ocession, every house-top almost, had its crowd of spectators.
According to the poet,

'Rank behind rank, close wedged, hung bellying o'er;'

while the area below, for many hundred yards on either side the
intended site of the monument, presented a continuous sea of heads. We
marked, among the flags exhibited, the Royal Standard of Scotland,
apparently a piece of venerable antiquity, for the field of gold had
degenerated into a field of drab, and the figure in the centre showed
less of leonine nobleness than of art in that imperfect state in which
men are fain to content themselves with semblances doubtful and
inexpressive, and less than half the result of chance. The entire
pageant was such a one as Sir Walter himself could perhaps have
improved. He would not have fired so many guns in the hollow, and the
grey old castle so near: he would have found means, too, to prevent
the crowd from so nearly swallowing up the procession. Perhaps no man
had ever a finer eye for pictorial effect than Sir Walter, whether
art or nature supplied the scene. It has been well said that he
rendered Abbotsford a romance in stone and lime, and imparted to the
king's visit to Scotland the interest and dignity of an epic poem.
Still, however, the pageant was an imposing one, and illustrated
happily the influence of a great and original mind, whose energies had
been employed in enriching the national literature, over an educated
and intellectual people.

It is a bad matter when a country is employed in building monuments to
the memory of men chiefly remarkable for knocking other men on the
head; it is a bad matter, too, when it builds monuments to the memory
of mere courtiers, of whom not much more can be said than that when
they lived they had places and pensions to bestow, and that they
bestowed them on their friends. We cannot think so ill, however, of
the homage paid to genius.

The Masonic Brethren of the several lodges mustered in great numbers.
It has been stated that more than a thousand took part in the
procession. Coleridge, in his curious and highly original work, _The
Friend_--a work which, from its nature, never can become popular, but
which, though it may be forgotten for a time, will infallibly be dug
up and brought into public view in the future as an unique fossil
impression of an extinct order of mind--refers to a bygone class of
mechanics, 'to whom every trade was an allegory, and had its guardian
saint.' 'But the ti