13, 14.]
CHAPTER XIV.
SCOTT AS A POLITICIAN.
Scott usually professed great ignorance of politics, and did what he
could to hold aloof from a world in which his feelings were very
easily heated, while his knowledge was apt to be very imperfect. But
now and again, and notably towards the close of his life, he got
himself mixed up in politics, and I need hardly say that it was always
on the Tory, and generally on the red-hot Tory, side. His first hasty
intervention in politics was the song I have just referred to on Lord
Melville's acquittal, during the short Whig administration of 1806. In
fact Scott's comparative abstinence from politics was due, I believe,
chiefly to the fact that during almost the whole of his literary life,
Tories and not Whigs were in power. No sooner was any reform proposed,
any abuse threatened, than Scott's eager Conservative spirit flashed
up. Proposals were made in 1806 for changes--and, as it was thought,
reforms--in the Scotch Courts of Law, and Scott immediately saw
something like national calamity in the prospect.
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