Page:Books and men.djvu/213

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THE CAVALIER.
203

many characters as Saladin in the Talisman; appearing now as his brother David Graham, in order to witness the trial of the Wigtown martyrs, and now as his distant kinsman, Patrick Graham, when it becomes expedient to figure as a dramatic feature of Argyle's execution. He changes at will into Sir Robert Grierson, and is thus made responsible for that highly curious game which Wodrow and Howie impute to Lag's troopers, and which Macaulay describes with as much gravity as if it were the sacking and pillage of some doomed Roman town. It is hard to understand the precise degree of pleasure embodied in calling one's self Apollyon and one's neighbor Beelzebub; it is harder still to be properly impressed with the tremendous significance of the deed. I have known a bevy of schoolgirls, who, after an exhaustive course of Paradise Lost, were so deeply imbued with the sombre glories of the satanic court that they assumed the names of its inhabitants; and, for the remainder of that term, even the mysterious little notes that form so important an element of boarding-school life began—heedless of grammar—with "Chère Moloch," and