According to our guide book, one might find there the visible counterpart of every thing which he has woven into his beautiful fiction--"the Lady's Rock, which rang to the applause of the multitude;" "the Franciscan steeple, which pealed the merry festival;" "the sad and fatal mound," apostrophized by Douglas,--
"That oft has heard the death-axe sound As on the noblest of the land, Fell the stern headsman's bloody hand;"--
the room in the castle, where "a Douglas by his sovereign bled;" and not far off the ruins of Cambuskenneth Abbey. One could not but think of the old days Scott has described.
"The castle gates were open flung, The quivering drawbridge rocked and rung, And echoed loud the flinty street Beneath the coursers' clattering feet, As slowly down the steep descent Fair Scotland's king and nobles went, While all along the crowded way Was jubilee and loud huzza."
The place has been long deserted as a palace; but it is one of the four fortresses, which, by the articles of union between Scotland and England, are always to be kept in repair.
We passed by the town of Perth, the scene of the "Fair Maid's" adventures. We had received an invitation to visit it, but for want of time were obliged to defer it till our return to Scotland.
Somewhere along here Mr. S. was quite excited by our proximity to Scone, the old crowning-place of the Scottish kings; however, the old castle is entirely demolished, and superseded by a modern mansion, the seat of the Earl of Mansfield.
Still farther on, surrounded by dark and solemn woods, stands Glamis Castle, the scene of the tragedy in Macbeth. We could see but a glimpse of it from the road, but the very sound of the name was enough to stimulate our imagination. It is still an inhabited dwelling, though much to the regret of antiquarians and lovers of the picturesque, the characteristic outworks and defences of the feudal ages, which surrounded it, have been levelled, and velvet lawns and gravel walks carried to the very door. Scott, who passed a night there in 1793, while it was yet in its pristine condition, comments on the change mournfully, as undoubtedly a true lover of the past would. Albeit the grass plats and the gravel walks, to the eye of sense, are undoubtedly much more agreeable and convenient. Scott says in his Demonology, that he never came any where near to being overcome with a superstitious feeling, except twice in his life, and one was on the night when he slept in Glamis Castle. The poetical and the practical elements in Scott's mind ran together, side by side, without mixing, as evidently as the waters of the Alleghany and Monongahela at Pittsburg. Scarcely ever a man had so much relish for the supernatural, and so little faith in it. One must confess, however, that the most sceptical might have been overcome at Glamis Castle, for its appearance, by all accounts, is weird and strange, and ghostly enough to start the dullest imagination.