Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/260

 consider it his duty to speak of the great land-holder with a certain guarded tone of respect, was greatly displeased at the destruction of his own and his parishioners' crops by the landlord's game, and by the unfeeling manner in which redress was refused.

"Now, Sir," continued the Englishman, taking a small volume out of his pocket, "with your permission I will read to you a short passage out of a History of Scotland I have here in my hands, a book written by a man from whom, though in common with the rest of the world I admire his genius, I differ totally on many points, and in none more than in his admiration of your Stuart kings. The writer I am about to quote is Sir Walter Scott; and the admission of gross injustice and rapacity on the part of your nobility is the more important as made by a writer whose bias was quite as aristocratical and as much against the Scottish democratical Church as that of Thucydides against the Athenian democracy; and this passage, therefore, bears some analagy [sic] to a passage in the eight book of the History of Thucydides."

"Sir Walter Scott was no friend to the Kirk of Scotland, and he has done his best to ridicule the