He did his best to reform the method of electing Scots peers, and in 1780 published a "Speech intended to be spoken at the Meeting of the Peers for Scotland for the General Election of their Representatives, in which a plan is proposed for the better Representation of the Peerage of Scotland." His thoughts on the matter seem indeed to have wavered. Sometimes he pleases to talk of himself as a "discarded courtier with a little estate." He apologises for not making more of his "insatiable thirst of knowledge and genius prone to the splendid sciences and the fine arts by calling himself "a nobleman, a piece of ornamental china, as it were." But he claimed kinship with Washington, whom he called "the American Buchan,' and sent him a snuff-box made from the oak which sheltered Wallace after the battle of Falkirk. In return Washington sent him his portrait, and "accepted the significant present of the box with sensibility and satisfaction." An intense pride in his own order and his long descent was joined with a contempt for others of the same persuasion. "I dined two days ago tête-à-tête with Lord Buchan," writes Scott. "Heard a history of all his ancestors, whom he has hung round his . chimney-piece. From counting of pedigrees, good Lord deliver us!" But he had also not a little of the proud humility of his brother the Chancellor, who, when a young man, used to declare, "Thank fortune, out of my own family, I don't know a lord!" The first and most earnest of the Earl's hobbies was the cultivation of his own domains. He published in the 'Bee' some curious essays on the art of idleness, in which the hero is invariably a gentleman of good family, who, after racketing in town, repents of his ways, and returns to respectability and agriculture. From the world of Brooks' and Almack's our hero flies to the planting of timber and the culture of fruittrees, till "he becomes so much master of the principles, practice, and duties of husbandry, that he is soon able to originate and direct in all the operations, as the paterfamilias of Columella, and becomes quite independent of his land-steward, bailiffs, and old experienced servants." He has essays on country life, with a far-away hint of Gilbert White, essays in an absurd rococo style, but now and then full of real observation and genuine feeling. One piece, "To the daughters of Sophia on the Dawning of Spring," begins: "Alathea, Isabella, Sophia, my dear girls, the daughters of my dearest friends! the delightful season of verdure is come. Rise up, my fair ones, and come away; for, lo! the winter is past, the rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land." Then comes a vivid little piece of genre painting, though to be sure the style is execrable, and the essay concludes with a kind of farmer's diary, exactly in the Selborne manner. His "Letters in imita tion of the Ancients" have the same honest country note amid their sham classicalism. Dryburgh and Melrose and the Eildons are strangely unrecognisable, but the good Tweedside birds and flowers and skies are there, though he calls a planting a "vernal thicket," and the Cheviots" undulatory forms of mountain." After agriculture, antiquities were his special province. In 1780 he founded the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland at a meeting held in the house in St Andrew Square. The first idea was a sort of Académie Ecossaise, to be called the Caledonian Temple of Fame, which, through a complex system of balloting, was to canonise the names of famous Scots, living or dead. The University authorities and the Advocates' Library saw their occupation gone, and opposed the petition for a royal charter of incorporation; but the charter was granted through Buchan's influence at Court. The Earl's own antiquarian studies are numerous a memoir of Sir James Steuart Denham, an account of the parish of Uphall, an account of the Abbey of Dryburgh in Grose's 'Antiquities,' and sketches of George Heriot, Lord Mar, the son of the Regent, and Drummond of Hawthornden. He kept up a lengthy correspondence on antiquarian matters with Nichols, and sent him "Some Remarks on the Progress of the Roman Arms in Scotland during the Sixth Campaign of Africanus," which was published in vol. xxxv. of the 'Topographia Britannica. But while he valued his agricultural and antiquarian achievements at their proper worth, it was as a patron of letters that my Lord hoped to appeal to the admiration of posterity. His was the task to bring forth retiring merit and to seal the fame of the great with his approbation. He appointed himself the special trumpeter of the poet Thomson, and he would fain have done the same for Burns and Scott. He erected at Dryburgh an Ionic temple, with a statue of Apollo inside and a bust of Thomson on the dome; and in 1791 he instituted an annual festival in commemoration of the poet, at which he solemnly crowned his bust with a wreath of bays. He asked Burns to attend, but the poet was harvesting, and sent a frigid Sixth frigid "Address to the Shade of Thomson," in imitation of Collins. Buchan distinguished Which is perhaps scarcely fair, for in all Buchan's folly there was little of this vulgarity. The Erskines had learned the lessons of adversity too well in their own lives to be mere patrons of success. Later Burns seems to have forgot his bitterness, for he sends a copy of "Scots Wha Hae," and a respectful and somewhat dithyrambic letter on the beauties of liberty-which must indeed have charmed our gentleman's heart, -for such fine sentiments were meat and drink to the dilettante Radical. When the poet died the Earl added his bust (in Parian marble!) to his Ionic temple. His essays in statuary were not all equally fortunate. The worst performance was the erection of a colossal statue of Wallace on a bank above the Tweed on the anniversary day of Stirling Bridge, a mon strosity which Scott prayed for lightning to annihilate. On its base was an inscription in Buchan's best style: "In the name of my brave and worthy country, I dedicate this monument, as sacred to the memory of Wallace 'The peerless Knight of Ellerslie, The unveiling was disastrous. The Earl appeared before the statue with his speech in his hand and destiny on his brow; and at the discharge of a cannon the curtain was dropped. But to the horror of the honest enthusiast and the delight of the audience, the peerless knight of Ellerslie was revealed smoking a huge German tobacco - pipe, which some humourist had stuck in his mouth. In His relations with Sir Walter extended over many years, and were on the whole the most pleasing we have to record. Once, when he examined a High School class, he praised the young Scott's recitation, which the poet remembered to the end as the first commendation he ever received. 