It should be added that, according to a popular idea, the presence of ghosts was announced, in bygone years, by an alteration in the tint of the lights which happened to be burning—an item of folk-lore alluded to in ‘Richard III.’ (Act v. sc. 3), where the tyrant exclaims as he awakens—
The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight,
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
.......
Methought the souls of all that I had murder’d
Came to my tent.
So in ‘Julius Cæsar,’ (Act iv. sc. 3), Brutus, on seeing the ghost of Cæsar, exclaims:
How ill this taper burns! Ha! Who comes here?
Phantom lights have also been associated with buildings, as in the case of the ancient chapel of Roslin, founded in the year 1446 by William St. Clair, Prince of Orkney. It is believed that whenever any of the founder’s descendants are about to depart this life, the chapel appears to be on fire, a weird and terrible occurrence graphically portrayed by Harold’s song in ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’:
O’er Roslin all that dreary night,
A wondrous blaze was seen to gleam;
’Twas broader than the watch-fire light,
And redder than the bright moonbeam.
It glared on Roslin’s castled rock,
It ruddied all the copse-wood glen;
’Twas seen from Dryden’s groves of oak,
And seen from cavern’d Hawthornden.
Seem’d all on fire that chapel proud,
Where Roslin’s chiefs uncoffin’d lie;
Each Baron, for a sable shroud,
Sheathed in his iron panoply.
Seem’d all on fire, within, around,
Deep sacristy and altar’s pale;
Shone every pillar foliage-bound,
And glimmer’d all the dead men’s mail.