Scott had Cavalier sympathies, as Macaulay had Covenanting
sympathies. That Scott is more unjust to the Covenanters than Macaulay to
Claverhouse historians will scarcely maintain. Neither history or fiction
would be very delightful if they were warless. This must serve as an
apology more needed by Macaulay--than by Sir Walter. His reply to Dr.
McCrie is marked by excellent temper, humour, and good humor. The
"Quarterly Review" ends with the well known reference to his brother
Tom's suspected authorship: "We intended here to conclude this long
article, when a strong report reached us of certain transatlantic
confessions, which, if genuine (though of this we know nothing), assign a
different author to those volumes than the party suspected by our
Scottish correspondents. Yet a critic may be excused for seizing upon the
nearest suspected person, or the principle happily expressed by
Claverhouse in a letter to the Earl of Linlithgow. He had been, it seems,
in search of a gifted weaver who used to hold forth at conventicles: 'I
sent for the webster, they brought in his brother for him: though he,
maybe, cannot preach like his brother, I doubt not but he is as well
principled as he, wherefore I thought it would be no great fault to give
him the trouble to go to jail with the rest.'"
Nobody who read this could doubt that Scott was, at least, "art and part"
in the review. His efforts to disguise himself as an Englishman, aided by
a Scotch antiquary, are divertingly futile.
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