CCXLVI. A third letter from Sir Walter Scott on receipt of Dr. Dibdin's formal intimation of his election to the Club, closes the story of this literary fiction. In the preface to Peveril of the Peak,' Scott recorded with pride the circumstance that he had been elected to the Roxburghe Club merely as the author of 'Waverley' and without any other designation. Sir Walter Scott to the Rev. T. Frognall Dibdin. Edinburgh: May 1, 1823. My dear Sir, I am duly honoured with your very interesting and flattering communication. Our highlanders have a proverbial saying, founded on the traditional renown of Fingal's dog, 'If it is not Bran,' they say, 'it is Bran's brother.' Now this is always taken as a compliment of the first class, whether applied to an actual cur or parabolically to a biped, and upon the same principle it is with no small pride and gratification that the Roxburghe Club have been so very flatteringly disposed to accept me as a locum tenens for the unknown author whom they have made the child of their adoption. As sponsor I will play my part as well as I can; and should the real Simon Pure make his appearance, to push me from my stool, why I shall have at least the satisfaction of having enjoyed it. They cannot say but what I had the crown. Besides, I hope the Devil does not owe me such a shame. Mad Tom tells us that the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman, and this mysterious personage will I hope partake as much of his honourable feelings as of his invisibility, and resuming his incognito permit me to enjoy in his stead an honour which I value more than I do that which has been bestowed on me by the credit of having written any of his novels. I regret deeply I cannot soon avail myself of my new privileges, but Courts which I am under the necessity of attending officially set down in a few days, and hei mihi do not arise for Vacation until July. But I hope to be in Town next Spring, and certainly I have one strong additional reason for a London Journey furnished by the pleasure of meeting the Roxburghe Club. Make my most respectful compliments to the members at their next merry meeting, and express in the warmest manner my sense of obligation. I am always, my dear Sir, CCXLVII. Under the nom de plume of Peter Plymley, the Rev. Sydney Smith, in a series of ten letters addressed to my brother Abraham,' joined in that controversy which, lasting, as it did, from Pitt to Peel, was the most persistent and most wearying political quarrel of modern times. Ranging himself among the followers of Grenville and Fox in advocating liberal concessions to the Roman Catholics, he fired his first shot in 1807, the effect of which has been likened to that of a spark on a heap of gunpowder.' Unfortunately the writer's vigorous arguments and cheerful humour were marred by overmuch bitterness and scoffing. Although the authorship of these letters was never really proved by the Government of the day, their vivid resemblance to the tone of Sydney Smith's conversation virtually betrayed him. 6 Peter Plymley to his brother Abraham. 1807. Dear Abraham,—A worthier and better man than yourself does not exist; but I have always told you, from the time of our boyhood, that you were a bit of a goose. Your parochial affairs are governed with exemplary order and regularity: you are as powerful in the vestry as Mr. Perceval is in the House of Commons, and, I must say, with much more reason; nor do I know any church where the faces and smock-frocks of the congregation are so clean, or their eyes so uniformly directed to the preacher. There is another point upon which I will do you ample justice; and that is, that the eyes so directed towards you are wide open; for the rustic has, in general, good principles, though he cannot control his animal habits, and, however loud he may snore, his face is perpetually turned toward the fountain of orthodoxy. Having done you this act of justice, I shall proceed, according to our ancient intimacy and familiarity, to explain to you my opinions about the Catholics, and to reply to yours. In the first place, my sweet Abraham, the Pope is not landed -nor are there any curates sent out after him-nor has he been hid at St. Alban's by the Dowager Lady Spencer-nor dined privately at Holland House-nor been seen near Dropmore. If these fears exist (which I do not believe), they exist only in the mind of the Chancellor of the Exchequer; they emanate from his zeal for the Protestant interest; and, though they reflect the highest honour upon the delicate irritability of his faith, must certainly be considered as more ambiguous proofs of the sanity and vigour of his understanding. By this time, however, the best informed clergy in the neighbourhood of the metropolis are convinced that the rumour is without foundation; and, though the Pope is probably hovering about our coast in a fishing-smack, it is most likely he will fall a prey to the vigilance of our cruisers; and it is certain he has not yet polluted the Protestantism of our soil. Exactly in the same manner the story of the wooden gods seized at Charing Cross, by an order from the Foreign Office, turns out to be without the shadow of a foundation: instead of the angels and archangels, mentioned by the informer, nothing was discovered but a wooden image of Lord Mulgrave, going down to Chatham, as a head piece for the Spanker gun-vessel : it was an exact resemblance of his Lordship in his military uniform, and therefore as little like a god as can well be imagined. Having set your fears at rest as to the extent of the conspiracy formed against the Protestant religion, I will now come to the argument itself. You say these men interpret the Scriptures in an unorthodox manner, and that they eat their god. Very likely. All this may seem very important to you, who live fourteen miles from a market town, and, from long residence upon your living, are become a kind of holy vegetable; and, in a theological sense, it is highly important. But I want soldiers and sailors for the state; I want to make a greater use than I now can do of a poor country full of men; I want to render the military service popular among the Irish; to check the power of France; to make every possible exertion for the safety of Europe, which in twenty years time will be nothing but a mass of French slaves: and then you, and ten other such boobies as you, call out-'For God's sake, do not think of raising cavalry and infantry in Ireland! . . . They interpret the Epistle to Timothy in a different manner from what we do! ... They eat a bit of wafer every Sunday, which they call their God!'