Though cast in a smaller bodily mould than his burly kinsman of Breadalbane, he carried himself with a singular dignity of bearing. His finely formed, expressive face and his abundant golden hair made him a conspicuous figure in any assembly. But he was perhaps best seen under his own roof at Inveraray entertaining the landed gentry of Argyleshire, when met for the transaction of county business—including many of the Campbell clan who counted the Mac Callum More as their chief, and from some of whom he could claim feudal service. One of them in particular used to be prominent from the massive silver chain which he wore with a key hung at the end of it. His castle was now a ruin, but, in accordance with ancient usage, he was bound to present the key of it when he came to see his chief. The Duke moved about among the guests as the grand seigneur, entering into animated talk, now about land and rent, or improvements in the county, or some recently opened tumulus, dredgings in Loch Fyne, the political situation of the country, or the probability of getting fossils out of his schists and limestones. He was keenly desirous to preserve every relic of antiquity on his property, and had made a kind of museum in the central hall of the castle in which he kept the smaller objects that had been picked up. Among these he was especially proud of an old knife with what he believed to be Rob Roy’s initials on it that had been found near the place where that Highland freebooter lived, when he placed himself for a time under the shelter of the Argyll of his day.
KENNEDY OF DUNURE
Perhaps no county in Scotland could furnish an ampler list of landed proprietors than Ayrshire, both of the old stock and of the new comers. The former included both titled possessors of large estates and smaller lairds who could trace their genealogy back to a remote ancestry. One of the best examples of these landed gentry whom I have known was the Right Honourable Thomas Francis Kennedy of Dunure. Educated in Edinburgh under Pillans and Dugald Stewart, he was associated from his youth with the brilliant literary coterie which then flourished in that city, and delighted to recount his reminiscences of the men and the clubs of the time. As he was born near Ayr, and had passed much of his life in Ayrshire, where he possessed considerable estates, he retained a lively recollection of the state of the south-west of Scotland in the closing years of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth century. I have heard him tell of the hardships of the peasantry and small farmers in his boyhood, how in severe winters they were compelled to bleed their cattle and mix the blood with oatmeal to keep themselves in life. He used to describe the cuisine of his early days, and the contrast between it and modern cookery. One of the dishes, rather a favourite in Carrick, was roast Solan goose from Ailsa Craig. But his account of it was not itself appetising, for he told how they had to bury the bird for some time in the garden, and when it came to be cooked, all the windows in the house had to be kept open, to let out the ‘ancient and fish-like smell.’ White and black puddings, now almost entirely banished, still maintained their place, together with ‘crappit heads,’ ‘singed sheep’s head,’ and sundry other national dishes which have long been banished from the tables of polite society. He used sometimes to revive a few of these dishes, and I thought them excellent, but he never, so far as I experienced, tried the Solan goose again.
He was a gentleman of the antique cast, courteous and stately in his manners, proud of his descent and of his ancestral possessions, and tenacious of his rights, which he was sometimes thought to insist upon rather more than he need have done. When I came to know him about the year 1863 he had retired from public life, and devoted himself to the care of his property. He looked carefully after his breeds of cattle, and was keenly alive to new inventions for the improvement of agriculture, which he was always ready to test on his own land. Part of one of the smallest coal-fields in Scotland underlay his estate of Dalquharran, and he worked the mineral according to the best known methods.
Yet he had been an active politician in his time. He was for sixteen years in Parliament, as member for the Ayr Burghs. In association with Cockburn, Jeffrey, Horner, Murray, Graham, and others, he took a leading part in the preparations for the Scottish Reform Bill. On retiring from Parliament, he obtained an official appointment in Ireland, where he spent some years, until in 1850 he received a commissionership in the Office of Woods and Forests. Owing to some dispute in the staff, he retired from this appointment in 1854, and thereafter lived entirely at his Ayrshire home, save that for some twenty years he continued to come up for the season to London. The Government of the day would not grant him a pension, a decision for which he believed that Gladstone was mainly responsible. His friend Lord Murray thought him so badly used that he settled a pension of £1200 a year upon him, which he enjoyed up to the time of his death. Though no longer actively interfering in politics, he continued to take the keenest interest in the events of the time, kept himself in touch with his old Whig friends in and out of Parliament, and gave free vent to his disapproval when he had to criticise their policy.
His wife, a daughter of Sir Samuel Romilly, was a singularly gentle and gracious old lady. They had been married twenty years before a son, their only child, was born to them. Kennedy used to remark on the curious coincidence that he himself was also an only child, born after twenty years of wedlock. The inhabited Dalquharran Castle is a large modern mansion, built in a massive but rather tasteless style, a strange contrast to the older castle which it replaced, and which now stands as a picturesque ivy-clad ruin a short distance off, near the river. The laird remembered when this ruin still had its roof on, and was partly habitable.
Another Ayrshire laird had a row of fine silver firs in the avenue to his romantically-placed old castle. As several of these trees had been struck by lightning during a series of years, his wife asked me one day if I thought it possible that the lightning was attracted by a seam of ironstone in the ground beneath. She hoped it was not, for if her husband suspected such a thing, she knew he would have lawn, avenue, trees, and everything else dug up in order to get at it. I was able to assure her that there was no ironstone there, and that the attraction was in the trees themselves.
In the same county I was acquainted about forty years ago with a bachelor laird who possessed a fine estate, on which he lived with two maiden sisters. He had a large collection of minerals, and more particularly of gems, many of which were mounted as rings. When low-spirited, he would array himself in his dressing-gown, retire to his library, cover his fingers with rings, and lay himself out on a sofa to gaze at and admire them. He dabbled a little also in water-colours, and it used to be said of him that ‘he painted a picture every day, and on Sundays he painted a church.’
‘SLIDDERY BRAES’
One of the oddest specimens of a laird I ever personally knew was the owner of a small estate to the north of Kilmarnock, where he lived with two unmarried sisters. He had nicknames for everybody and everything. His mansion-house, owing to the steepness of the approach to it, he always called ‘Sliddery Braes.’ His sisters, he used to speak of, the one as the ‘Mutiny at the Nore,’ the other as the ‘Battle of the Baltic,’ because they were born in the years when these two events occurred. He used to take whims, pursue them with great earnestness for a time, and then change to something else. Many of these occupations had a theological cast. At one time he devoted himself to a serious study of the Book of Revelations, and in order to get the better at its meaning, he took to the Greek original. He found that Dr. Sloan of Ayr had a more modern lexicon than that at Sliddery Braes, so he would come down day after day, and work with this volume in the doctor’s consulting room. His presence there, however, becoming troublesome, the book was sent upstairs to the drawing-room, and instructions were given to the servant to take the laird there the next time he came. On entering that room one day, he found the doctor’s sister sitting at the window, engaged in some needle-work. With apologies for his interruption, he begged her not to allow him to disturb her, for he would be engrossed in his study of the chapter on which he was then engaged. After some time he turned to Miss Sloan and said, ‘I’ve been investigating the account given in Revelation of the White Horse, and I think I now understand about it. The animal must have been a large beast, for standing in the street there, its back would be up on a level with the window you’re sitting at.’ And he proceeded to describe in the most whimsical way the look and qualities of this wonderful horse. His narrative was so comical, that the poor lady could hardly repress her laughter. At last he noticed that his discourse had not in the least solemnised her, and he thereupon started up remarking, ‘Ah, Miss Sloan, you may laugh, but it’s no laughing to some of them; good day.’ So ended his Greek studies.