1819, when Scott lay seriously ill, Buchan hurried to the house in Castle Street, found the knocker tied up, and concluded that the great man was on the point of death. He succeeded in elbowing his way upstairs to the sick chamber, and was only dissuaded from entering by a shove downstairs from Peter Mathieson the coachman. Scott heard the noise, and fearing for the person of the feeble old man, sent James Ballantyne to follow him home and inquire his purpose. He found the Earl strutting about his library in a towering passion. "I wished," he said, "to embrace Walter Scott before he died, and inform him that I had long considered it as a satisfactory circumstance that he and I were destined to rest together in the same place of sepulture. The principal thing, however, was to relieve his mind as to the arrangements of his funeral-to show him a plan which I had prepared for the procession-and, in a word, to assure him that I took upon myself the whole conduct of the ceremony at Dryburgh. The good man's hopes were disappointed, he died before his victim, and that great eulogium in the style of the French academicians remained unspoken. The Earl's own works-such at least as he wished to preserve for posterity-are contained in a little volume called 'Anony mous and Fugitive Essays,' published at Edinburgh in 1816. The preface is magnificently impersonal. "The Earl of Buchan, considering his advanced age, has thought proper to publish this volume, and to meditate the the publication of others, containing his anonymous writings; that no person may hereafter ascribe to him any other than are by him, in this manner, avowed, described, or enumerated." The book begins with a series on the Art of Idleness, which contains some what is the reason that my pretty crested hen has forgotten her chickens that she was so fond of long ago, and is going along, like a fool, with the ducklings? Why, dear, I will tell you how this happens: the henwife cheated her, and put the ducks' eggs into her nest, and she thought the eggs were her own and hatched them; by and by the ducks will take the water, and the hen will forsake them. A hen would not do this if ... she were at home, and had learnt to shift for herself in the fields by gathering seeds and corn; but we have brought hens about the house, and by having everything done for them by the servants, they have become silly and helpless.' 'Oh, mamma, what a terrible thing is this! Will myself?' 'Yes, my dear, I will, with you teach me to do everything for all my heart.' Thus I initiated my Alathea in the history of nations, and in general politics, beginning I with her at five years old. the loss of one of her garters; I confound one day Alathea in tears for doled with her, but told her that one of my own garters was worn through, so that I wanted one as well as heranother in its stead. I took out of self, but that I was busy making my pocket a worsted garter half wrought upon quills, and began to knit, saying it should not be long before I cured my misfortune.' 'Oh, you teach me to make mamma, will garters?' And so on in the style of the 'Young Ladies' Companion.' it be for a band of such men to So much for the Earl as an instructor of youth. His classical imitations, which take up a great part of the book, have a very doubtful value. As became a liberal nobleman, he must profess an admiration for the republican bores of the early Empire, especially Helvidius Priscus, whose statue, he says, stands in his hall. We may conjecture that his lordship's scholarship was not exact. He imitates Petronius Arbiter very clumsily, and he has many long letters, purporting to be from Roman republicans criticising the new régime, which are chiefly remarkable for their ineptness. Quintus Cicero writes an amusing letter to his brother Marcus in Britain, and Seneca has a fragment on the conduct of life. But such exercises are not without their humours, and now and then, by a quaint phrase, the author is betrayed. Petronius talks of "poor but elegant provincials," and the phrase in the Earl's mouth is self-descriptive. "The Greeks," he says, "when they transgressed, sinned (as I may say) in a superior style,"-which is exactly his lordship's code of ethics. He has some curious remarks on English prose style. Gibbon, Burke, and Junius have a 66 quaint, flippant, pointed manner"; Swift, Atterbury, and Hume, on the other hand, "remain in our age possessed of the chaste propriety and dignity of those who have set up the Greek historians for their models." "How glorious," he exclaims, "would associate in Britain for chastising the meretricious innovators who are encouraged by the tasteless people of the age to enervate our language and our manners." But when we come to the Bacon imitations we find a really tolerable level of excellence. They are introduced by a circumstantial account of their finding which is in itself a pretty piece of romance. "Goodly senectude" is quite in the Baconian manner, and he has the trick of an apt display of learning. Sometimes we catch the note of a very modern sensibility which is out of place: "Wherefore, my father, with a smile of amiable complacency and strict intelligence of my thoughts, did thus with great condescension apply himself to the train of my reflections." Among the "Literary Olla" he has a curious discussion of the character of a gentleman, in which he limits the application of the title to landed proprietors. He seems to have hated the young man about town with all the bitterness of a poor Scots magnate. "They then go abroad, to take what is called the tour of Europe, with a selfish, slavish, pedantic comde voyage, commonly called a pagnon leader of bears; and after having played monkey tricks at all the fashionable courts in Europe, and been plucked and fleeced by sharpers and opera girls, they come home when of age to join in recognisances with their worthy fathers; and, as a reward, are introduced into all the fashionable clubs as promising young men, tout à fait aimables et polis. Then you see them almost every night drunk in the boxes of the play-house and opera house, flirting |