er
was an author; a son who--paugh--why ask which was the best blood?

So, owing to his rage for gentility, Scott must needs become the
apologist of the Stuarts and their party; but God made this man pay
dearly for taking the part of the wicked against the good; for lauding up
to the skies the miscreants and robbers, and calumniating the noble
spirits of Britain, the salt of England, and his own country. As God had
driven the Stuarts from their throne, and their followers from their
estates, making them vagabonds and beggars on the face of the earth,
taking from them all that they cared for, so did that same God, who knows
perfectly well how and where to strike, deprive the apologist of that
wretched crew of all that rendered life pleasant in his eyes, the lack of
which paralysed him in body and mind, rendered him pitiable to others,
loathsome to himself,--so much so, that he once said, "Where is the
beggar who would change places with me, notwithstanding all my fame?" Ah!
God knows perfectly well how to strike. He permitted him to retain all
his literary fame to the very last--his literary fame for which he cared
nothing; but what became of the sweetness of life, his fine house, his
grand company, and his entertainments? The grand house ceased to be his;
he was only permitted to live in it on sufferance, and whatever grandeur
it might still retain, it soon became as desolate a looking house as any
misanthrope could wish to see--where were the grand entertainments and
the grand company? there are no grand entertainments where there is no
money; no lords and ladies where there are no entertainments--and there
lay the poor lodger in the desolate house, groaning on a bed no longer
his, smitten by the hand of God in the part where he was most vulnerable.
Of what use telling such a man to take comfort, for he had written the
"Minstrel" and "Rob Roy,"--telling him to think of his literary fame?
Literary fame, indeed! he wanted back his lost gentility:--

"Retain my altar,
I care nothing for it--but, oh! touch not my _beard_."

PORNY'S _War of the Gods_.

He dies, his children die too, and then comes the crowning judgment of
God on what remains of his race and the house which he had built. He was
not a Papist himself, nor did he wish any one belonging to him to be
Popish, for he had read enough of the Bible to know that no one can be
saved through Popery, yet had he a sneaking affection for it, and would
at t