The foundation-stone of the metropolitan monument in memory of Sir Walter Scott was laid with masonic honours on Saturday last. The day was pleasant, and the pageant imposing. All business seemed suspended for the time; the shops were shut. The one half of Edinburgh had poured into the streets, and formed by no means the least interesting part of the spectacle. Every window and balcony that overlooked the procession, every house-top almost, had its crowd of spectators. According to the poet,

‘Rank behind rank, close wedged, hung bellying o’er;’

while the area below, for many hundred yards on either side the intended site of the monument, presented a continuous sea of heads. We marked, among the flags exhibited, the Royal Standard of Scotland, apparently a piece of venerable antiquity, for the field of gold had degenerated into a field of drab, and the figure in the centre showed less of leonine nobleness than of art in that imperfect state in which men are fain to content themselves with semblances doubtful and inexpressive, and less than half the result of chance. The entire pageant was such a one as Sir Walter himself could perhaps have improved. He would not have fired so many guns in the hollow, and the grey old castle so near: he would have found means, too, to prevent the crowd from so nearly swallowing up the procession. Perhaps no man had ever a finer eye for pictorial effect than Sir Walter, whether art or nature supplied the scene. It has been well said that he rendered Abbotsford a romance in stone and lime, and imparted to the king’s visit to Scotland the interest and dignity of an epic poem. Still, however, the pageant was an imposing one, and illustrated happily the influence of a great and original mind, whose energies had been employed in enriching the national literature, over an educated and intellectual people.

It is a bad matter when a country is employed in building monuments to the memory of men chiefly remarkable for knocking other men on the head; it is a bad matter, too, when it builds monuments to the memory of mere courtiers, of whom not much more can be said than that when they lived they had places and pensions to bestow, and that they bestowed them on their friends. We cannot think so ill, however, of the homage paid to genius.

The Masonic Brethren of the several lodges mustered in great numbers. It has been stated that more than a thousand took part in the procession. Coleridge, in his curious and highly original work, The Friend a work which, from its nature, never can become popular, but which, though it may be forgotten for a time, will infallibly be dug up and brought into public view in the future as an unique fossil impression of an extinct order of mind refers to a bygone class of mechanics, ’to whom every trade was an allegory, and had its guardian saint.’ ‘But the time has gone by,’ he states, ’in which the details of every art were ennobled in the eyes of its professors by being spiritually improved into symbols and mementoes of all doctrines and all duties.’ We could hardly think so as we stood watching the procession, with its curiously fantastic accumulation of ornament and symbol; it seemed, however, rather the relic of a former age than the natural growth of the present a spectre of the past strangely resuscitated.

The laugh, half in ridicule, half in good nature, with which the crowd greeted every very gaudily dressed member, richer in symbol and obsolete finery than his neighbour, showed that the day had passed in which such things could produce their originally intended effect. Will the time ever arrive in which stars and garters will claim as little respect as broad-skirted doublets of green velvet, surmounted with three-cornered hats tagged with silver lace? Much, we suppose, must depend upon the characters of those who wear them, and the kind of services on which they will come to be bestowed. An Upper House of mere diplomatists skilful only to overreach imprudent enough to substitute cunning for wisdom ignorant enough to deem the people not merely their inferiors in rank, but in discernment also weak enough to believe that laws may be enacted with no regard to the general good wrapped up in themselves, and acquainted with the masses only through their eavesdroppers and dependants would bring titles and orders to a lower level in half an age, than the onward progress of intellect has brought the quaintnesses of mechanic symbol and mystery in two full centuries. We but smile at the one, we would learn to execrate the other. Has the reader ever seen Quarles’ Emblems, or Flavel’s Husbandry and Navigation Spiritualized? Both belong to an extinct species of literature, of which the mechanic mysteries described by Coleridge, and exhibited in the procession of Saturday last, strongly remind us. Both alike proceeded on a process of mind the reverse of the common. Comparison generally leads from the moral to the physical, from the abstract to the visible and the tangible; here, on the contrary, the tangible and the visible the emblem and the symbol were made to lead to the moral and the abstract. There are beautiful instances, too, of the same school in the allegories of Bunyan, the wonders in the house of the Interpreter, for instance, and the scenes exhibited in the cave of the ‘man named Contemplation.’

Sir Walter’s monument will have one great merit, regarded as a piece of art. It will be entirely an original, such a piece of architecture as he himself would have delighted to describe, and the description of which he, and he only, could have sublimed into poetry. There is a chaste and noble beauty in the forms of Greek and Roman architecture which consorts well with the classic literature of those countries. The compositions of Sir Walter, on the contrary, resemble what he so much loved to describe the rich and fantastic Gothic, at times ludicrously uncouth, at times exquisitely beautiful. There are not finer passages in all his writings than some of his architectural descriptions. How exquisite is his Melrose Abbey, the external view in the cold, pale moonshine,

’When buttress and buttress alternately
Seemed formed of ebon and ivory;’

internally, when the strange light broke from the wizard’s tomb! Who, like Sir Walter, could draw a mullioned window, with its ’foliaged tracery,’ its ‘freakish knots,’ its pointed and moulded arch, and its dyed and pictured panes? We passed, of late, an hour amid the ruins of Crichton, and scarce knew whether most to admire the fine old castle itself, so worthy of its poet, or the exquisite picture of it we found in Marmion.

Sir Walter’s monument would be a monument without character, if it were other than Gothic. Still, however, we have our fears for the effect. In portrait-painting there is the full life-size, and a size much smaller, and both suit nearly equally well, and appear equally natural; but the intermediate sizes do not suit. Make the portrait just a very little less than the natural size, and it seems not the reduced portrait of a man, but the full-sized portrait of a dwarf. Now a similar principle seems to obtain in Gothic architecture.

