in the parlors of thousands of common homes in America, Australia and India.  They are the ruins of Melrose Abbey.  Here is the original of the picture.  I see it at last, as thousands of Americans have seen it before.  In history and association it is to them the Westminster Abbey of Scotland, but in ruin.  It looks natural, though not at first glance what one expected.  The familiar engraving does not give us the real flesh and blood of the antiquity, or the complexion of the stone; but it does not exaggerate the exquisite symmetries and artistic genius of the structure.  These truly 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