have taken the plaster off her mouth, and given her free respiration, I cannot see the sense of keeping up the irritation about the claim to sit in Parliament.  Unopposed, the Catholic superstition may sink into dust, with all its absurd ritual and solemnities.  Still it is an awful risk.  The world is in fact as silly as ever, and a good competence of nonsense will always find believers."[50] That is the view of a strong and rather unscrupulous politician—­a moss-trooper in politics—­which Scott certainly was.  He was thinking evidently very little of justice, almost entirely of the most effective means of keeping the Kingdom, the Kingdom which he loved.  Had he understood—­what none of the politicians of that day understood—­the strength of the Church of Rome as the only consistent exponent of the principle of Authority in religion, I believe his opposition to Catholic emancipation would have been as bitter as his opposition to Parliamentary reform.  But he took for granted that while only “silly” persons believed in Rome, and only “infidels” rejected an authoritative creed altogether, it was quite easy by the exercise of common sense, to find the true compromise between reason and religious humility.  Had Scott lived through the religious controversies of our own days, it seems not unlikely that with his vivid imagination, his warm Conservatism, and his rather inadequate critical powers, he might himself have become a Roman Catholic.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 47:  Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ii. 328.]

[Footnote 48:  Lockhart’s Life of Scott, x. 47.]

[Footnote 49:  Lockhart’s Life of Scott, iii. 34.]

[Footnote 50:  Ibid., ix. 305.]

CHAPTER XV.

SCOTT IN ADVERSITY.

With the year 1825 came a financial crisis, and Constable began to tremble for his solvency.  From the date of his baronetcy Sir Walter had launched out into a considerable increase of expenditure.  He got plans on a rather large scale in 1821 for the increase of Abbotsford, which were all carried out.  To meet his expenses in this and other ways he received Constable’s bills for “four unnamed works of fiction,” of which he had not written a line, but which came to exist in time, and were called Peveril of the Peak, Quentin Durward, St. Ronan’s Well, and Redgauntlet.  Again, in the very year before the crash, 1825, he married his eldest son, the heir to the title, to a young lady who was herself an heiress, Miss Jobson of Lochore, when Abbotsford and its estates were settled, with the reserve of 10,000_l._, which Sir Walter took power to charge on the property for purposes of business.  Immediately afterwards he purchased a captaincy in the King’s Hussars for his son, which cost him 3500_l._ Nor were the obligations he incurred on his own account, or