daughter. The hag does her hellish work to the full satisfaction of the designs and the wishes of the mother. Omens are expounded, dreams interpreted, and other tricks of jugglery-such as showing to Lucy in a mirror her lover bestowing his hand upon a lady-are practised. Miss Ashton's mind became unsettled, and her health decayed daily. Sir William at length expels the accursed witch from the castle; but the hag had done her work but too well. Lady Ashton next provides a Presbyterian clergyman, and adds spiritual terrors to the horrors of superstition. Mr. Bide-the-bent, however, consents to forward a letter by a sure hand to absent Edgar. Lucy felt despondingly that an evil fate hung over the attachment, to which, despite so many trials, she clung with honourable tenacity; and she declared that she neither could nor would resign her contract without the consent of Ravenswood. "Let me be assured that he will free me from my engagement, and dispose of me as you please: I care not how." Still no letter from Edgar. The terrible day comes on which the victim is to sign and seal; and that day supplies the very strongest scene in the drama. At Lucy's first attempt to sign she began to write with a dry pen. The signature remained incomplete, defaced, and blotted; because she heard the hasty tramp of a horse, a step in the outer gallery, a voice which she knew. "He is come! he is come!"

Edgar Ravenswood enters the apartment. He "had more the appearance of one returned from the dead than of a living visitor." His rich dress was travelled-soiled and deranged by hard riding. His siouched hat lent an "additional gloom to his dark features, which, wasted by sorrow, and marked by the ghastly look communicated by long illness, added to a countenance naturally somewhat stern and wild a fierce and even savage expression." There was a deep silence in the company for more than two minutes.

The group comprises Sir William and Lady Ashton; Lucy's two brothers, Bucklaw, Craigengelt, and the clergyman; while pale Lucy herself, whose enfeebled mind is reduced to a state of stupor by the passions raging round her, and by her long suffering, sits there halfinanimate and apparently indifferent. The dark stern Ravenswood, with dishevelled dress and wild looks, in an ecstasy of fierce desperation which overcrows the natures of all there--with the exception of Lady Ashton-stands armed, and risks death in order to obtain a decisive interview with his affianced bride. An expression of sorrow fills his eyes as he looks upon that Lucy who seemed to him so faithless. By the irony of the fate that was hunting the lovers to their doom, he misjudges his love, and adds to Lucy's sufferings by a tone

tow much she had borne and suffered ne soci o koow that her reason was

scald only fer out the words, “It

14.727 se adus writing the letter and

200 15-mortsciously she gives back the

gut ste nad worn ever in her bosom. To all

Her mom s kided the bineness of being misconceived by De nom de wred by me no for whose sake she had endured so

zur le time i words won fer for this art of willful and deliberate ni na mderlying the challenges of Sholto and of v. Elg de very slowly past Bucklaw and the Colonel, aking as it as he passed each and looking in their faces sendir vile te fered this mute salutation, which was returned by bon was the same stem gravity."

The wedding takes place. Lay feverishly passive and torpid; and me hip are there -Walk of these revellers' turns will it be to be street first?' asks one beldame. It is the bride," is the reply of Alliste Gourlay. I tell ye, her winding-sheet is up as high as her throat already: believe it wha list. Her sand has but few grains to no out and nie wonder-they've been weel shaken.”

-Dye see her yonder," said Dame Gourlay, indicating Lady Ashton, as she prances on her grey gelding out at the kirkyard?— there's mair o' utter devilry in that woman, as brave and fair-fashioned as she ndes yonder, than in a' the Scotch witches that ever flew by moonlight over North Berwick Law." Then come the horrors of the bridal night--horrors of which the wounded Bucklaw says, "If a lady shall question me henceforward upon the incidents of that unhappy night, I shall remain silent, and in future consider her as one who has shown herself desirous to break off her friendship with me; in a word, I will never speak to her again. But if a gentleman shall ask me the same question, I shall regard the incivility as equivalent to an invitation to meet him in the Duke's Walk." Never could Bucklaw, a sadder and a wiser man, forget that frenzied cry“So, you have ta'en up your bonny bridegroom!" It was young and beautiful Lucy's last utterance. On the following night, the poor girl, strained in body and in mind beyond her endurance, passed away. "Convulsion followed convulsion, till they closed in death." And so Ailsie Gourlay's prophecy came true; and so the mother, in whom there was so much of utter devilry, is in her sort mphant, and has in this sombre fashion prevented the marriage and of Edgar.

Next comes the funeral of the wretched girl so foully done to death. Again, and for the last time, the malignant hags croak over sorrow, doom, and dole. A thirteenth mourner is counted, and Edgar Ravenswood, his misjudgment at an end, and all resentment gone, watches, in the anguish of despair, the interment of the fair creature he had loved so well.

Colonel Ashton's challenge for the next morning at Wolf's Hope is accepted, and in his own old ruined tower Edgar passes his last sleepless night on earth. Taking pathetic leave of faithful old Caleb Balderstone, the last Ravenswood rides fiercely to the duel, and horse and man disappear whelmed in the kelpie's flow.

"One only

vestige of his fate appeared. A large sable feather had been detached from his hat, and the rippling waves of the rising tide wafted it to Caleb's feet. The old man took it up, dried it, and placed it in his bosom."

