and as he grew more conservative Scott grew more conservative likewise, till he came to think this particular king almost a pillar of the Constitution.  I suppose we ought to explain this little bit of fetish-worship in Scott much as we should the quaint practical adhesion to duelling which he gave as an old man, who had had all his life much more to do with the pen than the sword—­that is, as an evidence of the tendency of an improved type to recur to that of the old wild stock on which it had been grafted.  But certainly no feudal devotion of his ancestors to their chief was ever less justified by moral qualities than Scott’s loyal devotion to the fountain of honour as embodied in “our fat friend.”  The whole relation to George was a grotesque thread in Scott’s life; and I cannot quite forgive him for the utterly conventional severity with which he threw over his first patron, the Queen, for sins which were certainly not grosser, if they were not much less gross, than those of his second patron, the husband who had set her the example which she faithfully, though at a distance, followed.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 45:  Lockhart’s Life of Scott, vi. 229-30.]

[Footnote 46:  Lockhart’s Life of Scott, vi. 13, 14.]

CHAPTER XIV.

SCOTT AS A POLITICIAN.

Scott usually professed great ignorance of politics, and did what he could to hold aloof from a world in which his feelings were very easily heated, while his knowledge was apt to be very imperfect.  But now and again, and notably towards the close of his life, he got himself mixed up in politics, and I need hardly say that it was always on the Tory, and generally on the red-hot Tory, side.  His first hasty intervention in politics was the song I have just referred to on Lord Melville’s acquittal, during the short Whig administration of 1806.  In fact Scott’s comparative abstinence from politics was due, I believe, chiefly to the fact that during almost the whole of his literary life, Tories and not Whigs were in power.  No sooner was any reform proposed, any abuse threatened, than Scott’s eager Conservative spirit flashed up.  Proposals were made in 1806 for changes—­and, as it was thought, reforms—­in the Scotch Courts of Law, and Scott immediately saw something like national calamity in the prospect.  The mild proposals in question were discussed at a meeting of the Faculty of Advocates, when Scott made a speech longer than he had ever before delivered, and animated by a “flow and energy of eloquence” for which those who were accustomed to hear his debating speeches were quite unprepared.  He walked home between two of the reformers, Mr. Jeffrey and another, when his companions began to compliment him on his eloquence, and to speak playfully of its subject.  But Scott was in no mood for playfulness.  “No, no,” he exclaimed, “’tis no laughing