Of the remaining branches of the House of Byres none now survive in wealth or estate except the families of Loughry, in the county of Tyrone, and of Drum and Craigballe, otherwise styled of Cahoo, in that of Louth, in Ireland—the former represented by John Lindsay, Esq., of Loughry, the latter by Walter Lindsay, Esq., of Dublin,-both being descended from Robert, younger brother of Bernard Lindsay of Lochhill, mentioned in a former page as groom of the chamber to King James VI.,*-Mr. Frederick Lindsay, of Mountjoy-Square West, Dublin, to whom I am beholden for much kind antiquarian and genealogical assistance, being a brother of the former family, and the venerable General Effingham Lindsay, of the Mauritius and of Constance in Switzerland, and the Rev. John Lindsay, Vicar of Stanford, representing respectively two younger branches of the latter. The arms of the House, being those of the Lords Lindsay by long inheritance, may be considered as establishing their Byres origin, but the precise affiliation has not as yet been ascertained.

In the mean while, as I have already intimated, the estates of the Lindsays of the Byres being destined, under the family entails, to heirs-female, devolved on the late Lady Mary Lindsay Crawford, only surviving sister of George, twenty-second Earl of Crawford, and, after her death, on the late excellent and amiable George Earl of Glasgow. Lady Mary survived her brother for a quarter of a century. No one has a right to speak of this remarkable lady so gratefully or affectionately as myself. She was quite a character-belonging to times that are gone by. she was extremely handsome, and retained her good looks to an advanced period of life. Her mind was of a masculine order, her spirit high, independent, and unscrupulous, her temper haughty to those who did not understand, or presumed to contradict her prejudices, yet kind and considerate to her dependents, who were devotedly attached to her, and whom she had had around her for

* Vide supra, tom. i. p. 319.

In youth

+ A Memorial by General Lindsay to the Duke of Wellington on his appointment to the Colonelcy of the Second W. India Regiment, enumerating services performed during fifty-five years of a soldier's life, is printed in the Appendix, No. XLIV. I am indebted for it, and for other genealogical information, to the kindness of my friend the Vicar of Stanford.

years. Living (at least while in Britain) in almost entire seclusion, her affections found vent on a curious assemblage of dumb favourites; dogs of every description, birds, and even a tame fox, formed part of her establishment. Her brother's charger, long the object of her care, survived her, and in her will were found minute directions how and when it should be put to death, so that the cessation of its existence might be attended with the least possible pain,-it was to be shot sleeping. A tame deer, of great age, was a peculiar favourite; she compounded its mess of bread and milk daily with her own hands.--But access to her papers enables me to speak of much of which the world in general knew nothing of kind attentions, acts of generosity, little minute delicacies, most unworldly and ideal, to every one with whom she came into contact,―of the judicious bestowal of money, in loan or gift, on the deserving-and constant correspondence and intercourse with her mother's old friends, maintained through years of age and illness,-which may balance the remembrance of eccentricities, many doubtless and to be regretted, but which almost invariably, as was remarked by a commentator on her character immediately after her death, "leaned to virtue's side and the cause of humanity."

The predominant feature in Lady Mary's character was a religious reverence for feudal times and the memory of her ancestors a reverence which she indulged in the erection of Crawford Priory, near Struthers, the ruined castle of the Lindsays of the Byres, in Fifeshire.-It was in the Gothic hall of this edifice that the funeral service of the Church of England was read over her remains by the Rev. J. Sinclair, on the 2nd of December, 1833. It was a day of alternate cloud and sunshine, but mild and still. About the middle of the service, the sun-rays suddenly streamed through the painted glass, on the groined roof, on the trophies of ancient armour disposed round the walls, and lighted up the very pall of death with the gules and azure of the Lindsay cognisance emblazoned on the window-and then died away again. The service over, the procession moved slowly from the Priory door, ascending, by a winding road cut for the occasion through a wood of pines, to the mausoleum on the summit of a lofty eminence, where her brother Earl George was buried. Numbers of the tenantry, and of the town's-people of Cupar and Ceres, attended,

and the hills were covered with groups of spectators. A more impressive scene I never witnessed. And thus, amidst a general subdued silence, we committed to the dust the last of the Lindsays of the Byres, the last of a line of five hundred years.

I possess various valued remembrances of Lady Mary, especially her own portrait by Watson, and that of her lovely but short-lived sister, Lady Eglinton, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, besides other family portraits and relics, specially bequeathed to me, "in consideration of the friendship and affection which has subsisted between the families of Crawford and Balcarres."*

I must now proceed towards the completion of my task-hereafter confined to our own immediate House of Balcarres. The preceding enumeration, however-so few standing where so many have fallen-may not have been useless if it imprint on our minds the solemn memento, that we too may in course of time be broken up as a family and reduced to penury. In such case may our heritage still be faith, energy, and honesty-and we shall do well.

