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By Sir Walter Scott

Condensation by REV. DR. R. PERRY BUSH THERE could be no fitter setting for a story of love and tragedy than that afforded by the court of England during the regin of Elizabeth. It was the heyday of gorgeous costuming and an age saturated with the occult. Every one patronized the astrologers and the alchemists. The queen coupled with the dignity and strength of the monarch the foibles of the weak. It was her policy to play one favorite against another and thereby secure the working of her own strong will, but she often gave way to furious temper and she was most susceptible to flattery. She was forever undecided between her duty to her subjects and her attachment to Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, whom it was commonly reported that she really intended to marry, for he was a courtier par excellence, and his ambition to share the throne overpowered every other purpose of his life. He had, however, been secretly wedded to Amy Robsart, and so, to further this chances to be king, he consorted with one Richard Varney, and plotted the murder of his wife, which was accomplished at Abingdon Manor.

These threads of fact, with many others of fancy, Scott wove into the fabric of Kenilworth. To him who would listen to those who make fulsome compliment and laudation a fine art, to one who would understand the subtle poisoning of the mind by insinuation, to such as are interested in the machinations of men and women anxious to mingle in high society, to all who would be regaled by the conversations of lords and ladies and have unfolded for their edification a phase of history which never appears in the text-books of our schools, at the same time that they are reading a romance of wonderful interest and plot, Kenilworth offers a rare and wholesome treat.