Always fond of fireside travels, I had, many a time, in imagination, ridden with William of Deloraine from Branksome Hall, through the night and into the ruins of Melrose Abbey. His errand was to visit the grave of Michael Scott, whose fame had penetrated all Europe and whom even Dante mentions in his deathless lines. Now, however, I had a purpose other than seeing ruins. If possible, I was determined to pick a flower, or a fern, from near the wizard’s grave to serve as ingredient for a philter.

Does not Sir Walter, in his “Rob Roy,” tell us that the cailliachs, or old Highland hags, administered drugs, which were designed to have the effect of love potions? Who knows but these concoctions were made from plants grown near the wonder-worker’s tomb? At any rate, I imagined that one such bloom, leaf, or root, sent across the sea, to a halting lover, might reinforce his courage to make the proposal, which I doubt not was expected on the other side of the house. At least we dare say this to the grandchildren of the long wedded pair.

So glorified were the gray ruins of Melrose, in Scott’s enchanting poetry, that I almost feared to look, in common sunlight, upon the broken arches and the shafted orioles; for does not Scott, who warns us to see Melrose “by the pale moonlight,” tell us that

Yet the tourist’s time, especially when in company, is not usually his own, and for me, though often, later, at the abbey, the opportunity never came of visiting “fair Melrose aright,” by seeing its fascinations under lunar rays, or in

On the morning of July 11, we had our first view from the railway. The ruins loomed dark and grand. Approaching on foot the pile, closely surrounded as it was by houses and Mammonites and populated chiefly by rooks, the first view was not as overpowering as if I had come unexpectedly to it under the silver light of the moon. Yet, on lingering in the aisles within the ruined nave and walking up and down amid the broken marbles, imagination easily pictured again that spectacular worship, so enjoyed in the Middle Ages and beloved by many still, which makes so powerful and multitudinous an appeal to the senses and emotions.

The west front and a large portion of the north half of the nave and aisle of the abbey have perished, but the two transepts, the chancel and the choir, the two western piers of the tower, and the sculptured roof of the east end are here yet to enthral. I thought of the processions aloft, of the monks, up and down through the interior clerestory passage, which runs all around the church. Again, in the chambers of fancy, the choir sang, the stone rood screen reflected torch and candlelight, and the lamp of the churchman shed its rays, while the “toil drops” of the knight William, “fell from his brows like rain,” as “he moved the massy stone at length.”

A minute examination of the carving of windows, aisles, cloister, capitals, bosses, and door-heads well repays one’s sympathetic scrutiny, for no design is repeated. What loving care was that of mediæval craftsmen, who took pride in their work, loving it more than money! Proofs of this are still visible here. Such beauty and artistic triumphs open a window into the life of the Middle Ages. From the south of Europe, the travelling guilds of architects and masons, and of men expert with the chisel, must have come hither to put their magic touch upon the stone of this edifice, which was so often built, destroyed, and built again. “A penny a day and a little bag of meal” was the daily dole of wages to each craftsman. One may still trace here the monogram of the master workman.

Under the high altar in this Scottish abbey, the heart of Robert the Bruce was buried. Intensely dramatic is the double incident of its being carried toward Palestine by its valorous custodian, who, in battle with the Saracens, hurled the casket containing it at the foe, with the cry, “Forward, heart of Bruce, and Douglas shall follow thee.”

In the chancel are famous tombs of men whose glory the poet has celebrated. Here, traditionally, at least, is the sepulchre of Michael Scott, visited, according to Sir Walter’s lay, by the monk accompanying William of Deloraine. With torch in hand and feet unshod, the holy man led the knight.

It was “in havoc of feudal war,” when the widowed Lady, mistress of Branksome Hall, was called upon to decide whether her daughter Margaret should be her “foeman’s bride.” “Amid the armed train” she called to her side William of Deloraine and bade him visit the wizard’s tomb on St. Michael’s night and get from his dead hand, “the bead, scroll, or be it book,” to decide as to the marriage.

Now for Scott’s home! On the bank of Scotland’s most famous river, the Tweed, two miles above Melrose, was a small farm called Clarty Hole, which the great novelist bought in 1811. Changing the name to Abbotsford, he built a small villa, which is now the western wing of the present edifice. As he prospered, he made additions in the varied styles of his country’s architecture in different epochs. The result is a large and irregularly built mansion, which the “Wizard of the North” occupied twenty-one years. It has been called “a romance in stone and lime.” Knowing that the Tweed had been for centuries beaded like a rosary with monasteries and that monks had often crossed at the ford near by, Sir Walter coined the new name and gave it to the structure in which so much of his wonderful work was done for the delight of generations. Curiously enough, in America, while many places have been named after persons and events suggested by Scott’s fiction, only one town, and that in Wisconsin, bears this name of Abbotsford.

