Pages of
living literature built up all these lofty walls, bent these arches,
panelled these ceilings, and filled the whole edifice with these
mementoes of the men and ages gone. Every one of these hewn stones
cost a paragraph; that carved and gilded crest, a column's length of
thinking done on paper. It must be true that pure, unaided literary
labor never built before a mansion of this magnitude and filled it
with such treasures of art and history. This will forever make it
and the pictures of it a monument of peculiar interest. I have said
that it is brim full of the author. It is equally full of all he
wrote about; full of the interesting topographs of Scotland's
history, back to the twilight ages; full inside and out, and in the
very garden and stable walls. The studio of an artist was never
fuller of models of human or animal heads, or of counterfeit
duplicates of Nature's handiwork, than Sir Walter's mansion is of
things his pen painted on in the long life of its inspirations. The
very porchway that leads into the house is hung with petrified stag-
horns, doubtless dug up in Scottish bogs, and illustrating a page of
the natural history of the country in some pre-historic century.
The halls are panelled with Scotland,--with carvings in oak from the
old palace of Dunfermline. Coats of arms of the celebrated Border
chieftains are arrayed in line around the walls. The armoury is a
miniature arsenal of all arms ever wielded since the time of the
Druids. And a history attaches to nearly every one of the weapons.
History hangs its webwork everywhere. It is built, high and low,
into the face of the outside walls. Quaint, old, carved stones from
abbey and castle ruins, arms, devices and inscriptions are all here
presented to the eye like the printed page of an open volume. Among
the interesting relics are a chair made from the rafters of the
house in which Wallace was betrayed, Rob Roy's pistol, and the key
of the old Tolbooth of Edinburgh.

I was conducted through the rooms opened to visitors by a very
gentlemanly-looking man, who might be taken for an author himself,
from his intellectual appearance and conversation. The library is
the largest of all the apartments--fifty feet by sixty. Nor is it
too large for the collection of books it contains, which numbers
about 20,000 volumes, many of them very rare and valuable. But the
soul-centre of the building to me was the _study_, opening into the
library.