imes in an underhand manner, give it a good word both in writing and
discourse, because it was a gaudy kind of worship, and ignorance and
vassalage prevailed so long as it flourished--but he certainly did not
wish any of his people to become Papists, nor the house which he had
built to become a Popish house, though the very name he gave it savoured
of Popery; but Popery becomes fashionable through his novels and
poems--the only one that remains of his race, a female grandchild,
marries a person who, following the fashion, becomes a Papist, and makes
her a Papist too. Money abounds with the husband, who buys the house,
and then the house becomes the rankest Popish house in Britain. A
superstitious person might almost imagine that one of the old Scottish
Covenanters, whilst the grand house was being built from the profits
resulting from the sale of writings favouring Popery and persecution, and
calumniatory of Scotland's saints and martyrs, had risen from the grave,
and banned Scott, his race, and his house, by reading a certain psalm.

In saying what he has said about Scott, the author has not been
influenced by any feeling of malice or ill-will, but simply by a regard
for truth, and a desire to point out to his countrymen the harm which has
resulted from the perusal of his works;--he is not one of those who would
depreciate the talents of Scott--he admires his talents, both as a prose
writer and a poet; as a poet especially he admires him, and believes him
to have been by far the greatest, with perhaps the exception of
Mickiewicz, who only wrote for unfortunate Poland, that Europe has given
birth to during the last hundred years. As a prose writer he admires
him, less, it is true, but his admiration for him in that capacity is
very high, and he only laments that he prostituted his talents to the
cause of the Stuarts and gentility. What book of fiction of the present
century can you read twice, with the exception of "Waverley" and "Rob
Roy?" There is "Pelham," it is true, which the writer of these lines has
seen a Jewess reading in the steppe of Debreczin, and which a young
Prussian Baron, a great traveller, whom he met at Constantinople in '44
told him he always carried in his valise. And, in conclusion, he will
say, in order to show the opinion which he entertains of the power of
Scott as a writer, that he did for the sceptre of the wretched Pretender
what all the kings of Europe could not do for his body--placed i