a class, or a family, is doomed to extinction.

Such was the man to whom the easy-going habit of the world, the
perfectly self-righteous indifference to a woman's happiness or honour
of the well-bred people of that day, gave over as a partner for life a
half-educated, worldly-ignorant and absolutely will-less young girl of
nineteen and a half, who doubtless considered herself extremely
fortunate in being chosen for so brilliant a match.

There is a glamour, even for us, connected with the name of Charles
Edward Stuart; in his youth he forms a brilliant speck of romantic light
in that dull eighteenth century, a spot of light surrounded by the halo
of glory of the devotion which he inspired and the enthusiasm which he
left behind him. We feel, in a way, grateful to him almost as we might
feel grateful to a clever talker, a beautiful woman, a bright day, as to
something pleasing and enlivening to our fancy. But the brilliant effect
which has pleased us is like some gorgeous pageant connected with the
worship of a stupid and ferocious divinity; nay, rather, if we let our
thoughts dwell upon the matter, if we remember how, while the prisons
and ship-holds were pestilent with the Jacobite men and women penned up
like cattle in obscene promiscuity, while the mutilated corpses were
lying still green, piled up under the bog turf of Culloden, while so
many of the bravest men of Scotland, who had supplicated the Young
Pretender not to tempt them to a hopeless enterprise, were cheerfully
mounting the scaffold "for so sweet a prince," Charles Edward was
dancing at Versailles in his crimson silk dress and diamonds, with
his black-eyed boast the eldest-born Princess of France. Nay, worse,
if we remember how the man, for whose love and whose right so much
needless agony had been expended, let himself become a disgrace to the
very memory of the men who had died for him: if we bear all this in
mind, Charles Edward seems to become a mere irresponsible and fated
representative of some evil creed; the idol, at first fair-shapen and
smiling, then hideous and loathsome, to which human sacrifices are
brought in solemnity; a glittering idol of silver, or a foul idol of
rotten wood, but without nerves and mind to perceive the weeping all
around, the sop of blood at its feet. And now, after the sacrifice of so
many hundreds of brave men to this one man, comes the less tragic, less
heroic, perfectly legitimate and correct sacrifice to him of a pre