king. He snatched
up a wine-glass from which George had just been drinking and carried it
away to be an object of reverence for ever after. Nevertheless, in his
heart, and often in his speech, Scott seemed to be a high Tory, and
even a Jacobite.

There are precedents for this. The Empress Eugenie used often to say
with a laugh that she was the only true royalist at the imperial court
of France. That was well enough for her in her days of flightiness and
frivolity. No one, however, accused Queen Victoria of being frivolous,
and she was not supposed to have a strong sense of humor. None the
less, after listening to the skirling of the bagpipes and to the
romantic ballads which were sung in Scotland she is said to have
remarked with a sort of sigh:

"Whenever I hear those ballads I feel that England belongs really to
the Stuarts!"

Before Queen Victoria was born, when all the sons of George III. were
childless, the Duke of Kent was urged to marry, so that he might have a
family to continue the succession. In resenting the suggestion he said
many things, and among them this was the most striking:

"Why don't you call the Stuarts back to England? They couldn't possibly
make a worse mess of it than our fellows have!"

But he yielded to persuasion and married. From this marriage came
Victoria, who had the sacred drop of Stuart blood which gave England to
the Hanoverians; and she was to redeem the blunders and tyrannies of
both houses.

The fascination of the Stuarts, which has been carried overseas to
America and the British dominions, probably began with the striking
history of Mary Queen of Scots. Her brilliancy and boldness and beauty,
and especially the pathos of her end, have made us see only her intense
womanliness, which in her own day was the first thing that any one
observed in her. So, too, with Charles I., romantic figure and knightly
gentleman. One regrets his death upon the scaffold, even though his
execution was necessary to the growth of freedom.

Many people are no less fascinated by Charles II., that very different
type, with his gaiety, his good-fellowship, and his easy-going ways. It
is not surprising that his people, most of whom never saw him, were
very fond of him, and did not know that he was selfish, a loose liver,
and almost a vassal of the king of France.

So it is not strange that the Stuarts, with all their arts and graces,
were very hard to displace. James II., with the aid of the French