The monastery; The abbot.

6 WAVERLEY NOVELS.
There are evenings when the spectator might believe, with Father Chaucer,
that the
Queen of Faerv,
With harp, and pipe, and symphony,
Were dwelling in the place.
Another, and even a more familiar refuge of the elfin race, (if tradition
is to be trusted,) is the glen of the river, or rather brook, named the Allen,
which falls into the Tweed from the northward, about a quarter of a mile
above the present bridge. As the streamlet finds its way behind Lord
Sommerville's hunting-seat, called the Pavilion, its valley has been popularly termed the Fairy Dean, or rather the Nameless Dean, because of the
supposed ill luck attached by the popular faith of ancient times, to any one
who might name or allude to the race, whom our fathers distinguished as
the Good Neighbours, and the Highlanders called Daoine Shie, or Men of
Peace; rather by way of compliment, than on account of any particular
idea of friendship or pacific relation which either Highlander or Borderer
entertained towards the irritable beings whom they thus distinguished, or
supposed them to bear to humanity.*
In evidence of the actual operations of the fairy people even at this time,
little pieces of calcareous matter are found in the glen after a flood, which'
either the labours of those tiny artists, or the eddies of the brook among
the stones, have formed into a fantastic resemblance of cups, saucers,
basins, and the like, in which children who gather them pretend to discern
fairy utensils.
Besides these circumstances of romantic locality, mea paupera regna (as
Captain Dalgetty denominates his territory of Drumthwacket) are bounded
by a small but deep lake, from which eyes that yet look on the light are
said to have seen the waterbull ascend, and shake the hills with his roar.
Indeed, the country around Melrose, if possessing less of romantic beauty
than some other scenes in Scotland, is connected with so many associations
of a fanciful nature, in which the imagination takes delight, as might well
induce one even less attached to the spot than the author, to accommodate,
after a general manner, the imaginary scenes he was framing to the localities to which he was partial. But it would be a misapprehension to suppose, that, because Melrose may in general pass for Kennaquhair, or because it agrees with scenes of the. Monastery in the circumstances of the
drawbridge, the milldam, and other points of resemblance, that therefore
an accurate or perfect local similitude is to be found in all the particulars
of the picture. It was not the purpose of the author to-present a landscape
copied from nature, but a piece of composition, in which a real scene, with
which he is familiar, had afforded him some leading outlines. Thus the
resemblance of the imaginary Glendearg with the real vale of the Allen, is
far from being minute, nor did the author aim at identifying them. This
must appear plain to all who know the actual character of the Glen of
Allen, and have taken the trouble to read the account of the imaginary
Glendearg. The stream in the latter case is described as wandering down
a romantic little valley, shifting itself, after the fashion of such a brook,
from one side to the other, as it can most easily find its passage, and touching nothing in its progress that gives token of cultivation. It rises near a
solitary tower, the abode of a supposed church vassal, and the scene of
several incidents in the Romance.
The real Allen, on the contrary, after traversing the romantic ravine
called the Nameless Dean, thrown off from side to side alternately, like a
billiard ball repelled by the sides of the table on which it has been played,
and in that part of its course resembling the stream which pours down
Glendearg, may be traced upwards into a more open country, where the
banks retreat farther from each other, and the vale exhibits a good deal of
* See Rob. Roy, Note, p. 202.