You will have heard of poor Caberfae's death? What a pity it is he should have outlived his promising young representative. His state was truly pitiable--all his fine faculties lost in paralytic imbecility, and yet not so entirely so but that he perceived his deprivation as in a glass darkly. Sometimes he was fretful and anxious because he did not see his son; sometimes he expostulated and complained that his boy had been allowed to die without his seeing him; and sometimes, in a less clouded state of intellect, he was sensible of, and lamented his loss in its full extent. These, indeed, are {p.014} the "fears of the brave, and follies of the wise,"[5] which sadden and humiliate the lingering hours of prolonged existence. Our friend Lady Hood will now be Caberfae herself. She has the spirit of a chieftainess in every drop of her blood, but there are few situations in which the cleverest women are so apt to be imposed upon as in the management of landed property, more especially of an Highland estate. I do fear the accomplishment of the prophecy, that when there should be a deaf Caberfae, the house was to fall.[6] [Footnote 5: Johnson's _Vanity of Human Wishes_.] [Footnote 6: Francis, Lord Seaforth, died 11th January, 1815, in his 60th year, having outlived four sons, all of high promise. His title died with him, and he was succeeded in his estates by his daughter, Lady Hood, now the Hon. Mrs. Stewart-Mackenzie of Seaforth.--See some verses on Lord Seaforth's death, in Scott's _Poetical Works_, vol. viii. p. 392 [Cambridge Ed. p. 419]. The Celtic designation of the chief of the clan MacKenzie, _Caberfae_, means _Staghead_, the bearing of the family. The prophecy which Scott alludes to in this letter is also mentioned by Sir Humphry Davy in one of his Journals (see his _Life_, by Dr. Davy, vol. ii. p. 72),--and it was, if the account be correct, a most extraordinary one, for it connected the fall of the house of Seaforth not only with the appearance of a deaf _Caberfae_, but with the contemporaneous appearance of various different physical misfortunes in several of the other great Highland chiefs; all of which are said--and were certainly believed both by Scott and Davy--to have actually occurred within the memory of the generation that has not yet passed away. Mr. Morritt can testify thus far--that he "heard the prophecy quoted in the Highlands at a time when Lord Seaforth had two sons both alive and in good health--so that it certainly was not made _après coup_." [Mrs.