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him to Glasgow, where he continued to be idle. He then went to London, where he has been very idle; and now he is going to Utrecht, where he will be as idle as ever." Besides passing as advocate in Edinburgh, James Boswell was called at the English Bar, and went the Northern Circuit, where many droll stories were circulated regarding him, particularly one invented at Lancaster Assizes, where, at the instigation of a waggish brother, he is said to have moved the Court for a writ "Quare adhærit pavimento." "I never heard (said the Judge) of such writ; what can it be that adheres pavimento? Are any of you gentlemen at the Bar able to explain this?" The Bar laughed. At last one of them said, "My Lord, Mr. Boswell last night adhærit pavimento. There was no moving him for some time. At last he was carried to bed, and he has been dreaming about himself and the pavement." With the exception of the "Douglas Cause," in which he was mixed up as a kind of volunteer on the winning side, Boswell had little call to appear often in Court, although he had all his life the esteem and friendship of the Scottish Bench and Bar. Of a festive, convivial turn of mind, he was simple and unconstrained to an almost reprehensible degree, and occasionally, it would appear, he found those as high in social station as himself willing to minister to his vanity. His great work (for his books of travel have been forgotten), the "Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson," appeared in two volumes 4to, 1790-nearly six years after the death of his hero. Boswell himself died June 19, 1795, aged 55, leaving Alexander, his heir, with James, a barrister, and friend of Malone, Shakespearian commentator.

Alexander Boswell (shortly before his melancholy death, Sir Alexander, Bart.), was one of the most popular Scottish gentlemen of his day, and in the course of his too brief life there came to gather round him an interest as varying in kind as it was unique in character. Efficient as a magistrate, he was also foremost in all that related to the public business of his native county of Ayr, while his accessibility to the humblest neighbour, joined to an unaffected appreciation for good-humoured social enjoyment, made him one of the most delightful of companions in the hunting-field or the race-course. His favourite riding colours,

blue and white stripes, were often landed first at the post, and none ever received warmer or more sincere congratulations on victory. He was not only the writer of two or three Scottish songs of far above average merit, but he sang them socially with a polished humour and fiery earnestness all his own. A sound scholar, not either public or private business-not even the exacting demands of the Muses, lessened his appreciation of these family treasures of old Scottish lore which he had inherited in the family library at Auchinleck, and which the luxury of a private printing-press he indulged in made familiar to more readers than would otherwise have been the case. There Scott picked up the romance of "Sir Tristram," and there Sir Alexander himself re-issued his interesting reprint of the discussion at Crossraguel between John Knox and Quentin Kennedy, 1562. Sir Alexander, born October 9th, 1775, was educated at Westminster and Oxford, and created a baronet for his patriotic zeal during the threatening Radical disturbances of 1821. He was not spared to enjoy the honour for any long season. The political atmosphere was charged with influences unusually exciting. Men given far less than Boswell to either light-heartedness or humour were led to think, and say, and write things not to be defended. One or two "squibs" from his pen, printed in the "Glasgow Sentinel," bore somewhat ungraciously on a leading Whig of the day, James Stuart, W.S., younger, of Dunearn. The most offensive was in the form of a Whig song, "supposed to be written by one of the Jameses, certainly not by King James I. or King James V., but probably by one of the house of Stuart." A few of the lines appear to have been studiously calculated to give offence:—

"There's stot-feeder Stuart,

Kent for that fat cow-art,

How glegly he kicks ony ba', man,
And Gibson, lang chiel, man,
Whose height might serve weel, man,

To read his ain name on a wa', man.

Your knights o' the pen, man,

Are a' gentlemen, man,

Ilk body's a limb o' the law, man;

Tacks, bonds, precognitions,

Bills, wills, and petitions,

And ought but a trigger some draw, man.”

