MELROSE', a pleasant village at the foot of the Eildon hills, on the s. bank of the T-weed, having a population of .1405 at the census of 1871. It is famous for the ruins of its nobie Cistercian abbey, founded by king David I. in 1136. The original pile hav ing been destroyed during the wars of the succession, the monastery began to be rebuilt about 1326. The work was helped by large grants from king Robert Bruce, and his son king David II., but proceeded so slowly that it was scarcely finished at the refor mation, in the middle of the 16th century. It was in the second pointed style, with one or two approaches to third pointed, and was beyond doubt the most beautiful structure' of which Scotland could boast in the middle ages. What now remains are the chief por-i tions of the conventual church, measuring 251 ft. in length, and some fragments of the cloister, which would seem to have been a square 150 ft. deep. The tracery and carv ings, cut in stone of singular excellence, are scarcely surpassed by any in England. In the pages of Scott, Melrase shines with a splendor which its meager history fails to sustain. Its line of abbots showed one saint, St. Waltheof, the stepson of its royal' founder. King Alexander II. chose his sepulture within its walls; Bruce left it the legacy of his heart; and it gave tombs to that flower of Scot,tish chivalry, the knight of Liddes2 dale, and to his kinsman, the heroic Douglas who fell at Otterburn. But its annals have
little else to record. As a seat of piety and learning, its renown is eclipsed by the older and humbler monastery founded by St. Aidan, about the middle of the 7th c., and com memorated by the Venerable Bede as the home of Eata, of Boisil, of Cuthbert, and of Drycthelm. "Old Melrose," as it was called after the 12th c., stood about two m. below the modern abbey, on a beautiful promontory almost encircled by the Tweed. It was burned by Kenneth, king of Scots, in 839, and seems never to have recovered the 1, blow. After it had lain waste for many years, we hear of it about 1073, as giving shel ter, for a short season, to a few fuoitive monks. All that survived the erection, of the later abbey was a chapel dedicatedt'to St. Cuthbert, and still famous about the middle of the 15th e. as a resort of pilgrims. The Chronica (le Mailros. a series of brief obits and umiak from 731 to 1275, has i)P011, triice printed, first among the Qui alcceni. ,Screptores Ilistorice Anglicante, published by bishop Fell at Oxford in 1684; and again by Mr. Joseph Stevenson, for the Bannatyne club, at Edinburgh in 1835. The charters of the more modern abbey were printed by Mr. Cosmo Hines, at Edinburgh in 1887, for the same society, at the cost of the duke of Buceleuch, in two sumptuous quartos, with the title of the Liber S. Marie de Melros.