"Maria Stuart" is a rich and powerful work, full of dramatic life, almost too violently intense. All the details of the plot are admirably linked together,--Rizzio's murder, Damley's death, and Bothwell's elopement with Maria; the finale alone is weak, or more correctly speaking, the drama has no finale. It is my belief that the poet succeeded so well simply because on Scottish soil he still felt himself encompassed by the atmosphere of Norway. These Scots of his are of Norse origin. Bothwell says: "Since the hour when my will struck root in events, I have seen it grow. One day in a tempest I sought refuge with my fleet among the Orkney Islands; the sea tossed us wildly, the clouds drifted o'er us like bits of wet sails, the billows broke with loud rumbling on the sharp and treeless shore. Ah, then I felt my kindred near at hand, the Norse Viking race that drifted in days of yore to this coast, and from which we are descended. Aye, it was a tree of ragged will, that took root in the rocks, but 'neath the shelter of this tree a people build to-day." In this Norwegian-Scottish world, the poet feels perfectly at home, and the characters, created by him without any breach with local coloring, have traits very nearly akin to the forms from the Norse Middle Ages that he was so well accustomed to portray. The most marked of the main characters are the Puritan John Knox, the gloomy yet pleasure-loving, wildly energetic Bothwell, and the weak, boyishly revengeful and unworthily humble Damley; Bothwell a genuine Renaissance personality, Damley almost too modern. Maria Stuart herself is not so successfully drawn; the traits of her character are too effeminately indistinct. She is conceived as a being, the mysterious foundation of whose nature is revealed in two opposite poles,--that of absolute feminine weakness, and that of absolute feminine strength. Her fate is dependent on her nature, so far as this weakness is the cause of her power over men, and this strength is useless in the affairs given her to manage in that violent age. She is, however, by virtue of Northern idealism, by virtue of the innate modesty of the poet who is a priest's son, entirely too lacking in the sensuous element, moreover, too passive to be the heroine of a drama. She is delineated less through what she says and does than through enthusiastic or deprecatory mention and the direct influence exercised by her personality. She is enveloped in a cloud of adjectives designating her character, hurled at her in masses by the other characters in the drama. "Maria Stuart" owes its origin to a period in the progress of Björnson's development, when he had a tendency, perhaps owing to Kierkegaard's influence, to describe his characters psychologically, instead of allowing their natures to unfold of themselves without any commentary. All the personages in these dramas are psychologists; they study one another, explain one another's temperaments, and experiment with one another.