came
Jacobite at heart, and admirers of absolute power. The Whigs talked
about the liberty of the subject, and the Radicals about the rights of
man still, but neither party cared a straw for what it talked about, and
mentally swore that, as soon as by means of such stuff they could get
places, and fill their pockets, they would be as Jacobite as the Jacobs
themselves. As for the Tories, no great change in them was necessary;
everything favouring absolutism and slavery being congenial to them. So
the whole nation, that is, the reading part of the nation, with some
exceptions, for thank God there has always been some salt in England,
went over the water to Charlie. But going over to Charlie was not
enough, they must, or at least a considerable part of them, go over to
Rome too, or have a hankering to do so. As the Priest sarcastically
observes in the text, "As all the Jacobs were Papists, so the good folks
who through Scott's novels admire the Jacobs must be Papists too." An
idea got about that the religion of such genteel people as the Stuarts
must be the climax of gentility, and that idea was quite sufficient. Only
let a thing, whether temporal or spiritual, be considered genteel in
England, and if it be not followed it is strange indeed; so Scott's
writings not only made the greater part of the nation Jacobite, but
Popish.

Here some people will exclaim--whose opinions remain sound and
uncontaminated--what you say is perhaps true with respect to the Jacobite
nonsense at present so prevalent being derived from Scott's novels, but
the Popish nonsense, which people of the genteeler class are so fond of,
is derived from Oxford. We sent our sons to Oxford nice honest lads,
educated in the principles of the Church of England, and at the end of
the first term they came home puppies, talking Popish nonsense, which
they had learned from the pedants to whose care we had entrusted them;
ay, not only Popery, but Jacobitism, which they hardly carried with them
from home, for we never heard them talking Jacobitism before they had
been at Oxford; but now their conversation is a farrago of Popish and
Jacobite stuff--"Complines and Claverse." Now, what these honest folks
say is, to a certain extent, founded on fact; the Popery which has
overflowed the land during the last fourteen or fifteen years, has come
immediately from Oxford, and likewise some of the Jacobitism, Popish and
Jacobite nonsense, and little or nothing else, h