Alexander, the late Earl of Balcarres, had acted the part of a brother to Lady Mary in early life:-"I ever hold in remembrance," she writes to him on the death of Lady Balcarres in 1816, "the polite attention and friendly conduct of your lordship and Lady Balcarres at a time I stood unprotected in the great world, maliciously attacked from interested motives... None had better opportunity, from his universal acquaintance in the higher circles, to vindicate falsehoods propagated, than Lord Balcarres. Her ladyship, with that good sense she possessed, requested of me to apply to him for that protection which a man alone under such circumstances of calumny and insult could give,-the event proved her ladyship correct, as those in a great measure thereafter ceased. The only return I could make was to publish to the world a circumstance which I cherish,--and which now makes me lament the loss of Lady Balcarres as a most excellent woman and the best of mothers."

On the death of Lady Mary, the representation of the Garnock line of the Earls of Crawford devolved on her nearest relatives, the Earl of Glasgow, and G. Dundas Hamilton, Esq., of Duddingstone, respectively descended from Margaret and Magdalen, sisters of Patrick the first Viscount Garnock. To my friend, the Rev. John Hamilton Gray, Vicar of Bolsover, and great-great-grandson of the Treasurer, Earl John, through the Duddingstone family, I have been indebted for much genealogical information at intervals extending backwards through many years.

SECTION I.

AFTER Earl James's death, Lady Balcarres resided for the most part in the country, sedulously discharging her maternal duties towards eleven children; her means were limited, but adequate under her admirable management to the difficult task she had undertaken, and to the support of that rank in life, "which at such a moment," observes her daughter, "might have been supposed a misfortune, but in fact is none,-'tis the buoy that keeps merit from sinking."*

Lady Anne has sketched in her lively manner the principal members of the family circle of Balcarres, as it existed during her youth and childhood, now nearly a century ago, in Fife and Edinburgh; her recollections precede the period of her father's death, and possess peculiar interest as descriptive of a period and style of life and manners removed from us by four generations, and that

* "You see," writes Lady Balcarres to a friend to whom she was entrusting a commission, "I'm very thrifty; and you would think it very necessary, had you seen us some nights ago at a family ball, when we were about fifty souls, all belonging to this identical house; literally all of them breakfast, dine, and sup off our little bit land."-I would once more request the gentle reader, who may peruse these Lives' as a critic, not a clansman, to remember that they were addressed to the hearts of an audience much more limited than the public to whom they are now presented, and in that recollection to forgive me for what he may perhaps deem somewhat too much of minute personal detail in this concluding Chapter.

have passed away for ever,- —a period too when character seems to have been stamped with a bolder die, or at least to have opposed more resistance to attrition than it now does. I have already cited her account of her father's marriage,—she proceeds to introduce herself and the youthful progeny of that marriage as follows:

"There had long existed a prophecy that the first child of the last descendant of the House of Balcarres was to restore the family of Stuart to those hereditary rights which the bigotry of James had deprived them of. The Jacobites seemed to have gained new life on the occasion; the wizards and witches of the party had found it in their books; the Devil had mentioned it to one or two of his particular friends; old ladies had read it from the grounds of their coffee,-no wonder if the event was welcomed by the grasp of expiring hope. Songs were made by exulting Tories, masses were offered up by good Catholics, who longed to see the Pope's Bull once more tossing his horns in the country, -every one was glad to hear what the Countess longed for; if devout, she would produce a pious man,-if she set her heart eagerly on anything, it was a sign the young Earl would be ardent and successful in his pursuits,-if she wore white much, it was the child's attachment to the white rose; but the Countess was a woman who longed for nothing, and thereby afforded no key to unlock the secrets of futurity. She went on prosperously however, and in due course of time the partisans of the Pretender, the soothsayers, wizards, witches, the bards, fortune-tellers, and old ladies, were all in a group, amazed, disconcerted, and enraged, to learn that Lady Balcarres was brought to bed of a daughter after all, absolutely but a daughter,-while Lord Balcarres, though he too privately would have been flattered with a boy, received the present she had made him with transport, thanked his young wife as if she had conferred a boon on him he had no right to expect from her, and both parents united in that partiality to their eldest child which they ever afterwards so kindly continued to it. That child was the Anne Lindsay who now addresses you, and in the arms of my nurse I promised to be a little heiress, perhaps a heroine worthy of having my name posted on the front of a novel. But twelve succeeding years robbed me of my prospects by enriching me with ten friends whom I would not now exchange