So the respectable people, whose opinions are still sound, are, to a certain extent, right when they say that the tide of Popery, which has flowed over the land, has come from Oxford.

It did come immediately from Oxford, but how did it get to Oxford?
Why, from Scott's novels.

Oh! that sermon which was the first manifestation of Oxford feeling, preached at Oxford some time in the year '38 by a divine of a weak and confused intellect, in which Popery was mixed up with Jacobitism?
The present writer remembers perfectly well, on reading some extracts from it at the time in a newspaper, on the top of a coach, exclaiming--"Why, the simpleton has been pilfering from Walter Scott's novels!" O Oxford pedants! Oxford pedants! ye whose politics and religion are both derived from Scott's novels! what a pity it is that some lad of honest parents, whose mind ye are endeavouring to stultify with your nonsense about "Complines and Claverse," has not the spirit to start up and cry, "Confound your gibberish! I'll have none of it.

Hurrah for the Church, and the principles of my _father_!".