or
paramours to shift for themselves, nor did any of these canny people
after passing the stream dash back to rescue a single female life,--no,
they were too well employed upon the bank in dancing strathspeys to the
tune of "Charlie o'er the water." It was, indeed, Charlie o'er the
water, and canny Highlanders o'er the water, but where were the poor
prostitutes meantime? _In the water_.

The Jacobite farce, or tragedy, was speedily brought to a close by the
battle of Culloden; there did Charlie wish himself back again o'er the
water, exhibiting the most unmistakable signs of pusillanimity; there
were the clans cut to pieces, at least those who could be brought to the
charge, and there fell Giles Mac Bean, or as he was called in Gaelic,
Giliosa Mac Beathan, a kind of giant, six feet four inches and a quarter
high, "than whom," as his wife said in a coronach she made upon him, "no
man who stood at Cuiloitr was taller"--Giles Mac Bean the Major of the
clan Cattan--a great drinker--a great fisher--a great shooter, and the
champion of the Highland host.

The last of the Stuarts was a cardinal.

Such were the Stuarts, such their miserable history. They were dead and
buried in every sense of the word until Scott resuscitated them--how? by
the power of fine writing and by calling to his aid that strange
divinity, gentility. He wrote splendid novels about the Stuarts, in
which he represents them as unlike what they really were as the graceful
and beautiful papillon is unlike the hideous and filthy worm. In a word,
he made them genteel, and that was enough to give them paramount sway
over the minds of the British people. The public became Stuart-mad, and
everybody, specially the women, said, "What a pity it was that we hadn't
a Stuart to govern." All parties, Whig, Tory, or Radical, became
Jacobite at heart, and admirers of absolute power. The Whigs talked
about the liberty of the subject, and the Radicals about the rights of
man still, but neither party cared a straw for what it talked about, and
mentally swore that, as soon as by means of such stuff they could get
places, and fill their pockets, they would be as Jacobite as the Jacobs
themselves. As for Tories, no great change in them was necessary;
everything favouring absolutism and slavery being congenial to them. So
the whole nation, that is, the reading part of the nation, with some
exceptions, for thank God there has always been some salt in England,
went ove