With a jolly party of Americans, we entered the house, thinking of Wolfert’s Roost at Tarrytown, New York, and its occupant Washington Irving, who had been a warm friend of Sir Walter. It was he who gave him, among other ideas, the original of Rebecca, a Jewish maiden of Philadelphia, whose idealization appears, in Scott’s beautiful story of “Ivanhoe,” as the daughter of Isaac of York. Memory also recalls that Scott wrote poetry that is yet sung in Christian worship, for in Rebecca’s mouth he puts the lyric,—

In the dim aisles of Melrose Abbey, before Michael Scott’s tomb, “the hymn of intercession rose.” The mediæval Latin of “Dies Iræ” has many stanzas, but Scott condensed their substance into twelve lines, beginning;—

We were shown the novelist’s study and his library, the drawing-room and the entrance hall. The roof of the library is designed chiefly from models taken from Roslyn Chapel, with its matchless pillar that suggests a casket of jewels. While many objects interested us both, it is clear, on the surface of things, that our lady companion, Quandril, was not so much concerned with what the cicerone told to the group of listeners as were certain male students present, who, also, were slaves of the pen: to wit, that when Sir Walter could not sleep, because of abnormal brain activity, he would come out of his bedroom, through the door, which was pointed out to us in the upper corner, and shave himself. This mechanical operation, with industry applied to brush, lather, steel, and stubble, diverted his attention and soothed his nerves. More than one brain-worker, imitating Sir Walter, has found that this remedy for insomnia is usually effectual.

Another fascinating monastic ruin is Dryburgh on the Tweed. It was once the scene of Druidical rites. The original name was Celtic, meaning the “bank of the oaks.” St. Modan, an Irish Culdee, established a sanctuary here in the sixth century, and King David I, in 1150, built the fine abbey. Here, in St. Mary’s aisle, sleeps the dust of the romancer who re-created, to the imagination, mediæval Scotland. Certainly her greatest interpreter in prose and verse is one of the land’s jewels and a material asset of permanent value.

The fame of Sir Walter yields a revenue, which, though not recorded in government documents, is worth to the Scottish people millions of guineas. From all over the world come annually tens of thousands of pilgrims to Scotland, and they journey hither because the “Wizard of the North” has magnetized them through his magic pen. Probably a majority are Americans. Not even Shakespeare can attract, to Stratford, at least, so many literary or otherwise interested pilgrims of the spirit, as does Burns or Scott.

We move next and still southward to Gretna Green—for centuries mentioned with jest and merriment. Of old, those rigid laws of State-Church-ridden England concerning marriage, which made the blood of Free Churchmen boil, while rousing the contempt and disgust of Americans, compelled many runaway couples from across the English border to seek legal union under the more easy statutes of Scotland. Gretna Green was the first convenient halting-place for those who would evade the oppressive requirements of the English Marriage Act. For generations, thousands of nuptial ceremonies were performed by various local persons or officials, though chiefly by the village blacksmith. Other places, like Lamberton, shared in the honors and revenue also. One sign, visible for many years, read, “Ginger Beer Sold Here, and marriages performed on the most reasonable terms.”

English law, framed by the House of Lords, compelled not only the consent of parents and guardians, but also the publication of banns, the presence of a priest of the Established Church, fixed and inconvenient hours, and other items of delay and expense. All that Scotland required, however, as in New York State, was a mutual declaration of marriage, to be exchanged in presence of witnesses.

The blacksmith of Gretna Green was no more important than other village characters, nor did his anvil and tongs have any ritual significance, because any witness was eligible to solemnize a ceremony which could be performed instantly. Gradually, however, as in so many other instances of original nonentities in Church and State, the blacksmith gradually assumed an authority which imposed upon the credulity of the English strangers, who usually came in a fluttering mood. In that way, the local disciple of St. Dunstan is said to have profited handsomely by the liberality usually dispensed on such felicitous occasions. The couple could then return at once to England, where their marriage was recognized as valid, because the nuptial union, if contracted according to the law of the place where the parties took the marital vow, was legal in the United Kingdom.

