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Having visited many more rooms than could be supposed to be of any other use than to contribute to the window tax,1 and find employment for the housemaids, ‘Now,’ said Mrs Rushworth, ‘we are coming to the chapel, which properly we ought to enter from above, and look down upon; but as we are quite among friends, I will take you in this way, if you will excuse me.’

They entered. Fanny’s imagination had prepared her for something grander than a mere spacious, oblong room, fitted up for the purpose of devotion . . . ‘I am disappointed,’ said she, in a low voice, to Edmund. ‘This is not my idea of a chapel. There is nothing awful here, nothing melancholy, nothing grand. Here are no aisles, no arches, no inscriptions, no banners. No banners, cousin, to be “blown by the night wind of Heaven.” No signs that a “Scottish monarch sleeps below”.’ 2

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)

1 window tax. A tax first levied in England in 1696 ‘for the purpose of defraying the expenses and making up the deficiency arising from clipped and defaced coinage in the recoinage of silver during the reign of William III’ (Encyclopaedia Britannica). Nearly all inhabited houses were assessed at two shillings a year and tax was added according to the number of windows. The tax was repealed in 1851.

2 blown by the night wind of Heaven and Scottish monarch sleeps below. These are quotations from Sir Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel, which was his first important original work.