emselves Church of England men, in order to batten on the bounty of the
Church which they were betraying, and likewise have opportunities of
corrupting such lads as might still resort to Oxford with principles
uncontaminated.

So the respectable people, whose opinions are still sound, are, to a
certain extent, right when they say that the tide of Popery, which has
flowed over the land, has come from Oxford. It did come immediately from
Oxford, but how did it get to Oxford? Why, from Scott's novels. Oh!
that sermon which was the first manifestation of Oxford feeling, preached
at Oxford some time in the year '38 by a divine of a weak and confused
intellect, in which Popery was mixed up with Jacobitism! The present
writer remembers perfectly well, on reading some extracts from it at the
time in a newspaper, on the top of a coach, exclaiming: 'Why, the
simpleton has been pilfering from Walter Scott's novels!'

Oh, Oxford pedants! Oxford pedants! ye whose politics and religion are
both derived from Scott's novels! what a pity it is that some lad of
honest parents, whose mind ye are endeavouring to stultify with your
nonsense about 'Complines and Claverse,' has not the spirit to start up
and cry, 'Confound your gibberish! I'll have none of it. Hurrah for the
Church, and the principles of my _father_!'

CHAPTER VII--SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED

Now what could have induced Scott to write novels tending to make people
Papists and Jacobites, and in love with arbitrary power? Did he think
that Christianity was a gaudy mummery? He did not, he could not, for he
had read the Bible; yet was he fond of gaudy mummeries, fond of talking
about them. Did he believe that the Stuarts were a good family, and fit
to govern a country like Britain? He knew that they were a vicious,
worthless crew, and that Britain was a degraded country as long as they
swayed the sceptre; but for those facts he cared nothing, they governed
in a way which he liked, for he had an abstract love of despotism, and an
abhorrence of everything savouring of freedom and the rights of man in
general. His favourite political picture was a joking, profligate,
careless king, nominally absolute; the heads of great houses paying court
to, but in reality governing, that king, whilst revelling with him on the
plunder of a nation, and a set of crouching, grovelling vassals (the
literal meaning of vassal is a wretch), who, after allowing themselves to
be horsewhi