The Palace and Park by Phillips, Forbes, Latham, Owen, Scharf, and Shenton

[Born in Edinburgh, 1771. Died at Abbotsford, 1832. Aged 61.] The great magician of the north, under whose fascinating spell millions in all lands have been entranced and strengthened. His boyish eye fed on the wild scenes of his native land, and on the mouldering wrecks--here and there sadly gracing those scenes--of her former sterner, yet greater day. His boyish heart was cradled in the music of her old wild songs, then living, and in the rough and bold traditions of her strange and romantic Past. The joy and the passion which were life to the boy, became power to the man. With a wondrous dominion suddenly begun, yet prolonged whilst he lived, he swayed and swept back the spirits of his generation on a torrent of delight and desire, into forgotten times, alien to our manner of thinking and of being. But the poet finds one heart of Man under all the shapes of human existence: one universal spirit of human life. Transported by the poet, we find ourselves everywhere with our kind. Reanimated by him, the worn-out and the antiquated rise new-born and of our time. And Scott, in verse or in prose, was a poet. The electric telegraph of the press carried his writings, as they left his desk, over the globe. The excellent French historian, Augustin Thierry, says that the romances of Scott, by their vivid and vital representations of the past, have reformed the style and study of history on the continent, urging and guiding the historian, instead of chronicling dry facts, to throw himself with a thirsty inspiration into the bosom of the mighty departed time. A Scottish traveller in Spanish California told, that a Spanish monk had there shown him his copy of “Ivanhoe,” and said “Next after my Bible.” We remember with pain that Scott, to whom the world stands so largely indebted for some of its purest delights, fell into trouble and difficulty, and snapped his brain in his noble and manly struggle for escape. The spot of Scotland which the toil of his genius had won him, for rooting his family on, when torn from both him and them by a blast of ill-fortune, was redeemed to them by the reverent affection of his country---made theirs by a public act which tied even every “book of his curious learning” to its place on his shelves, in perpetuity. There his favourite daughter’s daughter and her children now prolong, if not his illustrious name, his honoured line. [By F. Chantrey.]