Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 2: Great Britain and Ireland, Part 2
General
Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 2: Great Britain and Ireland, Part 2
Great Britain -- Description and travel; Ireland -- Description and travel
The other front gives you a much greater idea of the size. It has a more
continuous range of façade. Here, at one end, is Scott's square tower,
ascended by outside steps, and a round or octagon tower at the other;
you can not tell, certainly, which shape it is, as it is covered with
ivy. On this the flagstaff stands. At the end next to the square tower,
i. e., at the right-hand end as you face it, you pass into the outer
court, which allows you to go around the end of the house from one front
to the other, by the old gateway, which once belonged to the Tolbooth of
Edinburgh. Along the whole of this front runs a gallery, in which the
piper used to stalk to and fro while they were at dinner. This man still
comes about the place, tho he has been long discharged. He is a
great vagabond.
Such is the exterior of Abbotsford. The interior is far more
interesting. The porch, copied from that of the old palace of
Linlithgow, is finely groined, and there are stags' horns nailed up in
it. When the door opens, you find yourself in the entrance-hall, which
is, in fact, a complete museum of antiquities and other matters. It is,
as described in Lockhart's Life of Scott, wainscoted with old wainscot
from the kirk of Dumfermline, and the pulpit of John Knox is cut in two,
and placed as chiffoniers between the windows. The whole walls are
covered with suits of armor and arms, horns of moose deer, the head of a
musk bull, etc. At your left hand, and close to the door, are two
cuirasses, some standards, eagles, etc., collected at Waterloo.
At the opposite end of the room are two full suits of armor, one
Italian, and one English of the time of Henry V., the latter holding in
its hands a stupendous two-handed sword, I suppose six feet long, and
said to have been found on Bosworth field. Opposite to the door is the
fireplace of freestone, imitated from an arch in the cloister at
Melrose, with a peculiarly graceful spandrel. In it stands the iron
grate of Archbishop Sharpe, who was murdered by the Covenanters; and
before it stands a most massive Roman camp-kettle. On the roof, at the
center of the pointed arches, runs a row of escutcheons of Scott's
family, two or three at one end being empty, the poet not being able to
trace the maternal lineage so high as the paternal. These were painted
accordingly in clouds, with the motto, "Night veils the deep." Around
the door at one end are emblazoned the shields of his most intimate
friends, as Erskine, Moritt, Rose, etc., and all around the cornice ran
the emblazoned shields of the old chieftains of the border....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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