s, and kings, and nobles _let_ them be,
and who were collected to witness (a spectacle proper to the times) the
burning of the lovely Rebecca at a stake for a sorceress, because she was
a Jewess, beautiful and innocent, and the consequent victim of insane
bigotry and unbridled profligacy. And it is at this moment (when the heart
is kindled and bursting with indignation at the revolting abuses of
self-constituted power) that Sir Walter _stops the press_ to have a sneer
at the people, and to put a spoke (as he thinks) in the wheel of upstart
innovation! This is what he "calls backing his friends"--it is thus he
administers charms and philtres to our love of Legitimacy, makes us
conceive a horror of all reform, civil, political, or religious, and would
fain put down the _Spirit of the Age_. The author of Waverley might just
as well get up and make a speech at a dinner at Edinburgh, abusing Mr.
Mac-Adam for his improvements in the roads, on the ground that they were
nearly _impassable_ in many places "sixty years since;" or object to Mr.
Peel's _Police-Bill_, by insisting that Hounslow-Heath was formerly a
scene of greater interest and terror to highwaymen and travellers, and cut
a greater figure in the Newgate Calendar than it does at present.--Oh!
Wickliff, Luther, Hampden, Sidney, Somers, mistaken Whigs, and thoughtless
Reformers in religion and politics, and all ye, whether poets or
philosophers, heroes or sages, inventors of arts or sciences, patriots,
benefactors of the human race, enlighteners and civilisers of the world,
who have (so far) reduced opinion to reason, and power to law, who are the
cause that we no longer burn witches and heretics at slow fires, that the
thumb-screws are no longer applied by ghastly, smiling judges, to extort
confession of imputed crimes from sufferers for conscience sake; that men
are no longer strung up like acorns on trees without judge or jury, or
hunted like wild beasts through thickets and glens, who have abated the
cruelty of priests, the pride of nobles, the divinity of kings in former
times: to whom we owe it, that we no longer wear round our necks the
collar of Gurth the swineherd, and of Wamba the jester; that the castles
of great lords are no longer the dens of banditti, whence they issue with
fire and sword to lay waste the land; that we no longer expire in
loathsome dungeons without knowing the cause, or have our right hands
struck off for raising them in self-defence against