After the severity of the English law, under the hammering of the Free Church had been modified, Gretna Green was spoiled as a more or less romantic place of marriages, and held no charms for elopers. Scottish law, also, was so changed as to check this evasion of the English statutes. No irregular marriage of the kind, formerly and extensively in vogue, is now valid, unless one of the parties has lived in Scotland for twenty-one days before becoming either bride or groom. Gretna Green no longer points a joke or slur except in the preterite sense.

Sir Walter Scott, who sentinels for us the enchanted land we are entering, was in large measure the interpreter of Scotland, but he was more. In a sense, he was his native country’s epitome and incarnation. His literary career, however, illustrated, in miniature, almost all that Disraeli has written in his “Curiosities of Literature,” and especially in the chapter concerning “the calamities of authors.” Happily, however, Scott’s life was free from those quarrels to which men of letters are so prone, and of which American literary history is sufficiently full. Millions have been delighted with his poetry, which he continued to write until Byron, his rival, had occulted his fame. He is credited with having “invented the historical novel”—an award of honor with which, unless the claim is localized to Europe, those who are familiar with the literature of either China or Japan cannot possibly agree. Yet, in English, he was pioneer in making the facts of history seem more real through romance.

Scott was born in a happy time and in the right place—on the borderland, which for ages had been the domain of Mars. Here, in earlier days, the Roman and the Pict had striven for mastery. Later, Celtic Scot and invaders of Continental stock fought over and stained almost every acre with blood. Still later, the Lowlanders, of Teutonic origin, and the southern English battled with one another for centuries. On a soil strewn with mossy and ivied ruins, amid a landscape that had for him a thousand tongues, and in an air that was full of legend, song, and story, Scott grew up. Though not much of a routine student, he was a ravenous reader. Through his own neglect of mental discipline, in which under good teachers he might have perfected himself, he entered into active life, notably defective on the philosophic side of his mental equipment, and somewhat ill-balanced in his perspective of the past, while shallow in his views of contemporary life.

Despite Scott’s brilliant imagery, and the compelling charm of his pageants of history, there were never such Middle Ages as he pictured. For, while the lords and ladies, the heroes and the armed men, their exploits and adventures in castle, tourney, and field, are pictured in rapid movement and with fascinating color, yet of the real Middle Ages, which, for the mass of humanity, meant serfdom and slavery, with brutality and licentiousness above, weakness and ignorance below, with frequent visits of plague, pestilence, and famine, Scott has next to nothing to say. As for his anachronisms, their name is legion.

Nevertheless Scott had the supreme power of vitalizing character. He has enriched our experience, through imaginative contact with beings who are ever afterwards more intimately distinct and real for us than the people we daily meet. None could surpass and few equal Scott in clothing a historical fact or fossil with the pulsing blood and radiant bloom of life, compelling it to stand forth in resurrection of power. Scott thus surely possesses the final test of greatness, in his ability to impress our imagination, while haunting our minds with figures and events that seem to have life even more abundantly than mortal beings who are our neighbors.

Critics of to-day find fault with Scott, chiefly because he was deficient in certain of the higher and deeper qualities, for which they look in vain in his writings, while his poetry lacks those refinements of finish which we are accustomed to exact from our modern singers. However, those to whom the old problems of life and truth are yet unsettled, and who still discuss the questions over which men centuries ago fought and for which they were glad to spill their blood in defence and attack, accuse Scott of a partisanship which to them seems contemptible. Moreover, his many anachronisms and grave historical blunders, viewed in the light of a larger knowledge of men and nations, seem ridiculous.

Yet after all censure has been meted out and judgment given, it is probable that in frank abandon for boldness and breadth of effect, and in painting with words a succession of clear pictures, his poems are unexcelled in careless, rapid, easy narrative and in unfailing life, spirit, vigorous and fiery movement. Had Scott exercised over his prose writings a more jealous rigor of supervision, and had he eliminated the occasional infusions of obviously inferior matter, his entire body of writings would have been even more familiar and popular than they are to-day. It is safe to say that only a selection of the most notable of his works is really enjoyed in our age, though undoubtedly there will always be loyal lovers of the “Magician of the North,” who still loyally read through Scott’s entire repertoire. Indeed, we have known some who do this annually and delightedly. Taking his romances in chronological order, one may travel in the observation car of imagination through an enchanted land, having a background of history; while his poems surpass Baedeker, Black, or Murray as guide books to Melrose Abbey, through the Trossachs, to Ellen’s Isle, or along Teviot’s “silver tide.”