel. The characters stand before us as spectacles for our eyes, or at least for our imaginations. There is no real idea behind all that happens except the idea of supplying a series of attractive scenes. Strike, if you choose, a chord of deeper resonance—the celebrated love passage between the Templar and the Jewess Rebecca. But that episode, too, is little, at bottom, but a riot in the "picturesque." The character of the enamoured knight and the exchanges between the Templar and the Jewish girl are treated in a conventional and often absurd manner: we have the set for a drama of the soul, but the soul fails to materialize. The best touches, certainly, are a few impulses of generosity in the Templar's heart, and especially his death in combat—not under the enemy's joust, but from the violent tension of his conflicting passions. There is some merit—flashes of delicate and noble brilliancy—in the portrait of Rebecca, notably in the last visit she pays to the Lady Rowena and in their farewell. It is the figure of a Jewess who remains such out of loyalty to race, but with a successful outreaching to pure humanity.
Similar moments are not lacking in other novels of Scott, Old Mortality, for instance, in the conception of the crude and licentious Sergeant Bothwell, made ridiculous by his constant harping on his descent from the Stuarts, and on whose breast, when he had fallen in battle, Morton finds a wallet containing the Stuart family tree, two love letters written in a woman's hand twenty years before, a wisp of hair, and poems indited by this same Bothwell. Morton is moved to reflection on the destiny of this singular and unhappy wretch, who, from the depth of failure and poverty, could still cherish his dream of the grandeur to which birth entitled him, and who, from his debauchery and licence, looked back with yearning toward the one pure passion of his youth. Rob Roy has a few hints at poetry—themes of travel and unexpected meetings—in its earlier chapters; so does Waverley in an occasional evocation of traditional semi-barbarous life. But they are soon lost in insignificant intrigue again. This is one's inevitable experience with Scott. His novels start promisingly—I am thinking of Saint Roman's Wells particularly—but before long we are caught in the "ro-
