The Heart of Mid-Lothian - Penn State University

lowed the law, and rose more slowly, yet surely. Euphemia
Butler, whose fortune, augmented by her aunt’s generosity,
and added to her own beauty, rendered her no small
prize, married a Highland laird, who never asked the
name of her grand-father, and was loaded on the occasion
with presents from Lady Staunton, which made her
the envy of all the beauties in Dumbarton and Argyle
shires.
After blazing nearly ten years in the fashionable world,
and hiding, like many
of her compeers, an
aching heart with a gay
demeanour—after declining
repeated offers
of the most respectable
kind for a second matrimonial
engagement,
Lady Staunton betrayed
the inward
wound by retiring to the
Continent, and taking
Sir Walter Scott
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up her abode in the convent where she had received her
education. She never took the veil, but lived and died in
severe seclusion, and in the practice of the Roman Catholic
religion, in all its formal observances, vigils, and austerities.
Jeanie had so much of her father’s spirit as to sorrow
bitterly for this apostasy, and Butler joined in her regret.
“Yet any religion, however imperfect,” he said,
“was better than cold scepticism, or the hurrying din
of dissipation, which
fills the ears of worldlings,
until they care for
none of these things.”
Meanwhile, happy
in each other, in the
prosperity of their
family, and the love and
honour of all who knew
them, this simple pair
lived beloved, and died
lamented.