Ruskin truly observes that every bright boy in Edinburgh is influenced by the sight of the Castle.

So is the child of Dunfermline, by its noble Abbey, the Westminster of Scotland, founded early in the eleventh century (1070) by Malcolm Canmore and his Queen Margaret, Scotland's patron saint.

The ruins of the great monastery and of the Palace where kings were born still stand, and there, too, is Pittencrieff Glen, embracing Queen Margaret's shrine and the ruins of King Malcolm's Tower, with which the old ballad of "Sir Patrick Spens" begins: "The King sits in Dunfermline _tower_,[5] Drinking the bluid red wine." [Footnote 5: _The Percy Reliques_ and _The Oxford Book of Ballads_ give "town" instead of "tower"; but Mr.Carnegie insisted that it should be "tower."] The tomb of The Bruce is in the center of the Abbey, Saint Margaret's tomb is near, and many of the "royal folk" lie sleeping close around.
Fortunate, indeed, the child who first sees the light in that romantic town, which occupies high ground three miles north of the Firth of Forth, overlooking the sea, with Edinburgh in sight to the south, and to the north the peaks of the Ochils clearly in view.

All is still redolent of the mighty past when Dunfermline was both nationally and religiously the capital of Scotland.
The child privileged to develop amid such surroundings absorbs poetry and romance with the air he breathes, assimilates history and tradition as he gazes around.

These become to him his real world in childhood--the ideal is the ever-present real.