useful or healthy part of a boy's education—impressions that associated with the gloom of Gothic castles and the high-fretted roofs and pictured windows of Gothic abbeys or colleges, the idea of grandeur, of glory and honour that were once bright and true, on the hypothesis that they had been earned by labour and won by heroic deeds. The result may perhaps be dimly indicated by some of Scott's lines which describe the entrance of Deloraine into the chancel of Melrose Abbey—
"By a steel-clenclied postern door,
They enter'd now the chancel tall;
The darken'd roof rose high aloof
On pillars lofty, and light, and small."
****
"Full many a scutcheon and banner riven.
Shook to the cold night-wind of heaven,
Around the screened altars pale;
And there the dying lamps did burn.
Before thy low and lonely urn,
O gallant Chief of Otterburne!
And thine, dark Knight of Liddesdale!
O fading honours of the dead!
O high ambition, lowly laid!"
In the same poem Scott gives a striking picture of the state of the country on the borders of
