d
superstition.

From a number of unconnected accounts respecting this great, if not good
man, whose virtues even would have been the vices of our own age, we
find as the most prominent parts of his disposition a thorough contempt
for the maxims and opinions of the world, and an utter recklessness of
its censure or esteem. Marrying into the family of the Harringtons, he
resided the latter part of his life at the Castle of Hornby, where we
find him engaged in schemes for the most part tending to his own wealth
and aggrandisement.

The chapel which he built is said to have been vowed at Flodden, but
this statement is evidently untrue, having no foundation but the
averments of those who content not themselves with a plain narrative of
facts, but assume a licence to invent motives agreeable to their own
folly or caprice. That Sir Edward Stanley made any such vow we cannot
imagine, much less would he put it into execution. "Let us eat and
drink, for to-morrow we die," was the governing principle of his life,
and the mainspring of his actions. It would be a strange anomaly in the
records of human opinions to find an edifice reared to perpetuate a
belief which the founder thought a delusion, a mere system of
priestcraft and superstition. To this prominent feature in his history
our attention has been directed, and we think the following tradition
assigns a better and more plausible motive for the founding of that
beautiful structure, the chapel at Hornby.

It was by the still light of a cloudless harvest-moon that two men
appeared to be sauntering up the stream that winds through the vale near
Hornby. One of them wore a clerical habit, and the other, from his
dress, seemed to attend in the capacity of a menial. They rested at the
foot of a steep cliff overhung with firs and copse-wood. The castle,
upon the summit, with its tall and narrow tower, like a feather stuck in
its crown, was not visible from where they sat. The moon threw an
unclouded lustre from her broad full face far away over the wide and
heavy woods by which they were surrounded. A shallow bend of the stream
towards the left glittered over its bed like molten silver, issuing from
a dark and deep pool shaded by the jutting boughs and grim-visaged rocks
from whence they hung.

The travellers now ascended by a narrow and precipitous path. Their task
was continued with no little difficulty, by reason of the looseness of
the soil, and the huge rocks that obstruct