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86 sits sewing the shroud of her brother—the young, the gifted, the high-spirited Fergus, the last of their ancient line—the prematurely doomed chief of Glennaquoich. I never could read without tears his sister's bitter self-reproaches, that she had been the one to urge him on, and—to the scaffold! It is the cry of the heart-broken, when she so passionately exclaims, "Oh! that I could but remember to have said to him, he that strikes by the sword, shall die by the sword." It is a relief to think of Flora in the silence and the solitude of the cloister. The gates of life are as much closed upon her as if she had passed through those of death. The cause lost on which she had perilled what was dearer than existence, and the house of Stuart again in hopeless exile; her beloved brother in his early and ignominious grave—what remained for Flora but to ask her own tomb from that Heaven, the only light through the black veil of the order of St. Dominick.

 

There is one felicity of style which is peculiarly Scott's own; the very happy names which he gives his dramatis personæ. Whether of grace or of humour, they are singularly characteristic. Literary godfathers and godmothers, like those in real 