The same design which strikes as beautiful in a model the piece which, if executed in spar, and with a glass cover over it, would be regarded as exquisitely tasteful would impress, when executed on a large scale, as grand and magnificent in the first degree. And yet this identical design, in an intermediate size, would possibly enough be pronounced a failure. Mediocrity in size is fatal to the Gothic, if it be a richly ornamented Gothic; nor are we sure that the noble design of Mr. Kemp is to be executed on a scale sufficiently extended. We are rather afraid not, but the result will show. Such a monument a hundred yards in height would be one of the finest things perhaps in Europe.

What has Sir Walter done for Scotland, to deserve so gorgeous a monument? Assuredly not all he might have done; and yet he has done much more, in some respects, than any other merely literary man the country ever produced. He has interested Europe in the national character, and in some corresponding degree in the national welfare; and this of itself is a very important matter indeed. Shakespeare perhaps the only writer who, in the delineation of character, takes precedence of the author of Waverley seems to have been less intensely imbued with the love of country. It is quite possible for a foreigner to luxuriate over his dramas, as the Germans are said to do, without loving Englishmen any the better in consequence, or respecting them any the more. But the European celebrity of the fictions of Sir Walter must have had the inevitable effect of raising the character of his country, its character as a country of men of large growth, morally and intellectually. Besides, it is natural to think of foreigners as mere abstractions; and hence one cause at least of the indifference with which we regard them, an indifference which the first slight misunderstanding converts into hostility. It is something towards a more general diffusion of goodwill to be enabled to conceive of them as men with all those sympathies of human nature, on which the corresponding sympathies lay hold, warm and vigorous about them. Now, in this aspect has Sir Walter presented his countrymen to the world. Wherever his writings are known, a Scotsman can be no mere abstraction; and in both these respects has the poet and novelist deserved well of his country.

Within the country itself, too, his great nationality, like that of Burns, has had a decidedly favourable effect. The cosmopolism so fashionable among a certain class about the middle of the last century, was but a mock virtue, and a very dangerous one. The ’citizen of the world,’ if he be not a mere pretender, is a man to be defined by negatives. It is improper to say he loves all men alike: he is merely equally indifferent to all. Nothing can be more absurd than to oppose the love of country to the love of race. The latter exists but as a wider diffusion of the former. Do we not know that human nature, in its absolute perfection, and blent with the absolute and infinite perfection of Deity, indulged in the love of country? The Saviour, when He took to Himself a human heart, wept over the city of His fathers. Now, it is well that this spirit should be fostered, not in its harsh and exclusive, but in its human and more charitable form.

Liberty cannot long exist apart from it. The spirit of war and aggression is yet abroad: there are laws to be established, rights to be defended, invaders to be repulsed, tyrants to be deposed. And who but the patriot is equal to these things? How was the cry of ’Scotland for ever’ responded to at Waterloo, when the Scots Greys broke through a column of the enemy to the rescue of their countrymen, and the Highlanders levelled their bayonets for the charge! A people cannot survive without the national spirit, except as slaves. The man who adds to the vigour of the feeling at the same time that he lessens its exclusiveness, deserves well of his country; and who can doubt that Sir Walter has done so?

The sympathies of Sir Walter, despite his high Tory predilections, were more favourable to the people as such than those of Shakespeare. If the station be low among the characters of the dramatist, it is an invariable rule that the style of thinking and of sentiment is low also.

The humble wool-comber of Stratford-on-Avon, possessed of a mind more capacious beyond comparison than the minds of all the nobles and monarchs of the age, introduced no such man as himself into his dramas no such men as Bunyan or Burns, men low in place, but kingly in intellect. Not so, however, the aristocratic Sir Walter. There is scarcely a finer character in all his writings than the youthful peasant of Glendearg, Halbert Glendinning, afterwards the noble knight of Avenel, brave and wise, and alike fitted to lead in the councils of a great monarch, or to carry his banner in war. His brother Edward is scarcely a lower character. And when was unsullied integrity in a humble condition placed in an attitude more suited to command respect and regard, than in the person of Jeanie Deans?

A man of a lower nature, wrapt round by the vulgar prejudices of rank, could not have conceived such a character: he would have transferred to it a portion of his own vulgarity, dressed up in a few borrowed peculiarities of habit and phraseology. Even the character of Jeanie’s father lies quite as much beyond the ordinary reach. Men such as Sheridan, Fielding, and Foote, would have represented him as a hypocrite a feeble and unnatural mixture of baseness and cunning. Sir Walter, with all his prejudices and all his antipathies, not only better knew the national type, but he had a more comprehensive mind; and he drew David Deans, therefore, as a man of stern and inflexible integrity, and as thoroughly sincere in his religion. Not but that in this department he committed great and grievous mistakes. The main doctrine of revelation, with its influence on character that doctrine of regeneration which our Saviour promulgated to Nicodemus, and enforced with the sanctity of an oath was a doctrine of which he knew almost nothing. What has the first place in all the allegories of Bunyan, has no place in the fictions of Sir Walter. None of his characters exhibit the change displayed in the life of the ingenious allegorist of Elston, or of James Gardener, or of John Newton.

He found human nature a terra incognita when it came under the influence of grace; and in this terra incognita, the field in which he could only grope, not see, his way, well-nigh all his mistakes were committed. But had his native honesty been less, his mistakes would have been greater.

He finds good even among Christians. What can be finer than the character of his Covenanter’s widow, standing out as it does in the most exceptionable of all his works, the blind and desolate woman, meek and forgiving in her utmost distress, who had seen her sons shot before her eyes, and had then ceased to see more?

Our subject, however, is one which we must be content not to exhaust.