LOCAL LEGEND. They wanted neither beef nor ale, As long as their neighbour's lasted. 325 Indeed, the land around the Abbey was favourable for pasturage, and for the fattening of beef; and, for some time, its revenues were chiefly derived from this source.* The peninsula of greensward on which the building stood is formed by the sharply serpentine course of the Tweed, murmuring musically on its way; † lofty and wooded rocky banks shut it in; and, where now stands a modern mansion looking out over a fair and extensive view, is that promontory or projection which gave to the place the name of Mell-Rhos, 'the projection of the meadow.' But etymologists always give us a choice of derivatives; and some, instead of deducing the name from the British Mell-Rhos, would have it from the Celtic Maol-Ross, the bald, or bare, projection.' At a rather later date, we are presented with a simpler etymology. Those were the days of rebuses and punning devices; and, accordingly, Melrose was supposed to be signified by a mell and a rose-the mell, or mallet, signifying the instrument with which the building was erected, and the rose its elegant beauty and lightness; and the device of the mell and rose is seen not only in the decorations of the abbey, but also on the town gaol. But, lest none of these derivations should satisfy us, the Melrose people have a local legend to the following effect:-There was a beautiful young Princess who lived in an island in the Archipelago, who lost her honour to her lover, and, by the law of her island, was adjudged to die. So she called together her priests, and consulted * See Professor Innes' Sketches of Early Scotch History, pp. 99, 100. At any rate, if it does not, it ought to do; for the water at Melrose now belongs to the Messrs. Broadwood, of pianoforte renown. with them what was best to be done. They advised her to quit the island and sail for the Atlantic Ocean, from whence she was to bend her course northwards to a certain island; and they offered to accompany her, not only from attachment, but that they might assist her in her endeavours to atone for her sin. They accordingly set sail, and at length found themselves at Dunbar. Leaving this place, they found themselves by the Tweedside, and, crossing it at that spot since called Monksford (and now, Abbotsford) they came a little farther on to a meadow which the Tweed nearly folded with its gentle stream. Here they resolved to stay, and the Princess caused the Abbey to be erected, in which she might pray for the repose of her soul; the place thenceforward being called Malerose (a rose sullied or tarnished by a male), in allusion, says the tradition, to her misfortune.'* But, whatever may be the origin and meaning of its name, Melrose was built about 664, Oswald, king of Northumbria, being its patron, and Eata, the disciple of Aidan of Iona and Lindisfarne, being the first superior of the Culdee brotherhood. Eata's successor was Basil, of whom Bede speaks in high terms. His name is preserved in that of the adjacent parish of St. Boswell's; so that Boswell and Basil are convertible terms, and Johnson's jackal may have been a lineal descendant of the old Abbot of Melrose. Basil was succeeded by his pupil, Cuthbert, the famed and enlightened saint whose stately monument is to be found Where his cathedral, huge and vast, and whose body had tarried awhile at Melrose in its *So says John Bower, in his Description of the Abbeys of Melrose, p. 6. MELROSE A CENTRE FOR RELIGIOUS TEACHING. 327 6 So that, capricious tour between death and the grave. from the very first, as Milne * has said, 'the Abbey of Melrose was a famous nursery for learning and religious men who were filled with zeal for propagating the Christian religion, particularly among their neighbours the Saxons.' It was John of Melrose who, face to face, opposed Boniface, the Pope's nuncio, as the fabricator of falsehood, the troubler of peace and of the Christian religion, and the corrupter of it both by word and writing.' This first abbey is thought to have been destroyed about the ninth century by the first or second Kenneth. Traces of it have been discovered in a defensive wall that passed across the neck of the peninsula; and the names of Chapel-knowe, Monk-ford, Haly Wheel, and Girthgate, still exist to remind us of the first Abbey of Melrose. Its immediate successor would seem to have been built at Newstead, a Tweedside village, one mile from Melrose, on the Edinburgh road; so that Byron's Newstead Abbey was here forestalled. There were other chapels close around. One ' on the banks of Allan water,' was dedicated to Columba, and is now called Colmslee, or Columba's pasture.' Here the monks of Melrose had their dairy-farm. We thus see that Melrose was a centre for religious teaching from the earliest time of Christianity in Scotland. The Abbey travelled westward ho!' and first arose on its present site-more than two miles westward of the original Melrose, in the year 1136,† when King David the First founded it for the reception of Cistercian * See Description of Melrose, by the Rev. A. Milne, who was the minister of Melrose, from 1711 to 1747. The date was commemorated by these monkish lines: Anno Milleno, centens, ter quoque deno, Et sexto Christi, Melrose fundata fuisti. 6 monks, brought from Rievalle (Rievaulx), in Yorkshire. It was dedicated to the Virgin, and was completed in ten years. The first abbey was made of oaken planks, and had a thatched roof; but St. David's lonely pile' was probably not unlike Kelso Abbey, which was also founded by this royal patron of ecclesiastics. But, whatever the appearance of the second abbey may have been, it is well-nigh certain that not a stone of it now remains; for the richly-endowed Melrose met with the fate of all other Border buildings, and was more than once a prize for the English invaders. In 1322, Edward II. resolved to rest at Melrose, and Douglas took measures with the monks to do what hurt he could to the invader, and with a body of picked men was admitted into the building by William de Peebles, the Abbot. The old chronicler, Barbour, tells us how a right sturdy friar, spear in hand, rode forth on a stalwart horse, and, when the English advanced, cried out A Douglas! a Douglas!' upon which Douglas and his men rushed forth from the Abbey, and, by the suddenness of their attack, drove back the English advanceguard with great loss. The success of this scheme, however, recoiled upon the monks, for Edward swooped upon the Abbey, and (says Fordun, in his 'Scotichronicon,') 'wrecked' the building, and slew the Abbot and brethren. The wrecking was, probably, complete; at any rate, in 1326, Robert Bruce gave what would now be the sum of fifty thousand pounds for the re-building of the Abbey. They were large-hearted men in those days, and no niggards in their gifts for sacred purposes. CHAPTER XXXIII. LAYS AND LEGENDS. St. Waltheof and his Miracles-Profitable Embalming-The HE second Abbot of the second Abbey of Melrose THE was St. Waltheof, whose mother's second husband was that King David who founded the Abbey. Waltheof was a true Saxon, for his father was Simon, Earl of Huntingdon, and his grandfather was Siward, Count of Northumberland, and he lived to be a man of mark, both before, and (as Paddy would say) after his death, for he was canonised for his many virtues and miracles. His most useful miracle was supplying corn to the Tweed-dale people in a time of unusual scarcity—a miracle, doubtless, which the well-stocked granaries of Melrose enabled him to perform with ease. But another miracle recorded of him is far more abstruse and peculiar, and even surpasses the feats of those Chinese conjurors who swallow bullets and produce them from their ears. A priest had hesitated to drink some wine, on the very reasonable ground that there was a great spider in the cup. Waltheof insisted that |