doubt, the great majority of English readers know English history chiefly
through his works. His dramatic power, also, at its best, is superb; in his
great scenes and crises he is masterly as narrator and describer. In the
presentation of the characters there is often much of the same
superficiality as in the poems, but there is much also of the highest
skill. The novels may be roughly divided into three classes: first those,
like 'Ivanhoe,' whose scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century;
second those, like 'Kenilworth,' which are located in the fifteenth or
sixteenth; and third, those belonging to England and Scotland of the
seventeenth and eighteenth. In the earlier ones sheer romance predominates
and the hero and heroine are likely to be more or less conventional
paragons, respectively, of courage and tender charm; but in the later ones
Scott largely portrays the life and people which he himself knew; and he
knew them through and through. His Scottish characters in particular, often
especially the secondary ones, are delightfully realistic portraits of a
great variety of types. Mary Queen of Scots in 'The Abbot' and Caleb
Balderstone in 'The Bride of Lammermoor' are equally convincing in their
essential but very personal humanity. Descriptions of scenery are
correspondingly fuller in the novels than in the poems and are equally
useful for atmosphere and background.

In minor matters, in the novels also, there is much carelessness. The
style, more formal than that of the present day, is prevailingly wordy and
not infrequently slipshod, though its vitality is a much more noticeable
characteristic. The structure of the stories is far from compact. Scott
generally began without any idea how he was to continue or end and sent off
each day's instalment of his manuscript in the first draft as soon as it
was written; hence the action often wanders, or even, from the structural
point of view, drags. But interest seldom greatly slackens until the end,
which, it must be further confessed, is often suddenly brought about in a