One more illustration of Scott’s political Conservatism, and I may leave his political life, which was not indeed his strong side, though, as with all sides of Scott’s nature, it had an energy and spirit all his own.  On the subject of Catholic Emancipation he took a peculiar view.  As he justly said, he hated bigotry, and would have left the Catholics quite alone, but for the great claims of their creed to interfere with political life.  And even so, when the penal laws were once abolished, he would have abolished also the representative disabilities, as quite useless, as well as very irritating when the iron system of effective repression had ceased.  But he disapproved of the abolition of the political parts of the penal laws.  He thought they would have stamped out Roman Catholicism; and whether that were just or unjust, he thought it would have been a great national service.  “As for Catholic Emancipation,” he wrote to Southey in 1807, “I am not, God knows, a bigot in religious matters, nor a friend to persecution; but if a particular set of religionists are ipso facto connected with foreign politics, and placed under the spiritual direction of a class of priests, whose unrivalled dexterity and activity are increased by the rules which detach them from the rest of the world—­I humbly think that we may be excused from entrusting to them those places in the State where the influence of such a clergy, who act under the direction of a passive tool of our worst foe, is likely to be attended with the most fatal consequences.  If a gentleman chooses to walk about with a couple of pounds of gunpowder in his pocket, if I give him the shelter of my roof, I may at least be permitted to exclude him from the seat next to the fire."[49] And in relation to the year 1825, when Scott visited Ireland, Mr. Lockhart writes, “He on all occasions expressed manfully his belief that the best thing for Ireland would have been never to relax the strictly political enactments of the penal laws, however harsh these might appear.  Had they been kept in vigour for another half-century, it was his conviction that Popery would have been all but extinguished in Ireland.  But he thought that after admitting Romanists to the elective franchise, it was a vain notion that they could be permanently or advantageously deterred from using that franchise in favour of those of their own persuasion.”

In his diary in 1829 he puts the same view still more strongly:—­“I cannot get myself to feel at all anxious about the Catholic question.  I cannot see the use of fighting about the platter, when you have let them snatch the meat off it.  I hold Popery to be such a mean and degrading superstition, that I am not sure I could have found myself liberal enough for voting the repeal of the penal laws as they existed before 1780.  They must and would, in course of time, have smothered Popery; and I confess that I should have seen the old lady of Babylon’s mouth stopped with pleasure.  But now that you