[SUSANNA, COUNTESS OF EGLINTOUNE.]
The house on the west side of the Old Stamp-office Close, High Street, formerly Fortune’s Tavern, was, in the early part of the last century, the family mansion of Alexander, Earl of Eglintoune. It is a building of considerable height and extent, accessible by a broad scale stair. The alley in which it is situated bears great marks of former respectability, and contained, till the year 1821, the Stamp-office, then removed to the Waterloo Buildings.[162]
The ninth Earl of Eglintoune[163] was one of those patriarchal peers who live to an advanced age—indefatigable in the frequency of their marriages and the number of their children—who linger on and on, with an unfailing succession of young countesses, and die at last leaving a progeny interspersed throughout the whole of Douglas’s Peerage, two volumes, folio, re-edited by Wood. His lordship, in early life, married a sister of Lady Dundee, who brought him a large family, and died just about that happy period when she could not have greatly increased it. His next wife was a daughter of Chancellor Aberdeen, who only added one daughter to his stock, and then paused, in a fit of ill-health, to the great vexation of his lordship, who, on account of his two sons by the first countess having died young, was anxious for an heir. This was a consummation to his nuptial happiness which Countess Anne did not seem at all likely to bring about, and the chagrin of his lordship must have been increased by the longevity which her very ill-health seemed to confer upon her; for her ladyship was one of those valetudinarians who are too well acquainted with death, being always just at his door, ever to come to closer quarters with him. At this juncture the blooming Miss Kennedy was brought to Edinburgh by her father, Sir Archibald, the rough old cavalier, who made himself so conspicuous in the Persecution and in Dundee’s wars.
Susanna Kennedy, though the daughter of a lady considerably under the middle size—one of the three co-heiresses of the Covenanting general, David Leslie (Lord Newark), whom Cromwell overthrew at Dunbar—was six feet high, extremely handsome, elegant in her carriage, and had a face and complexion of most bewitching loveliness. Her relations and nurses always anticipated that she was to marry the Earl of Eglintoune, in spite of their disparity of age;[164] for, while walking one day in her father’s garden at Culzean, there alighted upon her shoulder a hawk, with his lordship’s name upon its bells, which was considered an infallible omen of her fate. Her appearance in Edinburgh, which took place about the time of the Union, gained her a vast accession of lovers among the nobility and gentry, and set all the rhyming fancies of the period agog. Among her swains was Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, a man of learning and talent in days when such qualities were not common. As Miss Kennedy was understood to be fond of music, he sent her a flute as a love-gift; from which it may be surmised that this instrument was played by females in that age, while as yet the pianoforte was not. When the young lady attempted to blow the instrument, something was found to interrupt the sound, which turned out to be a copy of verses in her praise:
‘Harmonious pipe, I languish for thy bliss,
When pressed to Silvia’s lips with gentle kiss!
And when her tender fingers round thee move
In soft embrace, I listen and approve