and shrewd enough to judge his tutor's deeds and motives, so for greater security he conveyed away all the most important writs and patents, and put them in the safe keeping of his friend, the Laird of Carnegie. Later, and when the good Sir Robert Gordon became in his turn tutor of Sutherland, Carnegie's successor returned the writs to him for the use of his nephew and ward, the thirteenth earl. In reading the family annals as written by this wellintentioned guardian, posterity has the satisfaction of knowing that his history was compiled at first hand from these newly rescued documents. It is also agreeable to have to associate their restoration with his nephew, whose premier earlship could not have been proved without the writs in question; for this lad, once in tutelage, was no less a man than Ian Glas,' the Grey Earl, the adversary of Montrose, and, without doubt, the most statesmanlike of all the belted earls of Sutherland. Since their fortunate restoration the Sutherland papers have never been pilfered, except by the Highland rebels in 1746. The damage then done was most trifling, and it is from the contents of the charter chest that the second and third volumes of Sir William Fraser's splendid book have been extracted; while the first volume, interesting as it is, could not have been compiled unless the family papers had been used by him to correct popular errors, and to elucidate Sir Robert Gordon's History.

It would, however, be unfair to proceed further in our notice of Sir William Fraser's work without stopping here to give an account of the family history to which he always refers. Sir Robert Gordon wrote a book which was not only a monument to the family and its origins, but was really a Peerage and Baronage for Scotland-a book that, in spite of manifest errors, is of the greatest value.

for

Sir Robert Gordon of Gordonstone was the second surviving son of Alexander, eleventh earl, by the Lady Jean Gordon, who is best remembered by her brief union with the too notorious Earl of Bothwell. He brought a suit against her, and sought to have their marriage annulled, on the plea of consanguinity. She brought a counter-suit against her Lovelace husband, and thus allowed him to achieve the age with Queen Mary, which was to consummate the Both the lovers. Sir Robert says of this much-tried that she managed, after the divorce, to

of the lands of Borthwick, Crichton, Midlothian, which had been settled

upon her by Bothwell, and that she continued to enjoy them after her marriage with Lord Sutherland, which took place in 1573. On the family estates in Sutherland she certainly left her mark by the care and diligence with which she brought to an end many hard and difficult buissinesses."' Among these hard things were the sicklie disposition' of her earl, the deaths of two of her children, and the long minority of her son. It is curious, in some of the Countess Jean's practical undertakings, to see the effects of her earlier training in the Lothians. Familiar with the salt-pans of Musselburgh and Prestonpans, she desired some pans to be built to the north of Dunrobin, and thus introduced a new and valuable industry among her people, at the same time that, fresh from the coal-seams of Vogrie and the Midlothian basin, she caused borings to be made in the river of the Brora. This countess was a Roman Catholic, and she lies beside her husband in Dornoch Cathedral, in what was once consecrated ground. Her eldest daughter became the mother of Donald, the first Lord Reay, of the Donald 'Dhuival Macleay,' who is still remembered as the wizard lord, the Michael Scott of the region that stretches towards Cape Wrath. Her second son was the historian. From 1615 to 1630 Sir Robert Gordon worked at his History. He left it in manuscript, and in that form it remained till 1813. As might be expected, more than one copy was taken from it during the two centuries of the unprinted life of this unique book. It was inevitable that as soon as its existence was realised many families should wish to refer to it. Some turned to it with a proud confidence that it must establish their claims and help them to vanquish and overcome their rivals. Others, again, must have scanned the pages with trembling, lest they should therein find ignored, discredited, or even disproved, some pedigree dear to their pride or their imagination. The Stewarts, the Gordons, the dukes of Lennox, the Sinclairs, earls of Caithness, the Mackays of Assynt, and many other clans, might there be found; and the book was all the more painfully interesting because the roll of precedence in Scotland at the beginning of the seventeenth century was arbitrary. It did not then depend, as it now does, on seniority of creation, when authenticated by writs and patents. According to the Commission of 1606, the earl of Sutherland stood only sixth in rank, and was obliged to accept a place after Angus, Argyll, Erroll, ard Marischal. This was obviously unfair, as the date of the Sutherland patent went back to 1235; and, thanks to the

rescued writs commemorated by Sir Robert Gordon, the family was able, by a petition to the Privy Council, to have its rights acknowledged and its precedence rectified.

But we must return to the manuscript of this useful history. The historian's own copy is now at Dunrobin, presented to the second Duke of Sutherland, in 1843, by a descendant of the author. Alongside of it stands a valuable duplicate, in the plain hand of the seventeenth century, certified to have been made for a fourth son of Sir Robert Gordon (Gordon of Cluny), and containing, along with minor matters of personal interest, that continuation of his father's work which is known to collectors and antiquarians as The Historie and Genealogie of the Earls of Sutherland, 'collected together by G. Gordon of Sallagh.' This copy was bought in by Lady Jane Wemyss, widow of George, fourteenth earl, and she made it a new-year's gift to her son. Another duplicate has long existed in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh, and to its pages abundant reference was made when, in 1811, Archibald Constable, of Edinburgh, did, at the request of Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland, and of her husband, Earl Gower, undertake to print, from the original, one hundred copies of the History. The cost of such an undertaking was enormous; but what annoyed the heiress most was that the work could not be quickly finished and sent to her. The printer, though largely helped by the late Mr. Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, found many difficulties. The book was first announced to be forthcoming in June, 1811; but Mr. Sharpe gave etchings, which had to be reproduced, and then the Cailleach Mhoir,' or Mohr Bhainn' of Sutherland herself, sent sketches of castles, lakes, and mountain ranges, all intended for the illustration and perfecting of the work. These caused fresh delays, and only in 1813 did the magnum opus see the light.

Sir William Fraser, no mean judge of what a genealogical writer ought to be, says of Sir Robert Gordon that he had many advantages for the compilation of such a work, and 'with his learning, personal qualifications, and family ad'vantages, he could not fail to produce an enduring record ' of the very ancient house of which he was a member.'

What was this house, and whence derived? If not, like the Bruces, from Norman ancestors, or like the Dundases, from Cospatrick the Saxon, or like the Maules, from a fief in the Vexin, or like the Drummonds, ex stirpe of Hungarian kings, the house of Sutherland can claim

to have been planted about A.D. 63, when a certain people called Morrayes, who were expelled from Germany, landed in Scotland, and were settled by the king (?) in the region between the Spey and the Ness,' of which all the ranges, with the blue peaks of Ben Rinnes, are now visible from the windows of Dunrobin. The name of the family, when it was first known among the possidentes of Scotland, was Moray, or de Moravia. Later, after the marriage of the heiress with Adam Gordon, the surname (about 1508-27) became Gordon, and as Gordon was handed down for centuries through the collateral branches of Gordonstone, Cluny, &c. Later, the distinctive patronymic of 'Suther'land' was adopted by the family which Freskin de Moravia planted in Sutherland.

Hugo Freskin is certainly the first wholly authentic ruler, with patents obtained from King David I.; but Sir Robert Gordon, not satisfied with the world of facts, indulges his imagination when he describes the doughty deeds of the predecessors of Freskin. There is, to begin with, a certain Alan, who, when the Danes had pushed up the Dornoch Firth as far as Creich, gave them battle and defeated them, A.D. 1031. After the legendary Alan appears the equally legendary Walter, created Earl of Sutherland by Malcolm Canmore at a Parliament said to have been held in Forfar. For this dignity no patent exists; but Sir Robert goes on, with equal good faith, to praise an Earl Robert after whom he conjectures that the castle of Dunrobin was named. Dunrobin is undeniably the oldest secular building now inhabited and in use in Scotland, but the later criticism would not point to any identification of it with an Earl Robin. The thane and the castle are used to support each other's claims, but of olden times the name of the tower was sometimes spelt 'Dunrabyn,' and sometimes 'Drumrabyn,' * and not till 1401 does the sixth earl date from Dunrobyn,' and the eighth earl (1492) from Dunrobbyn.' The facts that the parish church of Golspie is under the vocable of St. Andrew, and that St. James was the patron of the castle well and of the family chapel in Dornoch Cathedral, throw no light on the controversy. Suffice it to say that for five centuries the castle has been known as Dunrobin; while as regards Earl Robin, he makes, like the Eitel of the Hohenzollern pedigree, a good figure in a legend, but merely serves to support what Lord Hailes termed a foolish theory"

*Dun, a hill; drum, or dhreim, a ridge.

-tre history only commencing when writs under the seal of Scottish kings come to attest the reality of the "bonours' and the veracity of the tale.

Hugo de Moravia surely looms large enough to gratify any family pride. The earls, marquises, and dukes of Athole desceti from his brother William, while his kinsman Gilbert was first arch leason, and then bishop of Caithness. On him Hugo Freskyn bestowed grants of land, and he in his turn, with a pardonable nepotism, gave heritages to his brother Robert, whose aid he sought to secure at a time when the whole family, of laymen and of cleries, had to strain every nerve to protect the cultivation and sunny seaboard of Skibo, Evelix, Dornoch, Embo, Skelbo, Culmailie, Golspie, and Dunrobin, from the Norsemen.

If any one will examine the unwritten literature of the coasts of Sutherland, he will be struck at once by the Danish element that pervades it. There is the usual stock-in-trade -the wizard, the fair woman, the dragon and the dragonslayer, the kelpie, the hidden jewel, and the 'good people' who live under mounds and weave rings in the grass. But there is sure to be a King of Lauchlinn (Denmark) either in the foreground or the background of the tale. Queens of Lauchlinn, too, weave potent spells, and sons of Danish kings come to plunder and to meet violent deaths in the deep fiords of the coast. This element is not surprising when we remember that about 872 the four most northern counties of Scotland were conquered by Danish Jarls. What the Arabs did to Spain and Southern France, the Norsemen did to Scotland: they came, and they stayed, and they held their ground so firmly for a hundred years that Sigurd, their Jarl, aspired to the hand of a daughter of a king of Scotland whose territorial possessions were most painfully curtailed by his presence. The bride was actually given to the Viking, and the offspring of the marriage was a son named Thorfinn. He was a persona grata to his royal grandfather, and was, says the Chronicle, assisted by the king in his government (?) of Sutherland.' This Thorfinn is probably the warlike King of Lauchlinn,' the irresponsible despot about whom Highland fishermen and crofters told tales on winter nights till the middle of this century.

Thorfinn was certainly bold enough to wage war with Malcolm's successor; but the rule of the Vikings was near its close. The Norsemen got pushed gradually northwards, from Fife to Moray, from Moray to Ross, from Ross to Sutherland, from Sutherland to Caithness, and finally to a,