Papist. He is a writer reconciling all the diversities of
human nature to the reader. He does not enter into the distinctions of
hostile sects or parties, but treats of the strength or the infirmity of
the human mind, of the virtues or vices of the human breast, as they are
to be found blended in the whole race of mankind. Nothing can show more
handsomely or be more gallantly executed. There was a talk at one time
that our author was about to take Guy Faux for the subject of one of his
novels, in order to put a more liberal and humane construction on the
Gunpowder Plot than our "No Popery" prejudices have hitherto permitted.
Sir Walter is a professed _clarifier_ of the age from the vulgar and still
lurking old-English antipathy to Popery and Slavery. Through some odd
process of _servile_ logic, it should seem, that in restoring the claims
of the Stuarts by the courtesy of romance, the House of Brunswick are more
firmly seated in point of fact, and the Bourbons, by collateral reasoning,
become legitimate! In any other point of view, we cannot possibly conceive
how Sir Walter imagines "he has done something to revive the declining
spirit of loyalty" by these novels. His loyalty is founded on _would-be_
treason: he props the actual throne by the shadow of rebellion. Does he
really think of making us enamoured of the "good old times" by the
faithful and harrowing portraits he has drawn of them? Would he carry us
back to the early stages of barbarism, of clanship, of the feudal system
as "a consummation devoutly to be wished?" Is he infatuated enough, or
does he so dote and drivel over his own slothful and self-willed
prejudices, as to believe that he will make a single convert to the beauty
of Legitimacy, that is, of lawless power and savage bigotry, when he
himself is obliged to apologize for the horrors he describes, and even
render his descriptions credible to the modern reader by referring to the
authentic history of these delectable times? He is indeed so besotted as
to the moral of his own story, that he has even the blindness to go out of
his way to have a fling at _flints_ and _dungs_ (the contemptible
ingredients, as he would have us believe, of a modern rabble) at the very
time when he is describing a mob of the twelfth century--a mob (one should
think) after the writer's own heart, without one particle of modern
philosophy or revolutionary politics in their composition, who were to a
man, to a hair, just what priest