The manuscripts given up by the printer Borthwick, and the editor Alexander, were afterwards sworn to as in the handwriting of Auchinleck. A hostile meeting thereafter took place on 26th March, 1822, on the farm of Auchtertool, Fifeshire, when John Douglas, brother to the Marquis of Queensberry, acted as second to the Baronet, and the Earl of Rosslyn for Mr. Stuart. The principals stood at twelve paces distant. The Earl of Rosslyn gave the word, and the parties fired, when Sir Alexander received Mr. Stuart's ball in the right shoulder, which broke the clavicle of the bone and injured the spine. Sir Alexander immediately fell, and was carried to Balmuto House, the seat of his relative Lord Balmuto, where every professional assistance possible was rendered, but without avail, and the unfortunate Baronet, then only forty-seven years of age, gradually sank, and expired on the afternoon of the following day. Sir Alexander, in his last moments, expressed regret for not making his intention to fire in the air more distinct; but admitted that Mr. Stuart took the only course open to him in insisting on a "meeting." It had been intended to arrange matters in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, but the Sheriff of that county bound the parties over to keep the peace, and Fife was only thought of at the last moment, as preferable to the Continent, which had been partly arranged for. Mr. Stuart left the ground, after an ineffectual attempt to express his sympathy with the wounded Baronet. He surrendered for trial before the High Court of Justiciary on 10th June, same year (1822), where he was defended with unrivalled ability by his friends Jeffrey and Cockburn. The jury, after the address of counsel and a summing up by Lord-Justice Clerk Boyle, returned a verdict unanimously finding Mr Stuart not guilty. In relief of mental distress, he afterwards travelled in America, and returning to London edited the Liberal "Courier" for some years, when he was appointed Inspector of Factories, which position he held at his death in 1849, aged 74 years. Certain circumstances

connected with the above hostile meeting were reproduced by Scott in the duel scene of "St. Ronan's Well." Sir Alexander Boswell left one daughter, married to Sir W. F. Elliot of Stobs and Wells, and a son, James, who succeeded him; born 1806, and married, 1830, Jessie Jane, daughter of Sir J. Montgomery Cunningham, Bart., with issue, two daughters. Young Sir James died in 1857, a few years after he had succeeded in reducing what was intended to be a very strict entail of the family estate, as designed by Lord Auchinleck and his son, James, on the ground that certain letters written on or over an erasure were not referred to in the testing clause of the deed. Lady Boswell died March, 1884. The valued rental of lands composing Auchinleck parish is entered at £24,797, about twothirds being held by the Boswell family, and the rest divided among the Marquis of Bute with ten other proprietors.

THE MURES OF CALDWELL.

MURE, Moore, More, for the same name has in process of time assumed all these and at least as many other forms, carry the mind back to public transactions in Scotland earlier than to what well-authenticated history can testify, and earlier also than the time when any uniformity in spelling was observed. A settled nomenclature has justly been described as one of the niceties of modern orthography. Of the Mures it may be said with literal exactness, "Kings have come of us, not us of kings." Smitten by the charms of his cousin, the "Beauty of Rowallan," while living in retirement at Dundonald, the young Stewart, Earl of Strathaven, afterwards Robert II., by marrying Elizabeth Mure, under a dispensation from Holy Mother Church, made her the maternal head of the whole Royal race of Stewart. Without making any pretensions to be the parent stem of this ancient family the house of Caldwell has ever ranked high for the public spirit and energy

of its representatives-in later days for judicial wisdom and intellectual culture. Early in the fourteenth century, Easter Caldwell passed from the family of that name to the Mures through the marriage of Gilchrist Mure with the last heiress of her race, whose ancient ruined tower may still be seen within the grounds of Caldwell.

One of the earliest existing family documents (1496) is an instrument of sasine of Sir Adam Mure's-Noblis viri Ada Mur de Cauldvel-peaceably and legally conveying a small hamlet called Kempisland, otherwise "Breadsorrow," so named because of the "grate sorrow it bred in debating and contesting for the hereditable right thereof." The term "kemping" has been explained as an old Scottish word for striving and fighting-a commentary, it is further explained, of a disputatious age, when Border chiefs, great coveters of Naboth's vineyard, converted many an adjoining field into a campus belli, of which the strongest man reaped the harvest with his claymore. This Adam is described by contemporary annalists as "a gallant, stout man, having many feuds with his neighbours, which were managed with great fierceness and much blood-shed." Hector, a son, is mentioned as killed in 1499 by the Maxwells of Pollok, whose laird narrowly escaped the wild justice of Hector's brother John in retaliation. The feud remained long an heirloom in the families, but that it ultimately came to be "staunched" may be noticed from a pleasant adventure mentioned below. John Mure was not only indicted for laying an ambuscade to capture Maxwell and "his man" with "wikid malice, wrongwislie and violentlie;" but in 1515 we find him paying so little respect to the Church as to engage with Lennox for sacking the palace of Archbishop Beaton at Glasgow, and breaking down the same with artillery. An inventory, curious enough in its way, but too long for quotation here, will be found in the "Caldwell Papers" (vol. I, p. 54) of the "guids and geir," the scarlet gowns lined with fur, the gold rings and precious stones, the plate, ordnance, and "vivers" seized on the occasion. The dying voice of another of the family recorded in 1640 expresses with a quaint solemnity not to be misunderstood the fast-approaching troubles of the Cromwellian period:-"For so mickle as at this

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