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, having been taught at
Oxford for about that number of years. But whence did the pedants get
the Popish nonsense with which they have corrupted youth? Why, from the
same quarter from which they got the Jacobite nonsense with which they
have inoculated those lads who were not inoculated with it
before--Scott's novels. Jacobitism and Laudism, a kind of half Popery,
had at one time been very prevalent at Oxford, but both had been long
consigned to oblivion there, and people at Oxford cared as little about
Laud as they did about the Pretender. Both were dead and buried there,
as everywhere else, till Scott called them out of their graves, when the
pedants of Oxford hailed both; ay, and the Pope, too, as soon as Scott
had made the old fellow fascinating, through particular novels, more
especially the 'Monastery' and 'Abbot.' Then the quiet, respectable,
honourable Church of England would no longer do for the pedants of
Oxford; they must belong to a more genteel Church--they were ashamed at
first to be downright Romans--so they would be Lauds. The pale-looking,
but exceedingly genteel, non-juring clergyman in Waverley was a Laud; but
they soon became tired of being Lauds, for Laud's Church, gewgawish and
idolatrous as it was, was not sufficiently tinselly and idolatrous for
them, so they must be Popes, but in a sneaking way, still calling
th