As
they gazed down from the wall, he thought they scowled upon him, as if
they had taken a grudge against him on account of the duel of his
ancestor. He even gave this as a reason, though probably in jest, for
not sleeping at the Hall, declaring that he feared they would come down
from their frames at night to haunt him.
A feeling of the kind he has embodied in one of his stanzas of "Don
Juan:"
"The forms of the grim knights and pictured saints
Look living in the moon; and as you turn
Backward and forward to the echoes faint
Of your own footsteps--voices from the urn
Appear to wake, and shadows wild and quaint
Start from the frames which fence their aspects stern,
As if to ask you how you dare to keep
A vigil there, where all but death should sleep."
Nor was the youthful poet singular in these fancies; the Hall, like
most old English mansions that have ancient family portraits hanging
about their dusky galleries and waste apartments, had its ghost story
connected with these pale memorials of the dead. Our simple-hearted
conductor stopped before the portrait of a lady, who had been a beauty
in her time, and inhabited the hall in the heyday of her charms.
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