The next act shows the struggle of a partly Saxonised people against the Anglo-Norman kings and their claims to feudal superiority. The curtain rises on a sensational melodrama of confused alarms and excursions, where the ill-drilled Celtic supernumeraries at the back of the stage often fall to fighting like wild cats among themselves, while the mail-clad barons prance now on one side and now on the other, as the scenes shift about a border-line almost rubbed out by the crossing and recrossing of [Illustration: THE OUTFLOW OF LOCH KATRINE, PERTHSHIRE] armies. The heroes of the most thrilling tableaux are Wallace and Bruce; and the loudest applause hails the culminating blaze of lime-light on Bannockburn. The wars of Independence are not yet at an end, but the Scots people have learned more or less firmly to stand together, and their chiefs, when not led astray by feud and treachery, begin to enter into the spirit of the piece, in which France now takes a leading part. But Banquo’s ill-fortune dogs the line not yet fully consecrated by misfortune. Over the stage passes that woeful procession of boy kings, most of them cut off before they had learned to rule, each leaving his son to be in turn kidnapped and tutored by fierce nobles to whom John Knox might well have preached on the text “Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child!” more profitably than he denounced that “monstrous regiment of women.” This act culminates in the Reformation, when for a generation Scotland is not clear whether to cry “Unhand me, villain!” to France, or to England, the two powers that at her side play Codlin and Short in a tragic mask. When James VI. had posted off to his richer inheritance, we might expect an idyllic transformation scene of peace out of pain. But the Scot has no turn for peace. Is it the mists and east winds that set such a keen edge on his temper? When not at loyal war, he is robbing and raiding his neighbours, as if to keep his hand in; and if no strife be stirring at home, he hires himself out as a professional fighter or football player over foreign countries and counties, for pelf indeed, but also for the zest of the game. And now that Scotland has no longer its wonted national exercise of defending itself against England, it developed at home that notable taste for spiritual combat; so the next act has for its main interest a controversy as to what things were Cæsar’s, throughout which the hard-headed and hot-hearted theologians of the north made fitful efforts to be loyal to Cæsar, who, on his part, gave them little cause for loyalty.