consulted what he considered to be his relation's true interest,
although he knew that in doing so he run counter to his inclinations.

The Marquis drove on, therefore, with the plentitude of ministerial
authority, an appeal to the British House of Peers against those
judgments of the courts of law by which Sir William became possessed of
Ravenswood's hereditary property. As this measure, enforced with all the
authority of power, was new in Scottish judicial proceedings, though now
so frequently resorted to, it was exclaimed against by the lawyers
on the opposite side of politics, as an interference with the civil
judicature of the country, equally new, arbitrary, and tyrannical. And
if it thus affected even strangers connected with them only by political
party, it may be guessed what the Ashton family themselves said
and thought under so gross a dispensation. Sir William, still more
worldly-minded than he was timid, was reduced to despair by the loss
by which he was threatened. His son's haughtier spirit was exalted into
rage at the idea of being deprived of his expected patrimony. But to
Lady Ashton's yet more vindictive temper the conduct of Ravenswood, or
rather of his patron, appeared to be an offence challenging the deepest
and most immortal revenge. Even the quiet and confiding temper of Lucy
herself, swayed by the opinions expressed by all around her, could not
but consider the conduct of Ravenswood as precipitate, and even unkind.
"It was my father," she repeated with a sigh, "who welcomed him to this
place, and encouraged, or at least allowed, the intimacy between us.
Should he not have remembered this, and requited it with at least some
moderate degree of procrastination in the assertion of his own alleged
rights? I would have forfeited for him double the value of these lands,
which he pursues with an ardour that shows he has forgotten how much I
am implicated in the matter."

Lucy, however, could only murmur these things to herself, unwilling to
increase the prejudices against her lover entertained by all around
her, who exclaimed against the steps pursued on his account as illegal,
vexatious, and tyrannical, resembling the worst measures in the worst
times of the worst Stuarts, and a degradation of Scotland, the decisions
of whose learned judges were thus subjected to the review of a court
composed indeed of men of the highest rank, and who were not trained to
the study of any municipal law, and might be s