Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays; Vol. 6: With a Memoir and IndexMacaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
History
Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays; Vol. 6: With a Memoir and Index
Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
English literature -- History and criticism; Great Britain -- History
This was not all. The spirit of party, roused by impolitic provocation
from its long sleep, roused in turn a still fiercer and more malignant
Fury, the spirit of national animosity. The grudge of Whig against Tory
was mingled with the grudge of Englishman against Scot. The two sections
of the great British people had not yet been indissolubly blended
together. The events of 1715 and of 1745 had left painful and enduring
traces. The tradesmen of Cornhill had been in dread of seeing their
tills and warehouses plundered by barelegged mountaineers from the
Grampians. They still recollected that Black Friday, when the news
came that the rebels were at Derby, when all the shops in the city were
closed, and when the Bank of England began to pay in sixpences. The
Scots, on the other hand, remembered, with natural resentment, the
severity with which the insurgents had been chastised, the military
outrages, the humiliating laws, the heads {40}fixed on Temple Bar, the
fires and quartering blocks on Kennington Common. The favourite did not
suffer the English to forget from what part of the island he came. The
cry of all the south was that the public offices, the army, the navy,
were filled with highcheeked Drummonds and Erskines, Macdonalds and
Macgillivrays, who could not talk a Christian tongue, and some of whom
had but lately begun to wear Christian breeches. All the old jokes on
hills without trees, girls without stockings, men eating the food of
horses, pails emptied from the fourteenth story, were pointed against
these lucky adventurers. To the honour of the Scots it must be said,
that their prudence and their pride restrained them from retaliation.
Like the princess in the Arabian tale, they stopped their ears tight,
and, unmoved by the shrillest notes of abuse, walked on, without once
looking round, straight towards the Golden Fountain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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