The funeral of this hapless man of genius took place yesterday, and excited a deep and very general interest, in which there mingled the natural sorrow for high talent prematurely extinguished, with the feeling of painful regret, awakened by a peculiarly melancholy end. It was numerously attended, and by many distinguished men. The several streets through which it passed were crowded by saddened spectators––in some few localities very densely; and the windows overhead were much thronged. At no place was the crowd greater, except perhaps immediately surrounding the burying-ground, than at the fatal opening beside the Canal Basin, into which the unfortunate man had turned from the direct road in the darkness of night, and had found death at its termination. The scene of the accident is a gloomy and singularly unpleasant spot. A high wall, perforated by a low, clumsy archway, closes abruptly what the stranger might deem a thoroughfare. There is a piece of sluggish, stagnant water on the one hand, thick and turbid, and somewhat resembling in form and colour a broad muddy highway, lined by low walls; not a tuft of vegetation is to be seen on its tame rectilinear sides: all is slimy and brown, with here and there dank, muddy recesses, as if for the frog and the rat; while on the damp flat above, there lie, somewhat in the style of the grouping in a Dutch painting, the rotting fragments of canal passage-boats and coal-barges, with here and there some broken-backed hulk, muddy and green, the 120 timbers peering out through the planking, and all around heaps of the nameless lumber of a deserted boat-yard. The low, clumsy archway is wholly occupied by a narrow branch of the canal,––brown and clay-like as the main trunk, from which it strikes off at nearly right angles. It struck us forcibly, in examining the place, that in the uncertain light of midnight, the flat, dead water must have resembled an ordinary cart-road, leading through the arched opening in the direction of the unfortunate architect’s dwelling; and certainly at this spot, just where he might be supposed to have stepped upon the seeming road under the fatal impression, was the body found.

It had been intended, as the funeral letters bore, to inter the body of Mr. Kemp in the vault under the Scott Monument,––a structure which, erected to do honour to the genius of one illustrious Scotsman, will be long recognised as a proud trophy of the fine taste and vigorous talent of another. The arrangement was not without precedent; and had it been possible for Sir Walter to have anticipated it, we do not think it would have greatly displeased him. The Egyptian architect inscribed the name of his kingly master on but the plaster of the pyramid, while he engraved his own on the enduring granite underneath; and so the name of the king has been lost, and only that of the architect has survived. And there are, no doubt, monuments in our own country which have been transferred in some sort, and on a somewhat similar principle, from their original object. There are fine statues which reflect honour on but the sculptor that chiselled them, and tombs and cenotaphs inscribed with names so very obscure, that they give place in effect, if not literally, like that of the Egyptian king, to the name of the architect who reared them. Had the Scott Monument been erected, like the monument of a neighbouring square, to express a perhaps not very seemly gratitude for the services of 121 some tenth-rate statesman, who procured places for his friends, and who did not much else, it would have been perilous to convert it into the tomb of a man of genius like poor Kemp. It would have been perilous had it been the monument of some mere litterateur. The litterateur’s works would have disappeared from the public eye, while that of the hapless architect would be for ever before it. And it would be thus the architect, not the litterateur, that would be permanently remembered. But the monument of Sir Walter was in no danger; and Sir Walter himself would have been quite aware of the fact. It would not have displeased him, that in the remote future, when all its buttresses had become lichened and grey, and generation after generation had disappeared from around its base, the story would be told––like that connected in so many of our older cathedrals with ‘prentice pillars’ and ‘prentice aisles’––that the poor architect who had designed its exquisite arches and rich pinnacles in honour of the Shakespeare of Scotland, had met an untimely death when engaged on it, and had found under its floor an appropriate grave.

The intention, however, was not carried into effect. It had been intimated in the funeral letters that the burial procession should quit the humble dwelling of the architect––for a humble dwelling it is––at half-past one. It had been arranged, too, that the workmen employed at the monument, one of the most respectable-looking bodies of mechanics we ever saw, should carry the corpse to the grave. They had gathered round the dwelling, a cottage at Morningside, with a wreath of ivy nodding from the wall; and the appearance of both it and them naturally suggested that the poor deceased, originally one of themselves, though he had risen, after a long struggle, into celebrity, had not risen into affluence. Death had come too soon. He had just attained his proper position––just 122 reached the upper edge of the table-land which his genius had given him a right to occupy, and on which a competency might be soon and honourably secured––when a cruel accident struck him down. The time specified for the burial passed––first one half-hour, and then another. The assembled group wondered at the delay. And then a gentleman from the dwelling-house came to inform them that some interdict or protest, we know not what––some, we suppose, perfectly legal document––had inhibited, at this late hour, the interment of the body in the monument, and that there was a grave in the course of being prepared for it in one of the city churchyards.