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 sceptre 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 nearly 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 Jacobite histories, Jacobite songs, and Jacobite novels, and much the same figure as the scoundrel menials in the comedy cut when personating their masters, and retailing their masters' conversation, do they cut as Walter Scotts.
In their histories, they too talk about the Prince and Glenfinnan, and the pibroch; and in their songs about "Claverse" and "Bonny Dundee." But though they may be Scots, they are not Walter Scotts.But it is perhaps chiefly in the novel that you see the veritable hog in armour; the time of the novel is of course the '15 or '45; the hero a Jacobite, and connected with one or other of the enterprises of those periods; and the author, to show how unprejudiced he is, and what ORIGINAL views he takes of subjects, must needs speak up for Popery, whenever he has occasion to mention it; though, with all his originality, when he brings his hero and the vagabonds with which he is concerned before a barricadoed house, belonging to the Whigs, he can make them get into it by no other method than that which Scott makes his rioters employ to get into the Tolbooth, BURNING DOWN the door.
To express the more than utter foolishness of this latter Charlie o'er the water nonsense, whether in rhyme or prose, there is but one word, and that word a Scotch word.Scotch, the sorriest of jargons, compared with which even Roth Welsch is dignified and expressive, has yet one word to express what would be inexpressible by any word or combination of words in any language, or in any other jargon in the world; and very properly; for as the nonsense is properly Scotch, so should the word be Scotch which expresses it - that word is "fushionless," pronounced FOOSHIONLESS; and when the writer has called the nonsense fooshionless - and he does call it fooshionless - he has nothing more to say, but leaves the nonsense to its fate.
