Jealousy, betrayal and Gothic vengeance collide in this short medieval romance from Reynolds’s Miscellany. Set against the age of Robert the Bruce and the Crusades, “The Bloodstained Altar” follows Allan Lockhart’s apparent murder, miraculous survival, and dramatic return to Scotland on the very day his beloved is to marry another.
“Society was held together by brute force, intrigue, cord and axe, and woman’s flattery. But a push seemed needed to overthrow it. Yet it was quite secure, nevertheless, as there was none to give that push.”
“Talk of Robin Hood and Little John, and their dingy imitators in this metropolis described by Dickens and Ainsworth … The same man passes from one form into another – developing, according to the changes in society, from a forester to a mountaineer, thence to a highwayman, thence to an instructor of pickpockets and the receiver of their day’s work in St. Giles.”