MELROSE AND THE
EILDONS FROM BEMERSYDE
HILL: SCOTT'S
FAVOURITE VIEW
FROM A WATER-COLOUR SKETCH
PAINTED BY
JAMES ORROCK, R.I.
Both Scott and Campbell have sung of the unhappy Maid of Neidpath spent with grief and disease, waiting her lover on the Castle walls, and beholding him ride past all unconscious of her identity.
"He came—he passed—a heedless gaze,
As o'er some stranger glancing;
Her welcome, spoke in faltering phrase,
Lost in his courser's prancing—
The Castle arch whose hollow tone
Returns each whisper spoken,
Could scarcely catch the feeble moan
Which told her heart was broken."
The literary associations of Peebles—a charming township—are outstanding. William and Robert Chambers (founders of Chambers's Journal) were natives. So were Thomas Smibert and John Veitch, poets and essayists both. Mungo Park (a Gideon Gray prototype) was the town's surgeon for a time—an eternal longing for Africa in his soul. "Meg Dods," the best landlady in fiction, was one of its heroines. And "Peblis to the Play," probably by James I., is a Scots classic. Traquair is poetic ground every foot of it. At its "bonnie bush" how many singers have caught inspiration from Crawford of Drumsoy in 1725, to Principal Shairp in our own day! Shairp's lyric may well be quoted in full. It is by far the finest contribution to modern Border minstrelsy. "Thank ye again for this exquisite song; I would rather have been the man to write it than Gladstone in all his greatness and goodness," was the exuberant "Rab" Brown's compliment to the author: