This feast outshone his banquets past;
It was his blithest—and his last.”
The night of revelry in Edinburgh, preceding the direful battle, may have suggested to Byron the grand poetic description of the “beauty and chivalry” convened in Belgium’s capital the night before the battle of Waterloo. The tradition to which Scott alludes of the ghastly midnight proclamation at the market cross of Edinburgh, summoning the king by name, and many of his nobles and principal leaders, to appear before the tribunal of Pluto within the space of forty days, found indeed sad realization. The description of “Edinburgh after Flodden,” a poem by Robert Aytoun, completes the picture, and, in lyrical power, is not an unworthy postscript to the vigorous canto which finds its culmination in the last words of the English knight:
“When Stanley was the cry—
A light on Marmion’s visage spread,
And fired his glazing eye;
With dying hand, above his head,
He shook the fragment of his blade,
And shouted ‘Victory!—
Charge Chester, charge! On, Stanley, on!’