Leaving the two friends and lovers to arrange, consider and reconsider their plans,—leaving poor Howard to console himself the best way he can,—leaving the admiral busied about his ships and their prizes, while his gunner and coxswain, though staunch Scotsmen, were yielding to English influence, like greater men in more modern times, but after a more honourable fashion, for they were lowering their colours to the pretty Cicely, and the bright-eyed Rose, on whom their kind leader had bestowed two carcanets of silver, studded with those beautiful stones which are found upon the beach of Fife, and from their deep red colour are called Elie Rubies—leaving Father Zuill busied in the development of the great parabolic speculum,—and leaving young Margaret sighing with impatience to rejoin her boy husband, we will change the scene to the other side of the river.
CHAPTER LII.
THE HERMIT OF LORETTO.
"'Tis your belief the world was made for man;
Kings do but reason on the self-same plan.
Maintaining yours, you cannot theirs condemn,
Who think, or seem to think, man made for them."—COWPER.
Among all the places esteemed for sanctity, at a time when a singular mixture of high religious veneration and a strong faith amounting to adoration and sublimity, united to gross superstition,—existed in the land, there was none in Scotland so famous as the chapel and hermitage of Our Lady of Loretto, which stood a little way without the eastern gate of Musselburgh.
It belonged to the abbots of Dunfermline, and had been built in an age anterior to all written record; so now, we know not when it was founded or by whom. The obscurity in which its early history was enveloped left fancy free, and thus the fane enjoyed a celebrity for holiness second only to the Cottage of the Nativity, like which, it became famous for effecting supernatural cures and conversions on visitors and devotees.
The nuns of St. Catharine of Sienna patronised the cell and sought the prayers of the ascetic who dwelt in the hermitage. In August, 1530, before visiting France, James V. made a pilgrimage of more than forty miles on foot, to Loretto. Ladies about to be delivered sent there their childbed linen, to obtain the "odour of sanctity." If they recovered, the hermit attributed it to the powers of the shrine; if they died, to their own evil and sin. There, it was affirmed that sight had been restored to the blind, and strength to the lame; but under the coarse and pungent satires of Sir David Lindesay of the Mount, and one in particular by John Knox, beginning—
"I, Thomas the Hermit, in Loreitte,
Sanct Francies Order do heartillie greet,"
the shrine ultimately lost all reputation and honour; it was demolished, and its materials form the present Tolbooth of the town—little more being left of Loretto than the name and a vault under a wooded mound.
By the decline of the Church, and the general decay of religious sentiment, before the Reformation, the pilgrimages to Loretto became mere scenes of debauchery and an excuse for licentiousness.