existence a monarchical system as absolute as
that of the Stuarts had been, and to behead a monarch far less blamable
than Charles the First of England. There is something appropriate in
this uncompromising devotee and victim of the principle of divine right
dying in exile on the very eve of that revolution which was practically
to abolish the principle of the divine right of kings forever. Oddly
enough, there are still devotees of the House of Stuart, gentlemen and
ladies who work up picturesque enthusiasms about the Rebel Rose and the
Red Carnation, and who affect to regard a certain foreign princess as
the real sovereign of England. But the English people at large need
hardly take this graceful Jacobitism very seriously. Jacobitism came
to its end with Cardinal Henry dying as the pensioner of George the
Third, and with Prince Charles drowning in Cyprus wine the once gallant
spirit which, even at the end, could sometimes shake off its
degradation, and blaze into a moment's despairing brilliancy, at the
thought of the Clans and the Claymores, and the brave days of
Forty-five. And so, in the words of the old Saga men, here he drops
out of the tale.

[Sidenote: 1745-1889--The Stuart charm]

But it is the curious characteristic of the ill-fated House of Stuart
that, through all their misfortunes, through all their degradations,
they have contrived to captivate the imagination and bewitch the hearts
of many generations. The Stuart influence upon literature has been
astonishing. No cause in the world has rallied to its side so many
poets, named or nameless, has so profoundly attracted the writers and
the readers of romance, has bitten more deeply {235} into popular
fancy. Even in our own day, an English poet, Mr. Swinburne, who has
not tuned much to thrones fallen or standing, has been inspired by the
old Stuart frenzy to write one of the most valuable of all the wealth
of ballads that have grown up around the Stuart name. In his "A
Jacobite's Exile, 1746," Mr. Swinburne has summed up in lines of the
most poignant and passionate pathos all the feeling of a gentleman of
the North Country dwelling in exile for his king's sake. The emotion
which finds such living voice in the contemporary poetry, in the
ballads that men wrote and men sang, while the House of Stuart was
still a reality, while there were still picturesque or semi-picturesque
personages living in foreign courts and claiming the crown of England,
finds