There seems to have been no false sentiment about Lady Derby’s nature. And if the theories of Lavater are in any way correct, it is easiest to recall her living personality through the portrait of Vandyke, who, mighty portrayer that he was, gives Charlotte de la Trémoille on his canvas the frank and happy face of a good wife and a good mother, if not as specially beautiful or striking, as Scott has depicted the widowed Countess of Derby and “Queen in Man” in his _Peveril of the Peak_. Scott claims his rights as a romancer to give us the famous Countess of Derby as it suited his great novel to depict her. The Wizard has indeed drawn a curiously different personality from the real wife of James Stanley. On the other hand, her wifehood was almost past before Julian Peveril of the Peak was born. It is the woman advancing in years, with the memory of dead joys and loves and countless bitter wrongs heavy upon her, whom Scott characterises. When Charles II. was king, Charlotte de la Trémoille must have been greatly changed; but it is in having changed her creed that Scott misses the strong individuality in which he might have clothed her, without overleaping fact by a hair’s-breadth. No one comprehended better than he the play of light and shadow upon every act and word of man, woman, or even child, which is cast by religious conviction or the lack of it. Scott, while apologising for the dereliction, has transformed the born Huguenot, the staunch Anglican of twoscore years’ profession, into an ardent, even fanatical Roman Catholic. How completely she stood between the Scylla and Charybdis of Rome and the Sectaries, the extract from the following letter illustrates with striking emphasis:—