Waverley
and his new friend followed him, though probably he would have dispensed
with their attendance. They soon recognised in solemn march, first, the
performer upon the drum; secondly, a large flag of four compartments, on
which were inscribed the words, COVENANT, KIRK, KING, KINGDOMS. The
person who was honoured with this charge was followed by the commander of
the party, a thin, dark, rigid-looking man, about sixty years old. The
spiritual pride, which in mine host of the Candlestick mantled in a sort
of supercilious hypocrisy, was in this man's face elevated and yet
darkened by genuine and undoubting fanaticism. It was impossible to
behold him without imagination placing him in some strange crisis, where
religious zeal was the ruling principle. A martyr at the stake, a soldier
in the field, a lonely and banished wanderer consoled by the intensity
and supposed purity of his faith under every earthly privation, perhaps a
persecuting inquisitor, as terrific in power as unyielding in adversity;
any of these seemed congenial characters to this personage. With these
high traits of energy, there was something in the affected precision and
solemnity of his deportment and discourse that bordered upon the
ludicrous; so that, according to the mood of the spectator's mind and the
light under which Mr.
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