n the singular event which had taken place. The Lord Keeper's first
task, when he returned home, was to ascertain by medical advice that
his daughter had sustained no injury from the dangerous and alarming
situation in which she had been placed. Satisfied on this topic, he
proceeded to revise the memoranda which he had taken down from the mouth
of the person employed to interrupt the funeral service of the late
Lord Ravenswood. Bred to casuistry, and well accustomed to practise the
ambidexter ingenuity of the bar, it cost him little trouble to soften
the features of the tumult which he had been at first so anxious to
exaggerate. He preached to his colleagues of the privy council the
necessity of using conciliatory measures with young men, whose blood
and temper were hot, and their experience of life limited. He did not
hesitate to attribute some censure to the conduct of the officer, as
having been unnecessarily irritating.

These were the contents of his public despatches. The letters which
he wrote to those private friends into whose management the matter was
likely to fall were of a yet more favourable tenor. He represented
that lenity in this case would be equally politic and popular, whereas,
considering the high respect with which the rites of interment are
regarded in Scotland, any severity exercised against the Master of
Ravenswood for protecting those of his father from interruption, would
be on all sides most unfavourably construed. And, finally, assuming the
language of a generous and high-spirited man, he made it his particular
request that this affair should be passed over without severe notice. He
alluded with delicacy to the predicament in which he himself stood with
young Ravenswood, as having succeeded in the long train of litigation
by which the fortunes of that noble house had been so much reduced, and
confessed it would be most peculiarly acceptable to his own feelings,
could he find in some sort to counterbalance the disadvantages which he
had occasioned the family, though only in the prosecution of his just
and lawful rights. He therefore made it his particular and personal
request that the matter should have no farther consequences, an
insinuated a desire that he himself should have the merit of having
put a stop to it by his favourable report and intercession. It was
particularly remarkable that, contrary to his uniform practice, he made
no special communication to Lady Ashton upon the subject of