Page:Guy Mannering Vol 3.djvu/92

82 the opening door had extended their prospect to the other side of a dirty street. Nor can this be thought surprising, when it is considered, that unless upon such occasions their view was confined to the grated front of their prison, the high and sable walls of the court-yard, the heaven above them, and the pavement beneath their feet; a sameness of landscape, which, to use the poet's expression, "lay like a load on the wearied eye," and had fostered in some a callous and dull misanthropy, in others that sickness of the heart which induces him who is immured already in a living grave, to wish for a sepulchre yet more calm and sequestered.

Mac-Guffog, when they entered the court-yard, suffered Bertram to pause for a minute, and look upon his companions in affliction. When he had cast his eye around on faces on which guilt, and despondence, and low excess, had fixed their stigma; upon the spendthrift, and the