It is this blending of Scott’s dramatic and descriptive power which gives even to his minor works an enduring value. We have, as it were, a photograph of the great city as it appeared two hundred and sixty years ago. We see the Strand, a quiet street, unlike the noisy thoroughfare of to-day, lined on the river-side with palaces and pleasure grounds reaching to the Thames. We see Whitehall, with its rich gates designed by Holbein, and stately court planned by Inigo Jones. We walk in the park with the courtly Duke of Buckingham, talk face to face with the king in the palace, on the chase, in the parlor of the wealthy Londoner; and at the close of the volume we feel that Scott has justly summed up his character in this striking paragraph of the fifth chapter: “He was deeply learned, without possessing useful knowledge; sagacious in many individual cases, without having real wisdom; fond of his power, yet willing to resign the direction of that, and himself, to the most unworthy favorites; a big and bold asserter of his rights and words, yet one who tamely saw them trampled on in deeds; a lover of negotiations, in which he was always outwitted; and one who feared war, where conquest might have been easy. He was fond of his dignity, while he was perpetually degrading it by undue familiarity; capable of much public labor, yet often neglecting it for the meanest amusement; a wit, though a pedant; and a scholar, though fond of the conversation of the ignorant and uneducated. Even his timidity of temper was not uniform; and there were moments of his life, and those critical, in which he showed the spirit of his ancestors. He was laborious in trifles, and a trifler where serious labor was required; devout in his sentiments, and yet too often profane in his language; just and beneficent by nature, he yet gave way to the iniquities and oppressions of others.” “Rokeby,” a poem, comes next in historic order. The scene is laid at Rokeby, near Greta Bridge in Yorkshire, and the date is immediately subsequent to the great battle of Marston Moor, July 3, 1644. It was here that the bold cavaliers learned a lesson never to be forgotten, at the hand of Puritan and Roundhead. The poem abounds with notable and vigorous passages. It throws light on the stormy years of the great Civil War; but so many of Scott’s novels are related to this period that we must dismiss the poem with a single quotation—a tribute to the genius of Chaucer: