Norna of the Fitful-Head, speaks her wild rune of the reimkennar to the spirits of the North wind; “bold Magnus, the son of the earl;” Minna, Brenda, Cleveland, Claude Halcro, feast, love, fight and rhyme in the Udaller’s charmed isle. Diana Vernon, on horseback, clears her five-barred gate and gallops by; Rob Roy cries “claymore,” and Bailie Nichol Jarvie fights his highlandman with a hot coulter, and goes up perilously to the Clachan of Aberfoil; Jeannie Deans stands in the presence of Queen Caroline, pleading for the life of her sister, while the Duke of Argyle puts his hand to his chin whenever her Majesty or the Duchess of Suffolk are in danger of a random hit from the lips of the unconscious advocate; Monkbarn’s discovers the remains of a Roman _prætorium_, and Edie Ochiltree comes up and says: “Prætorium here, prætorium there; I mind the bigging o’t!” The Knight of the Leopard and the disguised Soldan fight their chivalrous duel in the desert, and then feast together at the spring, and Richard Plantagenet, leaping from his sick-bed, in spite of the Hakim, tears down the standard of Austria from the mound at Acre, and hurls the giant Wallenrode from the top to the bottom of it. Dominic Sampson exclaims “prodigious!”—Dirk Hatterick strangles Glossin and shoots Charlotte Cushman—Meg Merrilies we should say, but it is all one—who recognizes young Bertram and dies hard. Hal o’ the Wynd “fights for his own band” on the Inch of Perth, in the mêlée of the clans Chattan and Quhule. Tristram l’Hermit, hangs the trees around Plessis les Tours with Zingaris, like acorns. Louis and Charles the Bold ride together into Liege by a breach in the walls, and the head of the savage De Lamarck secures to the Scottish soldier the hand of Isabel Croye. The Highland Widow mourns over her condemned son with all the tragic truth of Æschylus or nature; the Last Minstrel sings a wild epic of goblin gramarye—the Leaguer of Branksome—knights and ladies—the lists and the festival. Roderick and the Knight of Snowdon fight by the ford of Coilantogle; Constance perishes awfully in her convent cell, and Marmion dies like a courageous knight, at Flodden “Charge, Chester, charge; on, Stanley, on— Where the last words of Marmion!” All these, and more, come thronging at the call of the wizard. And with them will also pass before the reader’s or muser’s eye the extravagant hero of him who “smiled Spain’s chivalry away;” Doctor Primrose and his delightful family, Parson Adams, Sir Roger de Coverley, Evangeline, Ichabod Crane, and a thousand others, which every body’s memory will distinguish for itself—just as every eye shapes its proper rainbow. They have all the distinctness of reality, and it is by an effort that we draw the line between them and _bona fide_ characters.