Home Improvements

Here's an interesting piece of news: Abbotsford — the home of the Scottish novelist, poet and Washington Irving mentor Sir Walter Scott — is receiving a nearly ten million pound makeover, courtesy of Scotland's Heritage Lottery Fund, to turn it into a major cultural center.

I'm all for it, though I have an admittedly biased angle:  Abbotsford was an important place to Washington Irving.  In the summer of 1817, Irving — one of  American literature's great gatecrashers and an enormous fan of...