00 a year; and added: "Making
every allowance for modern improvements, there can be no question that
the sixty brothers of Melrose divided a princely rental. The superiors
were often men of very high birth, and the great majority of the rest
were younger brothers of gentlemen's families. I fancy they may have
been, on the whole, pretty near akin to your Fellows of All
Souls--who, according to their statute, must be _bene nati, bene
vestiti, et mediocriter docti_. They had a good house in Edinburgh,
where, no doubt, my lord abbot and his chaplains maintained a
hospitable table during the sittings of Parliament." Some one
regretted that we had no lively picture of the enormous revolution in
manners that must have followed the downfall of the ancient Church in
{p.287} Scotland. He observed that there were, he fancied, materials
enough for constructing such a one, but that they were mostly
scattered in records--"of which," said he, "who knows anything to the
purpose except Tom Thomson and John Riddell? It is common to laugh at
such researches, but they pay the good brains that meddle with
them;--and had Thomson been as diligent in setting down his
discoveries as he has been in making them, he might, long before this
time of day, have placed himself on a level with Ducange or Camden.
The change in the country-side," he continued, "must indeed have been
terrific; but it does not seem to have been felt very severely by a
certain Boniface of St. Andrews, for when somebody asked him, on the
subsidence of the storm, what he thought of all that had
occurred,--'Why,' answered mine host, 'it comes to this, that the
moder_au_tor sits in my meikle chair, where the dean sat before, and
in place of calling for the third stoup of Bordeaux, bids Jenny bring
ben anither bowl of toddy.'"

At Dryburgh, Scott pointed out to us the sepulchral aisle of his
Haliburton ancestors, and said he hoped, in God's appointed time, to
lay his bones among their dust. The spot was, even then, a
sufficiently interesting and impressive one; but I shall not say more
of it at present.

On returning to Abbotsford, we found Mrs. Scott and her daughters
doing penance under the merciless curiosity of a couple of tourists
who had arrived from Selkirk soon after we set out for Melrose. They
were rich specimens--tall, lanky young men, both of them rigged out in
new jackets and trousers of the Macgregor tartan; the one, as they had
revealed, being a lawyer, the othe