. I wish to my soul they would eat you, and such reasoners as you are. What! when Turk, Jew, Heretic, Infidel, Catholic, Protestant, are all combined against this country; when men of every religious persuasion, and no religious persuasion; when the population of half the globe is up in arms against us, are we to stand examining our generals and armies as a bishop examines a candidate for holy orders, and to suffer no one to bleed for England who does not agree with you about the 2nd of Timothy? You talk about Catholics! If you and your brotherhood have been able to persuade the country into a continuation of this grossest of all absurdities, you have ten times the power which the Catholic clergy ever had in their best days. Louis XIV., when he revoked the Edict of Nantes, never thought of preventing the Protestants from fighting his battles; and gained accordingly some of his most splendid victories by the talents of his Protestant generals. No power in Europe, but yourselves, has ever thought for these hundred years past of asking whether a bayonet is Catholic, or Presbyterian, or Lutheran; but whether it is sharp and well-tempered. A bigot delights in public ridicule ; for he begins to think he is a martyr. I can promise you the full enjoyment of this pleasure from one extremity of Europe to the other. I am as disgusted with the nonsense of the Roman Catholic religion as you can be, and no man who talks such nonsense shall ever tithe the product of the earth, nor meddle with the ecclesiastical establishment in any shape; but what have I to do with the speculative nonsense of his theology, when the object is to elect the mayor of a country town, or to appoint a colonel of a marching regiment? Will a man discharge the solemn impertinences of the one office with less zeal, or shrink from the bloody boldness of the other with greater timidity, because the blockhead believes in all the Catholic nonsense of the real presence? I am sorry there should be such impious folly in the world, but I should be ten times a greater fool than he is, if I refused, in consequence of his folly, to lead him out against the enemies of the state. Your whole argument is wrong: the state has nothing whatever to do with theological errors which do not violate the common rules of morality, and militate against the fair power of the ruler : it leaves all these errors to you, and to such as you. You have every tenth porker in your parish for refuting them; and take care that you are vigilant, and logical in the task. I love the Church as well as you do; but you totally mistake the nature of an establishment, when you contend that it ought to be connected with the military and civil career of every individual in the state. It is quite right that there should be one clergyman to every parish interpreting the Scriptures after a particular manner, ruled by a regular hierarchy, and paid with a rich proportion of haycocks and wheatsheafs. When I have laid this foundation for a rational religion in the state-when I have placed ten thousand well educated men in different parts of the kingdom to preach it up, and compelled every body to pay them, whether they hear them or not-I have taken such measures as I know must always procure an immense majority in favour of the Established Church; but I can go no further. I cannot set up a civil inquisition, and say to one, you shall not be a butcher because you are not orthodox; and prohibit another from brewing, and a third from administering the law, and a fourth from defending the country. If common justice did not prohibit me from such a conduct, common sense would. The advantage to be gained from quitting the heresy would make it shameful to abandon it; and men who had once left the Church would continue in such a state of alienation from a point of honour, and transmit that spirit to the latest posterity. This is just the effect your disqualifying laws have produced. They have fed Dr. Rees, and Dr. Kippis; crowded the congregation of the Old Jewry to suffocation; and enabled every sublapsarian, and supralapsarian, and semi-pelagian clergyman, to build himself a neat brick chapel, and live with some distant resemblance to the state of a gentleman. You say the King's coronation oath will not allow him to consent to any relaxation of the Catholic laws. Why not relax the Catholic laws as well as the laws against Protestant dissenters? If one is contrary to his oath, the other must be so too; for the spirit of the oath is, to defend the Church establishment, which the Quaker and the Presbyterian differ from as much or more than the Catholic; and yet his Majesty has repealed the Corporation and Test Act in Ireland, and done more for the Catholics of both kingdoms than had been done for them since the Reformation. In 1778, the Ministers said nothing about the royal conscience; in 1793 no conscience; in 1804 no conscience; the common feelings of hu |