also recollected that he had at one time enjoyed Richelieu's bounty. He therefore replied as follows: Qu'on parle mal ou bien du fameux Cardinal, Richelieu had been arbitrary in the way in which he had ordered the Academicians to write a criticism on the Cid; but we should err in supposing that ill-feeling towards Corneille was his only object. M. Livet, the last editor of Pellisson's history, in his introduction, gives another reason that should claim our attention. It will be remembered that the Cid was first performed and was printed in the interval between the King's signing the edict for the French Academy and the registration of that edict by the Parliament. The Parliament had doubted Richelieu when he told their president that the Academy was to have no concern with political matters, and that their functions were to be purely literary. As yet the Academy, which existed only in name, was ignored by the public and misunderstood by the Parliament, and the consent of the Parliament was wanted to give it a legal status. The Cardinal thought that a good opportunity had presented itself for proving that he was acting openly and in good faith. He therefore wished the Academicians to do something to show, by a decisive act of their own, what their objects and intentions were. The Cid had been very warmly received by the public, and it had been condemned by contemporary dramatists. Here, then, was surely a case of which a literary assembly might take cognisance, and give what they thought to be the rightful verdict on the dispute. Richelieu may have been actuated by this motive as well as by the meaner ones of jealousy and envy. Boileau is likely to have known what was the feeling uppermost in men's minds at the time, and with his usual conciseness and good sense he has summed up the matter in a few lines : En vain contre le Cid un ministre se ligue, Tout Paris pour Chimène a les yeux de Rodrigue; Le public révolté s'obstine à l'admirer. HENRY M. TROLLOPE. THE ABBEY AND PALACE OF A' DUNFERMLINE. LTHOUGH it does not stand in the midst of romantic scenery, and is the centre of a town from which almost every glory, save only the name of a "royal burgh," has departed, yet Dunfermline may lay claim to being second to no place on the Scottish mainland in historic interest. For here is the burialplace of Margaret, queen and saint, whose name is still held in so much honour north of the Tweed that it is almost as great a favourite with Scottish lassies as that of Mary is in the south. In the palace of Dunfermline, too, our own King Charles I. first saw the light; and even in its present state, the abbey church of Dunfermline is beyond all question the finest Norman structure in the whole length and breadth of bonny Scotland. Dunfermline stands on a rather lofty site in Fifeshire, about sixteen miles north-west of Edinburgh, and some three or four miles from the Firth of Forth at Queensferry. It looks well if approached from the south. It is not attractive in its other buildings or surroundings, for the town has a decidedly commercial aspect, and its manufactures are held nowadays in higher repute than its mute "memorials of the past." Still, the man or woman must be wholly void of feeling who can look without emotion on the grand fabric of the abbey, and on the ruins of the royal palace hard by. All that remains of the former is the nave, its choir and chancel having been pulled down and destroyed half a century ago; and the church having been built for a religious order and not for a cathedral, there are no traces of transepts having ever been built. The abbey and the palace, however, form one group, and they stand on the well-wooded banks of an exquisite little glen, through which, some sixty or seventy feet below one's feet, trickles a little brook on its way to join the waters of the Forth. The abbey of Dunfermline was of the Benedictine order, so that doubtless it could have boasted of some very learned inmates, had it not been for the wanton destruction of its records, as well as of its walls, at the era of the Reformation, when the Scotch people set to work far more vigorously than their southern brethren in destroying the nests of the clergy, so as to scare away their episcopal inmates, whether Catholic or Protestant. Its early history may be very briefly told. It was begun by Malcolm Canmore, and finished by Alexander I., surnamed "the Fierce"; and it was held in high honour for several centuries as the burialplace of a long line of Scottish kings. In all probability it was originally intended at least to include a hospital, as it is styled in early documents "hospitium mente infirmorum." This is rendered the more probable, as at first it was only a priory, subject to a prior; but it was raised into an abbey by David I., who in 1124 brought to it thirteen monks from St. Augustine's house at Canterbury, and it gradually grew in wealth and importance, so that at the Reformation it numbered twenty-six brethren. The endowments of the abbey were very various and extensive; the estates of Musselburgh and Inveresk, near Edinburgh, with their parish churches and mills &c., were bestowed on it by King Malcolm and his son David. Kinghorn, and its western neighbour, Burntisland, with its castle and harbour, nearly all of Kirkaldy, and other towns, besides a share in the proceeds of the royal ferry at Queensferry, belonged to this holy place, by virtue of gifts or bequests from royal and noble personages. Besides these, the abbot had from David I. a grant of the tithe of all the gold found in Fife or Fotheriff, which may or may not be a proof that Fifeshire was auriferous. In addition, the same monarch invested his monks at Dunfermline with a right to a tithe of the seals found round about the coast at Kinghorn; whilst a third grant, from Malcolm IV., bestowed on them the heads, except the tongues, of certain small whales called "crespies," taken in the Firth of Forth, and also the oil extracted from their blubber. All this may be seen and read in the chartulary of the abbey, which is carefully preserved