Visitors are admitted first into what is surely the _sanctum sanctorum_ of the place--
This is a fair-sized apartment, 20 feet long, 14 feet broad, and 16 feet high, lighted by a large window which looks out to the courtyard. Everything is practically as Scott left it. Oaken bookcases line the walls, and hardly a volume (it is chiefly a reference library) has been altered. A light gallery, graced with ample book-shelves, runs round three sides of the room, opening out on a private staircase, by which the 'inhabitant of the study,' as the 'Reliquiæ' puts it, 'if unwilling to be surprised by visitors, may make his retreat, a facility which he has sometimes found extremely convenient.' The Desk is, of course, the chief object of interest. Modelled from one at Rokeby (see 'Letters,' vol. i., p. 180), it is thus described by Lockhart as he first saw it in the 'den' at Castle Street in 1818:
'The only table was a massive piece of furniture with a desk and all its appurtenances on either side, that an amanuensis might work opposite to him when he chose, and with small tiers of drawers reaching all round to the floor. The top displayed a goodly array of session papers, and on the desk below were, besides the MS. at which he was working, sundry parcels of letters, proof-sheets, and so forth, all neatly done up in red tape. His own writing apparatus was a very handsome old box, richly covered, lined with crimson velvet, and containing ink-bottles, taper-stand, etc., in silver, the whole in such order that it might have come from the silversmith's window half an hour before.' At the desk most of the novels were written, we may suppose, though not all at Abbotsford, as is not unfrequently imagined. It is, however, impossible to collate with exactness the dates and occasions of their composition. The fact remains, that in all probability each of the Waverleys was penned at this desk. Hence its unreckonable value to the literary pilgrim, and the unqualified reverence with which tens of thousands have gazed upon it. Certainly no article of furniture has been so intimately associated with Scott. Fourteen years from the time that he first saw it, it fell to Lockhart himself to open Scott's desk under the mournfullest circumstances. 'Perhaps the most touching evidence of the lasting tenderness of Sir Walter's early domestic feelings was exhibited to his executors when they opened his repositories in search of his testament the evening after his burial. On lifting up his desk we found, arranged in careful order, a series of little objects which had obviously been so placed there that his eye might rest on them every morning before he began his tasks. These were the old-fashioned boxes that had garnished his mother's toilette when he, a sickly child, slept in her dressing-room--the silver taper-stand, which the young advocate had bought for her with his first five-guinea fee; a row of small packets, inscribed with her hand, and containing the hair of those of her offspring who had died before her; his father's snuff-box and etui case, and more things of the like sort, recalling "the old familiar faces."'