ABBOTSFORD.
With the situation of St. Mary’s Abbey Dorothy Wordsworth was fain to avow herself disappointed. When she came to Melrose she found it “almost surrounded by insignificant houses,” which is even truer now than it was then; and she adds that even when viewed from a distance the position did not seem happy, for the church was not close to the river, “so that you do not look upon them as companions to each other.” This has been rebuked as “somewhat captious;” but one presumes to think it nothing of the kind. In itself, however, the Abbey is fair beyond description; it would be as difficult to adversely criticise as it is to adequately praise it. To justly appreciate its proportions, graceful and imposing even in its ruin, and with the central tower bereft of its rood-spire, it should be seen from one of the summits of Eildon; yet its details, when minutely scrutinised on the spot, are still more admirable. Burns, before his time in his appreciation of Gothic architecture as in some other things, speaks of it as “a glorious ruin;” to Sir Walter’s mind it was “the finest specimen of Gothic architecture and Gothic sculpture which Scotland can boast.” It is, in sooth, one of the crowning achievements of the Gothic, with most of its merits and almost none of its faults. Exuberantly ornamented, it never oversteps the thin line which separates richness from redundancy. Even the great east window, built after Richard II.’s devastations in 1385, when the Gothic had passed its prime, has a grace and harmony which justify all the admiration usually accorded to its size; while it is preserved from the stiffness which is the besetting sin of the Perpendicular by the foliaged tracery that knits the long mullions together. The window in the south transept, also in five lights, is, however, to be preferred before it, although considerably smaller; it is in the Second Pointed, or Decorated style, to which the greater part of the ruin belongs, and the lines into which its mullions flow are of indescribable loveliness. The carving on capital and corbel, on boss and buttress, has an elaborate yet dainty beauty such as is seldom met with on either side of the Tweed, and must of a truth be the work of hands that were made cunning by love of art and patient by a sense of pious duty.
The first Abbey of Melrose, built of oak and thatched with reeds, occupied a nearly insulated site two miles down the river, where the village of Old Melrose now stands. It was a “Chaldee” foundation, as Mrs. Dods would say—was founded by Aidan of Lindisfarne, was the home of the St. Boisil after whom St. Boswell’s is named, as well as of St. Cuthbert, was destroyed by Kenneth, after an existence of three hundred years, and, though rebuilt, sank into decay and ruin. Then, five hundred years after St. Aidan, came St. David, who, when the new monastery had been built, brought Cistercian monks from Rievaulx to fill it. Its experiences at the hands of the second Edward and the second Richard, of Evers and Latoun, and of Hertford, were identical with those of Dryburgh, and the dismal story need not be repeated. After the Reformation a part of the nave was used as the parish church, a barbarous wall of brick being put up at the west end, rising into an equally sightly vault to keep out the weather. Although these additions are a grievous eyesore, it was rightly decided, when early in the present century a church was built, to let them be, lest their removal should leave the ruins less secure. In 1832 these were repaired, and the circumstance that the Duke of Buccleuch allowed Sir Walter Scott to superintend the work is guarantee that it was done with a tender and reverent hand. The bell which counted the slow hours for the drowsy monks still tells the time, with quite as much accuracy as could be expected or desired.
To the cloisters access is had by a low door at the north-east end of the nave—the entrance through which William of Deloraine was led to the wizard’s grave. One of the tombs bears an incongruous printed label, “Michael Scott;” but the identification rests on evidence which would not even satisfy an antiquary—on nothing else, in truth, than the story of the “last minstrel,” who was not scrupulous as to matters of fact. Nor is there anything but tradition to show that the magician was buried in the Abbey at all. In this instance, moreover, tradition is divided against itself, for one story has it that he was interred in the monastery founded by St. Waltheof at Holme Coltrame, in Cumberland. In one particular, however, the stories agree: they both aver that the magic books were buried with the wizard, or preserved in the monastery where he died; and here we have the hint of which Sir Walter has made such splendid use in the “Lay.” There has been much controversy, by the way, over the question whether the ruins were ever explored by Scott by moonlight. Old John Bower, who for many years was the keeper of the abbey, maintained that he could never have done so, since he had never borrowed the key from him at night; and a verse has been quoted from Sir Walter himself against those who find it hard to believe that the sweetest lines in the “Lay” were not written from “personal experience”:—
“Then go and muse with deepest awe
On what the writer never saw,
Who would not wander ’neath the moon
To see what he could see at noon.”
The lines are not characteristic, and probably are not genuine. But whether Scott was “too practical a man to go poking about the ruins by moonlight,” as Tom Moore contended, or was not, is surely a trivial and even irrelevant question. If Scott never saw the Abbey except when it was being flouted by “the gay beams of lightsome day,” it does not follow that the passage is mere moonshine. Peradventure it is poetry.