[[11]] I had inherited Dunskey nearly fifty years before, on my grandfather's death (1857). The place was bought in 1900 by Charles Orr Ewing, M.P., who married my niece, the Glasgows' eldest daughter.
[[12]] A theory which, reduced to practice, had its disadvantages. I remember Lord Rosebery writing to the papers complaining that the lunatics of Epsom, finding no difficulty, under the new and improved system, in escaping from duress, used occasionally to saunter from the local asylum into his grounds, and, I think, even his house, near by.
[[13]] The reference, of course, is to King Henry V., Act iii., Sc. 2:
"And you, good yeomen,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture."
[[14]] My dear old cousin Felicia Skene, whose father had been one of Scott's closest friends, told me that this had been her privilege. So also did the late George Boyle, sometime Dean of Salisbury, who, however, in his autobiography, speaks merely of having once seen Sir Walter (looking very old and ill) when he came to call on his (the Dean's) father.
[[15]] "If you happened to find an egg on a music-stool, what poem would it remind you of?"
[[16]] James Hope Scott, the eminent parliamentary lawyer, friend of Newman, Manning and Gladstone, and husband of Sir Walter's granddaughter and eventual heiress, made his submission to Rome in 1851. His daughter Mary Monica (afterwards Hon. Mrs. Joseph Maxwell Scott), inherited Abbotsford at his death; and it is now owned by her son, General Walter Maxwell Scott.
[[17]] The Dies Iræ and the Stabat Mater. See Lockhart, Life of Walter Scott (2nd Ed.), vol. x., p. 215.
[[18]] From the looms of Gobelin: presented by Louis XIV. to an Earl of Stair, British Ambassador in Paris. They had come into the Dumfries (Bute) family through the marriage of a son of the first Earl of Stair to Penelope, Countess of Dumfries in her own right. It was a standing grievance of our old friend the tenth Earl of Stair that these tapestries were not at Lochinch.
[[19]] "Wale"=choice, or selection. A Fife laird, driving home across Magus Moor after dining not wisely but too well, fell out of his gig, and his wig fell off, but was recovered by his servant. "It's no' ma wig, Davie, it's no' ma wig," he moaned as he lay in the mire, thrusting the peruke away. "You'd best take it, sir," said the serving-man dryly; "there's nae wale o' wigs on Magus Moor."