And so in death they were not long divided. Edgar has rejoined Lucy, and doom is fulfilled.

And this dark, soiled raven's plume, at once a symbol and a relic, is all that remains of the doomed Edgar Ravenswood. Gone, in one quick stroke of pitiless annihilation, his beauty and his youth, hist courage and his force, his high heart, his sad life, and his bitter lot! No decision of the English House of Peers shall ever restore to him those possessions of his long-descended fathers, which the guile and the greed of Ashton had wrung from the Ravenswoods by means of the iniquity of Scottish law. Edgar is the last of his race, the fated scion of the old, fierce, powerful, proud house. Fortune smiled upon only to mock him. Love seemed within his grasp; the restoration of his heritage appeared to be within his reach; hope shone upon the gallant, generous, sorrowful youth-and all is whelmed beneath the kelpie's flow! And yet Nemesis is partly just. No heir of Ashton shall succeed to the inheritance or the lordship of Ravenswood. Lucy is in her grave, and her two brothers die young and unmarried. The old glories of the stately house know no heir, and receive no lord. The line has perished, and name and fame die out for Ravenswood. The poem of the dark house is fully accomplished, and its descendants know it no more.

The deadly completion of the tragedy is wrought by a womanby an implacable, pitiless, and inhuman woman, whose dæmonic will brought down upon her victims misery, ruin-death. She struck at Ravenswood, the man she hated, over the life and the love of her murdered child. Blind agents both of Fate, Bucklaw, and Edgar lose all that might have been hoped for from an interview

with the helpless Lucy, who never could unfold her heart, owing to the baleful presence of that Lady Ashton who felt no conscience and who knew no ruth.

Proper deformity seems not in the fiend

So horrid as in woman;

and Margaret Douglas, otherwise Ashton, remains in this romance of saddest story a monster of feminine cruelty and hate. Still, her wickedness is womanly; it is not violent masculine devilry.

Howe'er thou art a fiend,

A woman's shape doth shield thee.

With noble truth to the facts of life, and not to pretty or sentimental conceptions of life, Scott depicts his heroine of hell as living to extreme old age, the only survivor of the actors in that gruesome tragedy.

Devoted old Caleb pined and died within a year after the death of his loved master. The Ashton family, with one exception, died out soon. In this exception Scott shows one of his profoundest touches of great art. "Lady Ashton lived to the verge of extreme old age, the only survivor of the group of unhappy persons, whose misfortunes were owing to her implacability. That she might internally feel compunction, and reconcile herself with Heaven whom she had offended, we will not, and we dare not deny ; but to those around her she did not evince the slightest symptom of repentance or remorse. In all external appearance she bore the same bold, haughty, unbending character which she had displayed before these unhappy events. A splendid marble monument records her name, titles, and virtues; while her victims remain undistinguished by tomb or epitaph." But to those victims, to Edgar and to Lucy, the genius of Sir Walter Scott has given deathless tombs and unfailing epitaphs.

Lucy ranks, in sorrow and in fate, with Juliet and with Desdemona. Her sufferings were greater even than those of her unhappy lover; but dark, stern, doomed Edgar Ravenswood exists to all time one of the saddest and most splendid figures in tragical romance. In this melancholy but most working story, Lady Ashton remains the sole survivor of those houses of Ravenswood and of Ashton, which but for her might have been so happily united, but which this dæmonic woman drives to misery, to ruin, to extinction.

H. SCHÜTZ WILSON.

545

STAGE GHOSTS.

IASSED by the vulgar debasement of the supernatural in distorted melodrama of an order only just obsolete, we have been very much inclined latterly to assign the much-ridiculed ghost a lower position in the relative scale of dramatic components than is its due. A more extensive examination of the subject will go to show that the frequent recurrence of supernatural visitations in the dramatic literature of the universe was not owing primarily, as is generally considered, to the mere gratefulness of such expedients in moving a horror skilfully, but to the infinitely more powerful circumstance that the dramatist, in striving to depict all the varying shades of human thought and passion, could not afford to overlook a superstition common to humanity, and based upon the intuitive belief in a higher Providence and a future state.

So distinctly prominent was the supernatural element at the earliest period of theatrical history-when playgoing was little else than a pleasant form of religious worship-that, as a matter of fact, the Grecian dramatists left posterity but scant scope for inventing new methods of ghost manipulation. Thus, while in the "Eumenides" of Æschylus, Clytemnestra, earthy in form, but ghostly in garb, voluntarily revisits the glimpses of the moon, exposing her breast wound with the intention of arousing the vengeance of the Furies against the matricide Orestes; Darius, on the other hand, in "The Persians" of the same tragedian, is made to signify his displeasure at being raised from the grave before the entire Court by an incantation, and exhibits much petulant inquisitiveness before vouchsafing the information sought by Atossa regarding the fortunes of the Persians in Greece. In the "Alcestis" of Euripides, again, the heroine on her return from the infernal regions is deprived of speech on the count that she might be tempted to reveal the secrets of the other world.

In Italy the dramatist appears, on the whole, to have relied more upon the ingenuity of the stage mechanist than upon his own creative faculties; their ghosts have a heavy lack of intellect. About the most presentable specimen is found at an early period-in 1460,