Page:A Companion and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland.djvu/147

door (opposite the four windows over the altar-piece), is carved the broken head of the poor apprentice, and his mother weeping, for his untimely end. After all his trouble, the architect did not succeed, if the apprentice's pillar was conformable to the original plan of the edifice; for no other part of the work in the chapel resembles it; or the employer did not like the richer, and more complicated style of the apprentice's pillar, so well as the more simple workmanship of the rest of the chapel.—Roslin chapel is not large, but is reckoned to be a specimen of a very chaste and elegant piece of Gothic architecture. It is a ruin, but the most perfect ruin that can be seen. From the chapel to the ruined castle, is a short quarter of a mile, down a very steep hill. There is but a very small part of the castle standing; a middling modern house, being erected on a part of its wall: it is situated, as I have before mentioned, upon a small peninsulated promontory of an immense rock, high above the surrounding river, North Esk, which winds round the castle, rushing hoarsely over its rocky bed, imprisoned by perpendicular sides of towering rocks, finely covered with wood;—its noise, and its romantic beauties, increase as it rolls down