s he was called in Gaelic,
Giliosa Mac Beathan, a kind of giant, six feet four inches and a quarter
high, 'than whom,' as his wife said in a coronach she made upon him, 'no
man who stood at Cuiloitr was taller'--Giles Mac Bean, the Major of the
clan Cattan, a great drinker, a great fisher, a great shooter, and the
champion of the Highland host.

The last of the Stuarts was a cardinal.

Such were the Stuarts, such their miserable history. They were dead and
buried, in every sense of the word, until Scott resuscitated
them--how?--by the power of fine writing, and by calling to his aid that
strange divinity, gentility. He wrote splendid novels about the Stuarts,
in which he represents them as unlike what they really were, as the
graceful and beautiful papillon is unlike the hideous and filthy worm.
In a word, he made them genteel, and that was enough to give them
paramount sway over the minds of the British people. The public became
Stuart-mad, and everybody, especially the women, said: 'What a pity it
was that we hadn't a Stuart to govern.' All parties, Whig, Tory, or
Radical, became 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