in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh. The first abbot of Dunfermline was Gosfrid, of whom we find the following account in the writings of Florence of Worcester: "A man of singular piety, named Gosfridus, prior of Canterbury, at the request of David, King of the Scots, and with the approval of Archbishop William, was elected abbot of the place in Scotland called Dunfermline, and he was ordained by Robert, Bishop of St. Andrew's, in the year 1128." The Chronicle of the Holy Cross states that this abbot died in 1153, when he was succeeded by his nephew, another Gosfrid. The list of abbots who ruled here for four centuries is not quite perfect, and would be of little interest, for most of the names recorded are unknown to history, the abbey being overshadowed by the palace, to which it gradually came to be regarded as an appanage. The last of the line of abbots was George Dacre or Darcie, Commendator and Archdeacon of St. Andrew's; and the house which for more than four centuries had been the home of Benedictine learning and piety was "united to the Crown" by James VI. Such was its end. The nave of the abbey was long used for Presbyterian services, and was blocked up by huge tiers of unsightly pews and other abominations; but in the early part of the present century a brand-new edifice, of the sham Gothic style, was built on the site of a portion of the former chancel, and this is now occupied by the good people of Dunfermline for preachings on what, north of the Tweed, is called "The Sabbath." The nave is a noble specimen of fine solid Norman work, but singularly devoid of ornament throughout. It is supported on either side, and divided from the north and south aisles, by a double row of massive pillars, supporting grand semicircular arches; the pillars are very low, being scarcely 17 feet high, and 13 feet in circumference. Two of them are ribbed spirally, and two others are marked with zigzag mouldings closely resembling those at Lindisfarne and at Durham Cathedral. This likeness is to be accounted for by the fact that the nave was erected by Malcolm Canmore at the instance of one Turget, Bishop of St. Andrew's, who formerly had been prior of Durham. In spite of their massiveness, the pillars on the south side are terribly out of the perpendicular, and probably would long since have fallen, had it not been that the entire fabric is propped up on this face by external buttresses of great strength. No doubt it was the fact of the abbey having been built so near to a steep slope on the southern side that made this awkward addition necessary. The buttresses are very heavy, and do not add to the beauty of the structure; on each of them is a panel bearing a coat of arms showing that the work was the gift of several individuals who wished their names to be remembered. At the western end of the nave are two towers of Norman or semi-Norman work, but neither of them is a good specimen of that style. The tower at the southwestern angle was rebuilt, partly on the old lines, a few years ago, its predecessor having fallen for want of such external support as the addition of a buttress would have given. To the extreme east of the chancel, beyond the new parish church which covers the old choir, are some remains of the Lady Chapel. This, to judge by the scanty portions which stand above ground, must have been a fine specimen of the Early English or first Pointed style. It was here that Queen Margaret's monument and shrine stood, until it was shattered by the iconoclasts of the Tudor era. Between the nave of the church and the steep descent into the glen already mentioned stand a few remains of the monastic buildings. The ancient entrance gateway of the abbey is there; a modern carriage road, however, leads through it from the upper part of the town to the streets in the valley below. The gateway is very solid and substantial, and on the whole in good repair. This can scarcely be said of the refectory or "fratery" of the monks which it adjoins, and of which only one side and a portion of another is standing. This was partly of the Early English and partly of the Decorated period, as is shown by the lancet windows on the south, and a large traceried window in the western wall. The old cellars and the staircase leading from the kitchen to the fratery are still more or less perfect; but of the cells there is nec vola nec vestigium. It has been already mentioned that several of the Scottish kings were buried at Dunfermline: indeed, after they ceased to care to have their bones laid in the sacred but inaccessible Iona, the members of the royal line were almost all buried here. Such being the case, the visitor of antiquarian tastes would naturally expect to see here the tombs of some at least of those princes who reared the castles and palaces of Scotland, and whose names figure in the annals of that country. But nothing can be further from the fact; and the noble nave of Dunfermline Abbey is not more void of architectural ornament than it is of the monuments of Scottish royalty. The remains of Robert Bruce, the avenger of his country's independence, lay here for centuries without an inscription or other memorial to distinguish them from those of the vulgar herd. Whether it was always so is not known for certain; for the documentary records of Scotland have perished to a much larger extent than those of England, and it is probable that when the chancel was demolished at the Reformation, the royal monuments were broken up and buried in its ruins. For centuries previous to the erection of the present new church, the area of the choir and chancel was filled with rubbish several feet in depth, among which were fragments of statues and marble monuments, which once had been richly carved and gilt, together with several stone coffins containing human bones. One of these coffins dug up in 1821 was believed by experts to have held the remains of Robert Bruce, though his heart was buried far away. What was thought to have been his body was exhumed, but reverently re-buried. The tombstone of Queen Margaret is the only one |