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 spectre of the wretched Pretender what all
the kings of Europe could not do for his body--placed it on the throne of
these realms; and for Popery, what Popes and Cardinals strove in vain to
do for three centuries--brought back its mummeries and nonsense into the
temples of the British Isles.

Scott during his lifetime had a crowd of imitators, who, whether they
wrote history so called--poetry so called--or novels--nobody would call a
book a novel if he could call it anything else--wrote Charlie o'er the
water nonsense; and now that he has been dead a quarter of a century,
there are others daily springing up who are striving to imitate Scott in
his Charlie o'er the water nonsense--for nonsense it is, even when
flowing from his pen. They, too, must write Jacobite histories, Jacobite
songs, and Jacobite novels, and much the same figure as the scoundrel
menials in the comedy cut when personating their masters, and retailing
their masters' conversation, do they cut as Walter Scotts. In their
histories, they too talk about the Prince and Glenfinnan, and the
pibroch; and in their songs about "Claverse" and "Bonny Dundee." But
though they may be Scots, they are not Walter Scotts. But it is perhaps
chiefly in the novel that you see the veritable hog in armour; the time
of the novel is of course the '15 or '45; the hero a Jacobite, and
connected with one or other of the enterprises of those periods; and the
author, to show how unprejudiced he is, and what _original_ views he
takes of subjects, must needs speak up for Popery, whenever he has
occasion to mention it; though, with all his originality, when he brings
his hero and the vagabonds with which he is concerned before a
barricadoed house, belonging to the Whigs, he can make them get into it
by no other method than that which Scott makes his rioters employ to get
into the Tolbooth, _burning down_ the door.

To ex