He could not take them up into his imagination as real beings as he did men.
But then how living are his men, whether coarse or noble! What a picture, for instance, is that in _A Legend of Montrose_ of the conceited, pragmatic, but prompt and dauntless soldier of fortune, rejecting Argyle's attempts to tamper with him, in the dungeon at Inverary, suddenly throwing himself on the disguised Duke so soon as he detects him by his voice, and wresting from him the means of his own liberation! Who could read that scene and say for a moment that Dalgetty is painted "from the skin inwards"?
It was just Scott himself breathing his own life through the habits of a good specimen of the mercenary soldier--realizing where the spirit of hire would end, and the sense of honour would begin--and preferring, even in a dungeon, the audacious policy of a sudden attack to that of crafty negotiation.
What a picture (and a very different one) again is that in _Redgauntlet_ of Peter Peebles, the mad litigant, with face emaciated by poverty and anxiety, and rendered wild by "an insane lightness about the eyes," dashing into the English magistrate's court for a warrant against his fugitive counsel.

Or, to take a third instance, as different as possible from either, how powerfully conceived is the situation in _Old Mortality_, where Balfour of Burley, in his fanatic fury at the defeat of his plan for a new rebellion, pushes the oak-tree, which connects his wild retreat with the outer world, into the stream, and tries to slay Morton for opposing him.

In such scenes and a hundred others--for these are mere random examples--Scott undoubtedly painted his masculine figures from as deep and inward a conception of the character of the situation as Goethe ever attained, even in drawing Mignon, or Klaerchen, or Gretchen.

The distinction has no real existence.

Goethe's pictures of women were no doubt the intuitions of genius; and so are Scott's of men--and here and there of his women too.