As for the Tories, no great change in them was necessary; everything favouring absolutism and slavery being congenial to them.

So the whole nation, that is, the reading part of the nation, with some exceptions, for thank God there has always been some salt in England, went over the water to Charlie.

But going over to Charlie was not enough, they must, or at least a considerable part of them, go over to Rome too, or have a hankering to do so.

As the Priest sarcastically observes in the text, "As all the Jacobs were Papists, so the good folks who through Scott's novels admire the Jacobs must be Papists too." An idea got about that the religion of such genteel people as the Stuarts must be the climax of gentility, and that idea was quite sufficient.

Only let a thing, whether temporal or spiritual, be considered genteel in England, and if it be not followed it is strange indeed; so Scott's writings not only made the greater part of the nation Jacobite, but Popish.
Here some people will exclaim--whose opinions remain sound and uncontaminated--what you say is perhaps true with respect to the Jacobite nonsense at present so prevalent being derived from Scott's novels, but the Popish nonsense, which people of the genteeler class are so fond of, is derived from Oxford.