142 THE JOURNEYMAN. 



partially mantled with ivy caverned at its base, and 

 continually lifting up its voice in hollow echoes as if hold- 

 ing converse with the waves that toil beneath it, or the 

 innumerable flocks of sea-birds that scream around it. 

 The Jacques of my imagination moralized in a solitary 

 opening in the thicket above, from which a long vista 

 that penetrates into the recesses of the wood, and be- 

 comes narrower and darker in the distance, is seen to 

 terminate in a small circular opening which, when the 

 evening sun rests on the hill behind, may remind one of 

 the beacon of a lighthouse. I found it the easiest thing 

 imaginable to convert the cavern in which I had been 

 once imprisoned into the cave of Belarius ; and an old 

 vault in a ruinous chapel dedicated to St Regulus, and 

 nearly buried among the woods of the hill, furnished me 

 with a proper tomb for the Capulets. The other scenes 

 were of as suitable a character; and the figures with 

 which I peopled them were as strongly, though in some 

 instances more whimsically, defined. I conceived of 

 Caliban as a monster that scarcely less resembled a huge 

 beetle than a human creature, and that walked erect and 

 on all fours by turns. The witches of Macbeth appeared 

 to me in the forms of some of the most disagreeable 

 looking old women in the country not, however, in their 

 living aspects, but in those which I fancied their corpses 

 would have assumed, should they, after being committed 

 to the grave, be possessed by evil spirits. The ideas of 

 female grace and elegance which I connected with the 

 heroines of Shakespeare, and the lady of the Mask of 

 Comus, were mostly derived from a beautiful painting in 

 Cromarty House a copy of Guide's famous Aurora, 

 which, when a boy, I have contemplated for hours to- 

 gether. It was in consequence of my having acquired 

 such ideas as these of the characters and scenes of 



