Dryasdust, a name of Sir Walter Scott's invention, and employed by him to denote an imaginary character who supplied him with dry preliminary historical details, and since used to denote a writer who treats a historical subject with all due diligence and research, but without any appreciation of the human interest in it, still less the soul of it.
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Dryas * Dryburgh