st Popish house in Britain. A
superstitious person might almost imagine that one of the old Scottish
Covenanters, whilst the grand house was being built from the profits
resulting from the sale of writings favouring Popery and persecution, and
calumniatory of Scotland's saints and martyrs, had risen from the grave,
and banned Scott, his race, and his house, by reading a certain psalm.

In saying what he has said about Scott the author has not been influenced
by any feeling of malice or ill-will, but simply by a regard for truth,
and a desire to point out to his countrymen the harm which has resulted
from the perusal of his works; he is not one of those who would
depreciate the talents of Scott, he admires his talents, both as a prose
writer and a poet. As a poet especially he admires him, and believes him
to have been by far the greatest, with perhaps the exception of
Mickiewicz, who only wrote for unfortunate Poland, that Europe has given
birth to during the last hundred years. As a prose writer he admires him
less, it is true, but his admiration for him in that capacity is very
high, and he only laments that he prostituted his talents to the cause of
the Stuarts and gentility. What book of fiction of the present century
can you read twice, with the exception of 'Waverley' and 'Rob Roy?'
There is 'Pelham,' it is true, which the writer of these lines has seen a
Jewess reading in the steppe of Debreczin, and which a young Prussian
Baron, a great traveller, whom he met at Constantinople in '44, told him
he always carried in his valise. And in conclusion he will say, in order
to show the opinion which he entertains of the power of Scott as a
writer, that he did for the spectre of the wretched Pretender what all
the kings of Europe could not do for his body--placed it on the throne of
these realms, and for Popery what Popes and Cardinals strove in vain to
do for three centuries--brought back its mummeries and nonsense into the
temples of the British Isles.

Scott during his lifetime had a crowd of imitators, who, whether they
wrote history so called, poetry so called, or novels--nobody would call a
book a novel if he could call it anything else--wrote Charlie o'er the
water nonsense, and now that he has been dead a quarter of a century,
there are others daily springing up who are striving to imitate Scott in
his Charlie o'er the water nonsense--for nonsense it is, even when
flowing from his pen. They, too, must write