[The Antiquary by Sir Walter Scott]@TWC D-Link book
The Antiquary

CHAPTER TENTH
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Others, with boar-spears, swords, and old-fashioned guns, were attacking stags or boars whom they had brought to bay.

The branches of the woven forest were crowded with fowls of various kinds, each depicted with its proper plumage.

It seemed as if the prolific and rich invention of old Chaucer had animated the Flemish artist with its profusion, and Oldbuck had accordingly caused the following verses, from that ancient and excellent poet, to be embroidered in Gothic letters, on a sort of border which he had added to the tapestry:-- Lo! here be oakis grete, streight as a line, Under the which the grass, so fresh of line, Be'th newly sprung--at eight foot or nine.
Everich tree well from his fellow grew, With branches broad laden with leaves new, That sprongen out against the sonne sheene, Some golden red and some a glad bright green.
And in another canton was the following similar legend:-- And many an hart and many an hind, Was both before me, and behind.
Of fawns, sownders, bucks and does, Was full the wood and many roes, And many squirrels that ysate High on the trees and nuts ate.
The bed was of a dark and faded green, wrought to correspond with the tapestry, but by a more modern and less skilful hand.

The large and heavy stuff-bottomed chairs, with black ebony backs, were embroidered after the same pattern, and a lofty mirror, over the antique chimney-piece, corresponded in its mounting with that on the old-fashioned toilet.
"I have heard," muttered Lovel, as he took a cursory view of the room and its furniture, "that ghosts often chose the best room in the mansion to which they attached themselves; and I cannot disapprove of the taste of the disembodied printer of the Augsburg Confession." But he found it so difficult to fix his mind upon the stories which had been told him of an apartment with which they seemed so singularly to correspond, that he almost regretted the absence of those agitated feelings, half fear half curiosity, which sympathise with the old legends of awe and wonder, from which the anxious reality of his own hopeless passion at present detached him.

For he now only felt emotions like those expressed in the lines,-- Ah! cruel maid, how hast thou changed The temper of my mind! My heart, by thee from all estranged, Becomes like thee unkind.
He endeavoured to conjure up something like the feelings which would, at another time, have been congenial to his situation, but his heart had no room for these vagaries of imagination.


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