o a higher bar. The
thread of life, which had been long wasting, gave way during a fit of
violent and impotent fury with which he was assailed on receiving the
news of the loss of a cause, founded, perhaps, rather in equity than in
law, the last which he had maintained against his powerful antagonist.
His son witnessed his dying agonies, and heard the curses which he
breathed against his adversary, as if they had conveyed to him a legacy
of vengeance. Other circumstances happened to exasperate a passion which
was, and had long been, a prevalent vice in the Scottish disposition.

It was a November morning, and the cliffs which overlooked the ocean
were hung with thick and heavy mist, when the portals of the ancient
and half-ruinous tower, in which Lord Ravenswood had spent the last and
troubled years of his life, opened, that his mortal remains might pass
forward to an abode yet more dreary and lonely. The pomp of attendance,
to which the deceased had, in his latter years, been a stranger, was
revived as he was about to be consigned to the realms of forgetfulness.

Banner after banner, with the various devices and coats of this ancient
family and its connexions, followed each other in mournful procession
from under the low-browed archway of the courtyard. The principal gentry
of the country attended in the deepest mourning, and tempered the
pace of their long train of horses to the solemn march befitting the
occasion. Trumpets, with banners of crape attached to them, sent
forth their long and melancholy notes to regulate the movements of the
procession. An immense train of inferior mourners and menials closed
the rear, which had not yet issued from the castle gate when the van had
reached the chapel where the body was to be deposited.

Contrary to the custom, and even to the law, of the time, the body was
met by a priest of the Scottish Episcopal communion, arrayed in his
surplice, and prepared to read over the coffin of the deceased the
funeral service of the church. Such had been the desire of Lord
Ravenswood in his last illness, and it was readily complied with by the
Tory gentlemen, or Cavaliers, as they affected to style themselves, in
which faction most of his kinsmen were enrolled. The Presbyterian Church
judicatory of the bounds, considering the ceremony as a bravading insult
upon their authority, had applied to the Lord Keeper, as the nearest
privy councillor, for a warrant to prevent its being carried into
ef