ly inspire one with wonder. They are all that
pen and pencil have described them. The great window, which is the
most salient feature in the common picture, is a magnificent piece
of work in stone, twenty-four feet in height and sixteen in breadth.
It is all in the elm-tree order of architecture. The old monks
belonged to that school, and they wrought out branches, leaves and
leaf-veins, and framed the lacework of their chisels with colored
glass most exquisitely.

Melrose Abbey was the eldest daughter, I believe, of Rievaulx Abbey,
in Yorkshire, which has already been noticed; a year or two older in
its foundation than Fountain Abbey, in Studley Park. The fecundity
with which these ecclesiastical buildings multiplied and replenished
England and Scotland is a marvel, considering the age in which they
were erected and the small population and the poverty of the
country. But something on this aspect of the subject hereafter.
Here lie the ashes of Scottish kings, abbots and knights whose names
figured conspicuously in the history of public and private wars
which cover such a space of the country's life as an independent
nation. The Douglas family especially with several of its branches
found a resting-place for their dust within these walls. Built and
rebuilt, burnt and reburnt, mutilated, dismembered, consecrated and
desecrated, make up the history of this celebrated edifice, and that
of its like, from Land's End to John O'Groat's. It is a slight but
a very appreciable mitigation of these destructive acts that it was
ruined _artistically_; just as some enthusiastic castle and abbey-
painter would have suggested.

Although I spent the night at Melrose, it was a dark and cloudy one,
so that I could not see the abbey by moonlight--a view so much
prized and celebrated. The next day I literally walked from morning
till evening among the tombstones of antiquity and monuments of
Scotch history invested with an interest which will never wane. In
the first place, I went down the Tweed a few miles and crossed it in
a ferry-boat to see Dryburgh Abbey. Here, embowered among the trees
in a silver curve of the river, stands this grand monument of one of
the most remarkable ages of the world. Within an hour's walk from
Melrose, and four or five years only after the completion of that
edifice, the foundations of this were laid. It is astonishing. We
will not dwell upon it now, but make a separate chapter on it when I
hav