AND THE VALE OF THE ESK. I33
of the seventeenth century. Over a gateway near the middle, leading into
an inner court, you see armorial bearings carved in the stone, and decipher the
motto, Hos gZoria red& konores. . . . Not, however, till you have moved from
immediately in front of the mansion, so as to survey it in flank and depthwise
to the back, are you aware of its full picturesqueness. If you move to the
right, you find yourself on a path edging a deep, precipitous, thickly-wooded
dell, with the Esk below, and you see, on glancing back, that the more modem
portion of the mansion overhangs this dell behind, the windows of the chief
rooms looking down into the dell, and athwart its woody labyrinth, with a
steepness almost dizzying. . . . For a new surprise, you must return, repass
the front and doorway, and descend on the other or left flank of the bouse,
where there is a massive block of very ancient masonry to which the rest is
an evident addition. The block or tower rests also on the sandstone rock
springing up from the dell behind ; and it is part of the established procedure
of a visit that you should grope your way through a dark excavation pointed
out to you in the rock itself, just beneath the masonry which it supports
Descending a few steps, an{ stooping along this mine-like gallery, you come
to a hideous circular shaft, once a well, sunk deep down through the rock,
with an embrasure atop opening out dangerously on the clear chasm of the
dell ; and thence, by similar communications, you reach two chambers, also
cut out of the rock. One is a mere dark cavern, in which several men could
hide or sleep ; the other admits more light, and has the peculiarity that its
sides all round, about ten or twelve feet in the longest direction and four or
five feet in the other, are scooped out into a number of square holes or recesses,
separated from each other, vertically and horizontally, by partitions an inch or
two thick, much after the fashion of a bottle-rack for some Troglodyte or
Cyclops. When these caverns were made, and for at purpose or in what
freak, no mortal can tell. fi. . .
'Were there no special traditions of a historical kind about Hawthornden
House, were it simply the picturesque edifice we have described, overhanging
the beautiful glen of the Esk, part of it bringing back the seventeenth
century by its look, and part recalling a remoter and- more savage Scottish
eld, it would be worth visiting, and would probably attract visitors. This,
however, is not the case. Hawthornden House has been for three centuries
in the possession of a family of Drummonds, a branch of the wider Scottish
race of that name, and it is interesting as having been the 'residence of one
man of this family who took for himself a place in British Literature, and is
known pre-eminently as the Drummond of Hawthornden. He it was indeed
