ed by a low,
clumsy archway, closes abruptly what the stranger might deem a
thoroughfare. There is a piece of sluggish, stagnant water on the one
hand, thick and turbid, and somewhat resembling in form and colour a
broad muddy highway, lined by low walls; not a tuft of vegetation
is to be seen on its tame rectilinear sides: all is slimy and brown,
with here and there dank, muddy recesses, as if for the frog and
the rat; while on the damp flat above, there lie, somewhat in the
style of the grouping in a Dutch painting, the rotting fragments of
canal passage-boats and coal-barges, with here and there some
broken-backed hulk, muddy and green, the timbers peering out
through the planking, and all around heaps of the nameless lumber of a
deserted boat-yard. The low, clumsy archway is wholly occupied by a
narrow branch of the canal,--brown and clay-like as the main trunk,
from which it strikes off at nearly right angles. It struck us
forcibly, in examining the place, that in the uncertain light of
midnight, the flat, dead water must have resembled an ordinary
cart-road, leading through the arched opening in the direction of the
unfortunate architect's dwelling; and certainly at this spot, just
where he might be supposed to have stepped upon the seeming road under
the fatal impression, was the body found.

It had been intended, as the funeral letters bore, to inter the body
of Mr. Kemp in the vault under the Scott Monument,--a structure which,
erected to do honour to the genius of one illustrious Scotsman, will
be long recognised as a proud trophy of the fine taste and vigorous
talent of another. The arrangement was not without precedent; and had
it been possible for Sir Walter to have anticipated it, we do not
think it would have greatly displeased him. The Egyptian architect
inscribed the name of his kingly master on but the plaster of the
pyramid, while he engraved his own on the enduring granite underneath;
and so the name of the king has been lost, and only that of the
architect has survived. And there are, no doubt, monuments in our own
country which have been transferred in some sort, and on a somewhat
similar principle, from their original object. There are fine statues
which reflect honour on but the sculptor that chiselled them, and
tombs and cenotaphs inscribed with names so very obscure, that they
give place in effect, if not literally, like that of the Egyptian
king, to the name of the architect who reared them.