The political bearing of the Scotch Novels has been a considerable recommendation to them.  They are a relief to the mind, rarefied as it has been with modern philosophy, and heated with ultra-radicalism.  At a time also, when we bid fair to revive the principles of the Stuarts, it is interesting to bring us acquainted with their persons and misfortunes.  The candour of Sir Walter’s historic pen levels our bristling prejudices on this score, and sees fair play between Roundheads and Cavaliers, between Protestant and Papist.  He is a writer reconciling all the diversities of human nature to the reader.  He does not enter into the distinctions of hostile sects or parties, but treats of the strength or the infirmity of the human mind, of the virtues or vices of the human breast, as they are to be found blended in the whole race of mankind.  Nothing can shew more handsomely or be more gallantly executed.  There was a talk at one time that our author was about to take Guy Faux for the subject of one of his novels, in order to put a more liberal and humane construction on the Gunpowder Plot than our “No Popery” prejudices have hitherto permitted.  Sir Walter is a professed clarifier of the age from the vulgar and still lurking old-English antipathy to Popery and Slavery.  Through some odd process of servile logic, it should seem, that in restoring the claims of the Stuarts by the courtesy of romance, the House of Brunswick are more firmly seated in point of fact, and the Bourbons, by collateral reasoning, become legitimate!  In any other point of view, we cannot possibly conceive how Sir Walter imagines “he has done something to revive the declining spirit of loyalty” by these novels.  His loyalty is founded on would-be treason:  he props the actual throne by the shadow of rebellion.  Does he really think of making us enamoured of the “good old times” by the faithful and harrowing portraits he has drawn of them?  Would he carry us back to the early stages of barbarism, of clanship, of the feudal system as “a consummation devoutly to be wished?” Is he infatuated enough, or does he so dote and drivel over his own slothful and self-willed prejudices, as to believe that he will make a single convert to the beauty of Legitimacy, that is, of lawless power and savage bigotry, when he himself is obliged to apologise for the horrors he describes, and even render his descriptions credible to the modern reader by referring to the authentic history of these delectable times?[E] He is indeed so besotted as to the moral of his own story, that he has even the blindness to go out of his way to have a fling at flints and dungs (the contemptible ingredients, as he would have us believe, of a modern rabble) at the very time when he is describing a mob of the twelfth century—­a mob (one should think) after the writer’s own heart, without one particle of modern philosophy or revolutionary politics in their composition, who were