" It was, indeed, Charlie o'er the water, and canny
Highlanders o'er the water, but where were the poor prostitutes
meantime? IN THE WATER.
The Jacobite farce, or tragedy, was speedily brought to a close by
the battle of Culloden; there did Charlie wish himself back again
o'er the water, exhibiting the most unmistakable signs of
pusillanimity; there were the clans cut to pieces, at least those
who could be brought to the charge, and there fell Giles Mac Bean,
or as 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.
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