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!"
O 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.
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