does over his "Charlie over the water" Jacobites.[52]

Again Scott's apprehension of the spirit of chivalry, though less
imperfect than his apprehension of the spirit of mediaeval Catholicism,
was but partial. Of the themes which Ariosto sang--

"Le donne, i cavalier, l'arme, gli amori,
Le cortesie, l'audaci imprese io canto"--

the northern Ariosto sang bravely the _arme_ and the _audaci imprese_;
less confidently the _amori_ and the _cortesie_. He could sympathise
with the knight-errant's high sense of honour and his love of bold
emprise; not so well with his service of dames. Mediaeval courtship or
"love-drurye," the trembling self-abasement of the lover before his lady,
the fantastic refinements and excesses of gallantry, were alien to
Scott's manly and eminently practical turn of mind. It is hardly
possible to fancy him reading the "Roman de la Rose" with patience--he
thought "Troilus and Creseyde" tedious, which Rossetti pronounces the
finest of English love poems; or selecting for treatment the story of
Heloise or Tristram and Iseult, or of "Le Chevalier de la Charette"; or
such a typical mediaeval life as that of Ulrich von Liechtenstein.[53]
These were quite as truly beyond his sphere as a church legend like the
life of Saint Margaret or the quest of the Sangreal. In the "Talisman"
he praises in terms only less eloquent than Burke's famous words, "that
wild spirit of chivalry which, amid its most extravagant and fantastic
nights, was still pure from all selfish alloy--generous, devoted, and
perhaps only thus far censurable, that it proposed objects and courses of
action inconsistent with the frailties and imperfections of man." In
"Ivanhoe," too, there is something like a dithyrambic lament over the
decay of knighthood--"The 'scutcheons have long mouldered from the