When we left the train at Melrose, and took up our quarters in the Abbey Hotel, we found that our good fortune continued, as our rooms looked right down upon the lovely ruins, and, as we sat watching them, the moon rose slowly over the Tweed, so that we had the opportunity to obey literally the poet's counsel in the Lay of the Last Minstrel—
"If thou wouldst view fair Melrose aright,
Go visit it by the pale moonlight."
To one who, like myself, regards Sir Walter Scott as the greatest novelist that ever lived, the opportunity to visit his home at Abbotsford, and his grave at Dryburgh a second time, and to drink in the exquisite beauty of the Tweed Valley at this point, is one to be thankful for indeed.
SIR WALTER SCOTT'S SEAT IN MELROSE ABBEY.
Scott was a reactionary and a royalist, a Tory politically, and a toady socially. He had an unreasoning reverence for kings and courts. He never was in sympathy with his countrymen in their long and bloody, but finally successful, struggle against the tyranny of the church and the state. In Old Mortality, and elsewhere, he slandered the heroic Covenanters, who won the freedom of Scotland. In Woodstock and elsewhere, he caricatured Cromwell and the heroic Puritans, who won the freedom of England. But, with all this, he never wrote anything dirty or degrading, like so much of our latter day fiction. He uniformly exalted bravery, and purity, and honor. Nor should it ever be forgotten that towards the close of his life, when he was overwhelmed by the disaster that befell the publishing house with which he was connected, and when he was thus plunged from independence and affluence into poverty and debt, he gave the world a splendid object lesson of personal honesty, by setting to work, in his old age, to discharge his obligations by continuous, laborious, exhausting work with his pen. He succeeded, but the effort cost him his life. He has given a larger amount of innocent and wholesome pleasure to the reading world than any other writer that ever lived. The unceasing stream of pilgrims to his home at Abbotsford is but one of many indications of his unwaning popularity.
Temporary Residence in Auld Reekie.
Edinburgh at last! No. 4 Atholl Crescent. It was delightful to settle down here, in our rented apartments, after long toil at home and long travel abroad, for a real rest, with just enough walking and hill-climbing daily in and around the city to give us a keen appetite for our meals. Round the bowl of yellow Scotch earthenware, in which our oatmeal porridge was served every morning, ran these lines from Burns: