“Oh! Arthur’s Seat shall be my bed,
The sheets shall ne’er be pressed by me:
St. Anton’s well shall be my drink,
Sin’ my true love’s forsaken me,” etc.
The situation is remarkably well adapted for a hermitage, though in the immediate neighbourhood of a populous capital. The scene around is as wild as a Highland desert, and gives an air of seclusion and peacefulness as complete. If the distant din of the city at all could reach the eremite’s ears, it would appear as insignificant as the murmur of the waves around the base of the isolated rock, and would be as unheeded.
CHAPTER VIII.
Bride of Lammermoor.
(The Plot, and Chief Characters of the Tale.)[36]
ohn Hamilton, second son of Sir Walter Hambledon of Cadzow, ancestor of the Dukes of Hamilton, married the heiress of Innerwick,[37] in East Lothian, in the reign of King Robert Bruce, and was the progenitor of “a race of powerful barons,” who flourished for about three hundred years, and “intermarried with the Douglasses, Homes,” etc. They possessed a great many lands on the coast of East Lothian, betwixt Dunbar and the borders of Berwickshire, and also about Dirleton and North Berwick. They had their residence at the Castle of Innerwick, now in ruins. Wolff’s Crag is supposed to be the Castle of Dunglas; and this supposition is strengthened by the retour[38] of a person of the name of Wolff, in the year 1647, of some parts of the Barony of Innerwick, being on record, and the castle having been blown up by gunpowder in 1640, a circumstance slightly noticed in the Tale, but too obvious to be mistaken.[39] Of this family the Earls of Haddington are descended. They began to decline about the beginning of the 17th century, when they seem to have lost the title of Innerwick[40] and began to take their designation from other parts of the family inheritance, such as Fenton, Lawfield, etc. The last of them was a Colonel Alexander Hamilton, who was in life in 1670, and had been abroad for some time—thus agreeing with the Story in one particular which had a material influence on the fortunes of the family. In him the direct male line became extinct, and, according to the prophecy, his name was “lost for evermore.” The circumstances of this family, and the period of their decline, agree so exactly with the Tale, that, unless the local scene of it be altogether a fiction, it appears, at first view, scarcely possible to doubt that the Lords of Ravenswood and the Hamiltons of Innerwick were the same.