A FITTING MEMORIAL.
[To THZ Burros OF Tax "SrecriToa."] SIR,-2. propos of your admirable article and " News " note on the Tennyson Memorial Beacon, in the Spectator of August 14th, permit me to recall Lord Rosebery's speech at Edinburgh on the proposed memorial to Robert Louis Stevenson, and his scathing remarks on the Edinburgh statues generally. I was so struck with this speech that I Wrote to his Lordship suggesting that the memorial should take the form of a cairn, or beacon, on the Pentlands, over- looking the hillside village of Swanston, where Stevenson spent most of his boyhood, and drank in his early inspiration. I suggested, also, that there might be a second cairn at Queensferry, near the Hawes Inn, so intimately associated with "Kidnapped" (or is it "The Master of Ballantrae" and—if funds permitted—a statue, or bust, in Edinburgh. The latter might very well be placed in St. Giles's Cathedral :
and, by the way, is there any reason why this noble ohurob should not become the Valhalla of Scotland,—the West- minster Abbey of the North ? In his "Memories and Portraits" Stevenson dwells much on his early associations with the Pentlands, a district in which the present writer spent all his boyhood, and frequently attended the ministra- tions of Stevenson's grandfather, so vividly portrayed in the chapter headed "The Manse."—I am, Sir, &c., R. W. J.
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