Had the Scott
Monument been erected, like the monument of a neighbouring square, to
express a perhaps not very seemly gratitude for the services of some
tenth-rate statesman, who procured places for his friends, and who did
not much else, it would have been perilous to convert it into the tomb
of a man of genius like poor Kemp. It would have been perilous had it
been the monument of some mere _litterateur_. The _litterateur's_
works would have disappeared from the public eye, while that of the
hapless architect would be for ever before it. And it would be thus
the architect, not the _litterateur_, that would be permanently
remembered. But the monument of Sir Walter was in no danger; and Sir
Walter himself would have been quite aware of the fact. It would not
have displeased him, that in the remote future, when all its
buttresses had become lichened and grey, and generation after
generation had disappeared from around its base, the story would be
told--like that connected in so many of our older cathedrals with
'prentice pillars' and 'prentice aisles'--that the poor architect who
had designed its exquisite arches and rich pinnacles in honour of the
Shakespeare of Scotland, had met an untimely death when engaged on it,
and had found under its floor an appropriate grave.

The intention, however, was not carried into effect. It had been
intimated in the funeral letters that the burial procession should
quit the humble dwelling of the architect--for a humble dwelling it
is--at half-past one. It had been arranged, too, that the workmen
employed at the monument, one of the most respectable-looking bodies
of mechanics we ever saw, should carry the corpse to the grave. They
had gathered round the dwelling, a cottage at Morningside, with a
wreath of ivy nodding from the wall; and the appearance of both it and
them naturally suggested that the poor deceased, originally one of
themselves, though he had risen, after a long struggle, into
celebrity, had not risen into affluence. Death had come too soon. He
had just attained his proper position--just reached the upper edge of
the table-land which his genius had given him a right to occupy, and
on which a competency might be soon and honourably secured--when a
cruel accident struck him down. The time specified for the burial
passed--first one half-hour, and then another. The assembled group
wondered at the delay. And then a gentleman from the dwelling-house
came to inform them that so