Adventure stories; England -- Fiction; Romanies -- Fiction
therefore request the reader to have patience until he can lay before the
world a pamphlet, which he has been long meditating, to be entitled
"Remarks on the strikingly similar Effects which a Love for Gentility has
produced, and is producing, amongst Jews, Gypsies, and Quakers."
The Priest in the book has much to say on the subject of this gentility-
nonsense; no person can possibly despise it more thoroughly than that
very remarkable individual seems to do, yet he hails its prevalence with
pleasure, knowing the benefits which will result from it to the church of
which he is the sneering slave. "The English are mad after gentility,"
says he; "well, all the better for us; their religion for a long time
past has been a plain and simple one, and consequently by no means
genteel; they'll quit it for ours, which is the perfection of what they
admire; with which Templars, Hospitalers, mitred abbots, Gothic abbeys,
long-drawn aisles, golden censers, incense, et cetera, are connected;
nothing, or next to nothing, of Christ, it is true, but weighed in the
balance against gentility, where will Christianity be? why, kicking
against the beam--ho! ho!" And in connection with the
gentility-nonsense, he expatiates largely, and with much contempt, on a
species of literature by which the interests of his church in England
have been very much advanced--all genuine priests have a thorough
contempt for everything which tends to advance the interests of their
church--this literature is made up of pseudo Jacobitism, Charlie o'er the
waterism, or nonsense about Charlie o'er the water. And the writer will
now take the liberty of saying a few words about it on his own account.
CHAPTER VI--On Scotch Gentility-Nonsense--Charlie o'er the Waterism.
Of the literature just alluded to Scott was the inventor. It is founded
on the fortunes and misfortunes of the Stuart family, of which Scott was
the zealous defender and apologist, doing all that in his power lay to
represent the members of it as noble, chivalrous, high-minded,
unfortunate princes; though, perhaps, of all the royal families that ever
existed upon the earth, this family was the worst. It was unfortunate
enough, it is true; but it owed its misfortunes entirely to its crimes,
viciousness, bad faith, and cowardice. Nothing will be said of it here
until it made its appearance in England to occupy the English throne.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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