n Scotland, the Government seemed to take fright, and
to abandon all thought of extending the clemency of the Relief Bill to
Scotland.

But the Scottish agitation against the Catholics soon spread across the
Border, soon directed itself, not against the imaginary Bill which it
might be the intention of the Government to pass, but against the
actual Bill which the {192} Government had passed for the benefit of
English Catholics. The bigoted bodies, societies, and committees in
Scotland soon found their parallels in England. The English Protestant
Association rose into being like some sudden evocation of a wizard, and
chose for its head and leader the man who had made himself conspicuous
as the head and leader of the movement in Scotland--Lord George Gordon.

[Sidenote: 1750-80--Lord George Gordon]

Lord George Gordon lives forever, a familiar figure in the minds of the
English-speaking race, thanks to the picture drawn by Charles Dickens.
Englishmen know, as they know the face of a friend, the ominous figure
"about the middle height, of a slender make and sallow complexion, with
an aquiline nose, and long hair of a reddish brown, combed perfectly
straight and smooth about his ears and slightly powdered, but without
the faintest vestige of a curl." It is a living portrait of that
solemn gentleman in the suit of soberest black, with those bright large
eyes in which insanity burned, "eyes which betrayed a restlessness of
thought and purpose, singularly at variance with the studied composure
and sobriety of his mien, and with his quaint and sad apparel." It
fits well with all that we know of Lord George Gordon, to learn that
there was nothing fierce or cruel in his face, whose mildness and whose
melancholy were chiefly varied by a haunting air of "indefinable
uneasiness, which infected those who looked upon him and filled them
with a kind of pity for the man: though why it did so they would have
had some trouble to explain." Such was the strange fanatic whose name
was destined to be blown for a season throughout England, who was fated
to stand for a moment visible in the eyes of all men, the idol of
intolerance, the apostle of violence, of murder, and of fire, and then
to fall most pitiably, most pitifully into the dust.

Lord George Gordon was still a young man when he became leader of the
anti-Catholic agitation. He would seem in our days a very young man,
for, as he was born in 1750, he was only thirty when the a