The story humorously gives us the old-time belief that Woodstock was a haunted spot; and Scott refers in his preface to a book, printed in London in the year 1660, bearing the sombre title of “The Just Devil of Woodstock; or a true narrative of the several apparitions, the fights and punishments inflicted upon the rumpish commissioners sent thither to survey the manors and houses belonging to his Magestie.” The sad story of the fair Rosamond, murdered here by Queen Eleanor, was well calculated to make the ghostly apparitions more real; at least, the place was tragic enough to impress the superstitious of that generation. But the great value of this novel, apart from the picture of the times, consists in the portrayal of a living, breathing Cromwell; such a Cromwell as no history gives, but _the_ Cromwell who appears as the resultant of them all; a man of deep emotion, wary in council and unwavering in execution, a man without a single grace of oratory, who, by the force of character, assumed and kept the leadership of the House of Commons; in whose presence the bravest men stood lost in fear and wonder. Or, as Scott beautifully puts it: “So true it is, that as greater lights swallow up and extinguish the display of those which are less, so men of great, capacious, and overruling minds, bear aside and subdue, in their climax of passion, the more feeble wills and passions of others; as, when a river joins a brook, the fiercer torrent shoulders aside the smaller stream.” There is one other sketch which claims our attention—that of the disguised wanderer, Charles the Second, revered by Royalist, and pursued by the ruling party as an outcast. “No person on earth,” Scott says, “could better understand the society in which he moved; exile had made him acquainted with life in all its shades and varieties—his spirits, if not uniform, were elastic—he had that species of Epicurean philosophy which, even in the most extreme difficulties and dangers, can in an interval of ease, however brief, avail itself of the enjoyments of the moment—he was, in short, in youth and misfortune, as afterward in his regal condition, a good-humored but hard-hearted voluptuary, wise, save where his passions intervened, beneficent, save where prodigality had deprived him of the means, or prejudice of the wish to confer benefits—his faults such as might have often drawn down hatred, but that they were mingled with so much urbanity, that the injured person felt it impossible to retain the full sense of his wrongs.” During his wandering he was entertained for a time at the home of the old knight, Sir Henry Lee, proprietor of Woodstock. The attachment formed for the old knight and his family affords Scott material for one of those dramatic descriptions in which he always so much delighted.