Scott's children did not long survive him. Anne died June, 1833; Sophia Lockhart, May 17, 1837; Charles, private secretary to Sir John M'Neill, who had been sent to the Court of Persia, died at Teheran, October 28, 1841; the second Sir Walter died near the Cape of Good Hope, on his return to England from India, February 8, 1847; John Gibson Lockhart, the devoted son-in-law, in 1854. Both of Lockhart's sons died before him, and his only daughter, Charlotte, who inherited the estate, and married James Robert Hope, who added the name of Scott to his own, died October 26, 1858. The following letter, dated January 4, 1889, through the courtesy of Hon. Wallace Bruce, United States Consul at Edinburgh, gives the present ownership of Abbotsford : "It happened that I had just returned from Abbotsford, where I enjoyed the hospitality of a friend whose residence, known as 'Boleside,' crowns the hill still shaded by the great trees underneath which Walter Scott used to picnic, and referred to by him in his Introduction (1830) to The Monastery.' We had talked over the same matter included in your questions, but, in order to be accurate and beyond the chance of mistake, I submitted the questions to him, and you can therefore be entirely sure of your authority to date. "First. The present owner of the Abbotsford estate is the Hon. Mrs. Maxwell Scott. She was the only child of Lockhart's daughter, Mrs. Hope Scott. Her maiden name (viz., Lockhart's granddaughter and Walter Scott's great-granddaughter) was Mary Monica Hope Scott. She was married on 21st July, 1874, to the Hon. Joseph Constable Maxwell, brother of the present Lord Herries. "There has been no revival of the baronetcy, which became extinct by the death of Sir Walter's son (the second Sir Walter). Mrs. Maxwell Scott has several children - the eldest being a son, Walter Joseph, born April 10, 1875." A beautiful Gothic monument was erected to the memory of Scott in his native city, Edinburgh, through subscriptions amounting to more than fifteen thousand pounds. Over his grave and that of his wife, in Dryburgh Abbey, is an oblong block of Aberdeen granite, from a design by Sir Francis Chantrey. Greater than all Scott's other monuments are his immortal works; and his heroic life is as pathetic and sublime as any of his romances. The family which he strove to establish faded as flowers cut down by the mower's scythe, but his own name is as perennial as the Scottish heather, of which he said, "If I did not see it once a year, I think I should die." He conquered all circumstances-death only could conquer him. ROBERT BURNS. HARLES KINGSLEY said: "Four faces among the CHARLE portraits of modern men, great or small, strike us as supremely beautiful — not merely in expression, but in the form and proportion and harmony of features Shakespeare, Raphael, Goethe, Burns. One would expect it to be so, for the mind makes the body, not the body the mind, and the inward beauty seldom fails to express itself in the outward as a visible sign of the invisible grace or disgrace of the wearer. "Placing them side by side, we must be allowed to demand for that of Robert Burns an honorable station among them. Of Shakespeare's we do not speak, for it seems to us to combine in itself the elements of all the other three: but of the rest we question whether Burns be not, after all, if not the noblest, still the most lovable the most like what we should wish that of a teacher of men to be. . . . "The features certainly are not as regular or well proportioned as they might be; there is no super. abundance of the charm of mere animal health in the outline or color; but the marks of intellectual beauty in the face are of the highest order, capable of being but too triumphant among a people of deep thought and feeling. The lips ripe, yet not coarse or loose, full of passion and the faculty of enjoyment, are parted, as if forced to speak by the inner fulness of the heart; the |