Monuments and Monumental Inscriptions in Scotland. Vol. 2. By the
Rev. C. Rogers. (Griffin and Co.)—Mr. Rogers has now completed for the whole of Scotland his " Old Mortality" work. Paper and print are in their way loss perishable than stone, and a number of persons more or loss worthy or distinguished, or possibly in some cases not worthy or distinguished at all, have obtained, by the help of Mr. Rogers, here a memorial more enduring than that which the stonemason had given them. Inscriptions which may b3 exposed to the action of the weather seldom, as any observant visitor of country churchyards will have observed, endure for a couple of centuries. The industry which preserves them from destruction is not without its usefulness. The literary value of this collection is indeed but small, even loss than we might fairly expect. The best part of it, as regarded in this aspect, is to be found in the Latin verse, this verse being notably better the older its date. Even the oddity which one sometimes finds in epitaphs does not show conspicuous examples. We suspect, in fast, that our northern neigh- bours are not much given to monumental display. Mr. Rogers has com- pleted his work in two volumes. We wonder how many would be wanted were the same to be accomplished in anything like the same fullness for England. Two volumes would be scant measure, we imagine, for a single county. Of the archeological value of such a work we need not speak. That is sufficiently manifest now, and future generations will appreciate it yet more fully. What would not the work have been worth to historians and genealogists, if some enthusiast had bean moved to put on record the "monuments and monumental inscriptions" of England as they wore before the great cataclysm of the sixteenth century? We cannot conclude this notice without paying our humble tribute of admiration to the prudence and good management of the town of Perth, as it comes out in a narrative which Mr. Rogers tells us in the simplest and most unpretending manner. Perth, then, set up a monument to the Prince Consort, a statue, which is described as an ex- cellent likeness, reared on an appropriate pedestal "; Perth induced her Majesty to be present at the inauguration, and had the satisfaction of seeing the Lord Provost knighted ; and we read, "the monument was reared at the cost of £560." Five hundred and sixty pounds for a statue, and pedestal, and cost of erection is indeed a triumph ! How many thousands of pounds have we not paid for the Wellington Monument, without, as far as we know, getting anything !
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