From the Palace, we passed into the contiguous ruin of Holyrood Abbey;
which is roofless, although the front, and some broken columns along the
nave, and fragments of architecture here and there, afford hints of a
magnificent Gothic church in bygone times. It deserved to be
magnificent; for here have been stately ceremonials, marriages of kings,
coronations, investitures, before the high altar, which has now been
overthrown or crumbled away; and the floor--so far as there is any floor
--consists of tombstones of the old Scottish nobility. There are
likewise monuments, bearing the names of illustrious Scotch families; and
inscriptions, in the Scotch dialect, on the walls.
In one of the front towers,--the only remaining one, indeed,--we saw the
marble tomb of a nobleman, Lord Belhaven, who is represented reclining on
the top,--with a bruised nose, of course. Except in Westminster Abbey, I
do not remember ever to have seen an old monumental statue with the nose
entire. In all political or religious outbreaks, the mob's first impulse
is to hit the illustrious dead on their noses.
At the other end of the Abbey, near the high altar, is the vault where
the old Scottish kings used to be buried; but, looking in through the
window, I saw only a vacant space,--no skull, nor bone, nor the least
fragment of a coffin. In fact, I believe the royal dead were turned out
of their last home, on occasion of the Revolutionary movements, at the
accession of William III.