“Your reliance on your unwise generalisation regarding the ‘inferior’ quality of _all_ work at the end of the fifteenth century has blinded you to the facts at Melrose, as elsewhere. The magnificent panel carved with the royal arms, of which I gave an enlarged photograph (p. 55), is dated 1505. There is nothing finer of its kind in the country, and the carved bosses in the presbytery vault are remarkable for their rare beauty, and yet one of them bears the arms of Margaret, wife of James IV. You state that ‘the building or restoration of the eastern part of the edifice seems, from its style, to have been carried out towards the middle of the fifteenth century’ (p. 372). The further statement is made that ‘the design of the choir appears to have been borrowed from that of the transept’ (p. 370). These statements are contradictory. The south transept was not erected until after the middle of the fifteenth century, by Abbot Andrew Hunter. His arms are to be found carved on it, and also in the nave chapel, where the work is unmistakeably from the hand of the same designer. It is indubitable that the ‘perpendicular’ work was inserted in the older transept. It has never occurred to you to endeavour to explain the presence in Scotland [Illustration: FIG. 2.--Carved Boss in Vaulting of Aisle of Car Fergus.] of so marked a type of English art _in the middle of the fifteenth century_, and you have thought it wise to ignore my interpretation that this style was adopted as an expression of the international good feeling arising from the marriage of James IV. with Margaret of England. Perpendicular work is also present at Linlithgow and Stirling, and there also it is associated with Queen Margaret.