In his lifetime Scott's friends had no end of praise and flattery for the place: 'A perfect picture of the wonderful owner's mind'; 'a romance in stone and lime'; 'a poem in stone'; 'a mosaic of Scottish history'; 'like places that we dream about'; 'exactly what one ought to have had wit enough to dream,' etc. It is surprising, therefore, to have the more modern descriptions of such men as Dr. John Brown, who actually calls it the 'ugly Abbotsford'; Ruskin, albeit a true Scott-lover, who describes it as 'perhaps the most incongruous pile that gentlemanly modernism ever designed'; Hugh Miller, who characterizes it as a 'supremely melancholy place'; Dean Stanley, who (curiously) speaks of it as 'a place to see once _but never again_'; George Gilfillan, who compares it to a 'Castle Folly'; Robert Chambers, to whom it was chiefly a 'sad piece of patchwork'; and Carlyle (never friendly to Scott), who simply refers to it as 'a stone house in Selkirkshire.' [It is not in Selkirkshire, however.] Granting it to be in many respects bewildering, heterogeneous, irregular, fantastic, odd, a revelry of false Gothic, reared on no set plan, and so forth, the general effect does not seem to be at all displeasing. Ruskin and the others saw Abbotsford perhaps only once at the most. But it is not a place to be exhausted in an hour, or a day, and hundreds (among modern trippers) in their hurry can hardly carry away a correct impression. Abbotsford is a place to be seen often, and the oftener it is seen and studied, the more fascinating will it become, and the less prominent will its defects appear. [Illustration: SIR WALTER'S DIAL, ABBOTSFORD] 'Thou gav'st him solemn thoughts at twilight dim, And now to us dost bear remembrance sweet of him.'