The Motive or Motives which Actuated the Production 327 



She also placed there [at Dunfermline] a cross of priceless value, 

 bearing the figure of our Saviour, which she had caused to be covered 

 with the purest gold and silver studded with gems, a token even to the 

 present day of the earnestness of her faith. She left proofs of her devotion 

 and fervour in various other churches, as witness the Church of St. An- 

 drews, in which is preserved a most beautiful crucifix erected by her there, 

 and remaining even at the present day. Her chamber was never without 

 such objects, those I mean which appertained to the dignity of the divine 

 service. It was, so to speak, a workshop of sacred art.^ 



There, as she herself had directed, we committed it [Margaret's body] 

 to the grave, opposite the altar and the venerable sign of the Holy Cross 

 which she had erected.^ 



It is justly said (as will later be shown in detail) that ' southern Scot- 

 land was the creation of David.' He introduced his Norman and EngUsh 

 friends, with their civiHzation. He founded abbeys, he aided burghs, 

 he encouraged art and agriculture, he was ' the Commons' King,' he 

 brought Scotland within the circle of European chivalry, manners, trade, 

 and education.^ 



The Lowland abbeys founded by David, as Holyrood, Melrose, Jed- 

 burgh, Kelso, Diyburgh, and others, were centres of letters, tillage, 

 and nascent civilisation. In art, of course, Scotland was now perhaps 

 more civilised than it has ever been since, where art is concerned. David's 

 attachment to Anglo-Norman friends was, partly, a matter of taste ; 

 partly, too, he found them useful against his Celtic subjects. They 

 were the examples and sources of such European culture as reached 

 Scotland.* 



As we doat over the picturesque beauty of the broken details which 

 are left to us, and try to conjure up the great unity which in each case 

 they constituted, we cannot but feel that in those otherwise dim and 

 barbarous early centuries, there was a sense of vastness and of regal 

 magnificence in art which has not since then flourished as a genuine 

 growth in our land, and that the power of imagination which could 

 so embody itself was inspired by a deep and faithful state of the human 

 soul, interpenetrated by the emotions of awe and grandeur, and puri- 

 fied by reverence and the sense of an encompassing invisible reality.* 



1 Turgot, p. 30. 



- Ibid., p. 81. 



3 Lang 1. 109 ; cf. p. 93. 



* lUd. 1. 109. 



^ Veitch, Hist, and Poetry of the Scottish Border, p. 167. 



(115) 



