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SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED.
Now what could have induced Scott to write novels tending to make people Papists and Jacobites, and in love with arbitrary power?
Did he think that Christianity was a gaudy mummery?
He did not, he could not, for he had read the Bible; yet was he fond of gaudy mummeries, fond of talking about them.

Did he believe that the Stuarts were a good family, and fit to govern a country like Britain?
He knew that they were a vicious, worthless crew, and that Britain was a degraded country as long as they swayed the sceptre; but for those facts he cared nothing, they governed in a way which he liked, for he had an abstract love of despotism, and an abhorrence of everything savouring of freedom and the rights of man in general.

His favourite political picture was a joking, profligate, careless king, nominally absolute--the heads of great houses paying court to, but in reality governing, that king, whilst revelling with him on the plunder of a nation, and a set of crouching, grovelling vassals (the literal meaning of vassal is a wretch), who, after allowing themselves to be horsewhipped, would take a bone if flung to them, and be grateful; so that in love with mummery, though he knew what Christianity was, no wonder he admired such a church as that of Rome, and that which Laud set up; and by nature formed to be the holder of the candle to ancient worm- eaten and profligate families, no wonder that all his sympathies were with the Stuarts and their dissipated insolent party, and all his hatred directed against those who endeavoured to check them in their proceedings, and to raise the generality of mankind something above a state of vassalage that is wretchedness.

Those who were born great, were, if he could have had his will, always to remain great, however worthless their characters.