It is easy to trace the relation of this to his other work, particularly to the novels.

He once wrote to a friend, "The editing a new edition of _Somers's Tracts_ some years ago made me wonderfully well acquainted with the little traits which marked parties and characters in the seventeenth century, and the embodying them is really an amusing task."[4] Among the works which he edited in this way the number of historical memoirs is noticeable.

After the volume that has been mentioned as the first, he prepared another book of _Memoirs of the Great Civil War_; and we find in the list a _Secret History of the Court of James I._, _Memoirs of the Reign of King Charles I._, Count Grammont's _Memoirs of the Court of Charles II._, _A History of Queen Elizabeth's Favourites_, etc.

Such books as these, besides furnishing material for his novels, led Scott to acquire a mass of information that enabled him to perform with great facility and with admirable results whatever editorial work he might choose to undertake.
These labors Scott always considered as trifles to be dispatched in the odd moments of his time, but the great edition of _Dryden's Complete Works_, which he began to prepare soon after the _Minstrelsy_ appeared, was more important.

This, next to the _Minstrelsy_, was probably the most notable of all Scott's editorial enterprises.