They were dead and buried in every sense of the word until Scott resuscitated them--how?
by the power of fine writing, and by calling to his aid that strange divinity, gentility.

He wrote splendid novels about the Stuarts, in which he represents them as unlike what they really were as the graceful and beautiful papillon is unlike the hideous and filthy worm.

In a word, he made them genteel, and that was enough to give them paramount sway over the minds of the British people.

The public became Stuart-mad, and everybody, especially the women, said, "What a pity it was that we hadn't a Stuart to govern." All parties, Whig, Tory, or Radical, became Jacobite at heart, and admirers of absolute power.

The Whigs talked about the liberty of the subject, and the Radicals about the rights of man still, but neither party cared a straw for what it talked about, and mentally swore that, as soon as by means of such stuff they could get places, and fill their pockets, they would be as Jacobite as the Jacobs themselves.