Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/269

 fancy was found for him in Scott's novel of "Red Gauntlet." The episode selected for illustration is the frightful adventure of Hutcheon and Dougal MacCallum. "When midnight came, and the house was quiet as the grave, the silver whistle sounded as sharp and shrill as if Sir Robert was blowing it, and up got the two old serving-men and tottered into the room where the dead man lay. Hutcheon saw enough at the first glance; for there were torches in the room, which showed him the foul fiend in his ain shape, sitting on the laird's coffin! Ower he couped, as if he had been dead. He could not tell how long he lay in a trance at the door; but when he gathered himself, he cried on his neighbour, and getting nae answer, raised the house, when Dougal was found lying dead within twa steps of the bed where his master's coffin was placed. As for the whistle, it was lost ance and aye, but mony a time it was heard at the top of the house on the bartizan and among the auld chimneys and turrets, where the howlets have their nests." The coffin of the dead laird lies in state on a table covered with black cloth, richly ornamented with his armorial bearings; at the foot of the bier stands his black plumed helmet; while atop of the coffin crouches the grinning ape with the laird's whistle in his paw; on the ground, as they have been tossed about by the mischievous beast, lie his rapier, gauntlet, and other military trappings. The furniture, the fittings, the sombre hangings, the gloomy ancestral portraits, all are in keeping with the weird scene and its surroundings. The Death of Sikes, and Fagin in the Condemned Cell (especially the latter) have been described any number of times, and the circumstances, moreover, under which the latter design was conceived, told invariably wrong. In the Murder of Sir Rowland Trenchard ["Jack Sheppard"], we have a Rembrandtish etching, quite equalling in power and intensity that of Fagin in the Condemned Cell. The gloomy depths of the well hole are illumined only by the pine torch of the frightened Jew, as Wild hammers with 'his bludgeon on the fingers of the doomed wretch who, maimed and faint from loss of blood, clings with desperate tenacity to the bannister, from which his relaxing grip will presently plunge him into the black abyss below.