THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

ART. I.—1. Memorials of the Bagot Family. Privately printed.

1824.

2. Stemmata Shirleiana; or the Annals of the Shirley Family. 1841.

3. Histories of Noble British Families, with Biographical Notices of the most distinguished in each. Illustrated by Armorial Bearings, Portraits, &c. Vol. 2nd. 1846.

4. Lives of the Lindsays. By Lord Lindsay. 1849.

HE re-action in favour of what may be called the literature of feudalism, which has been going on ever since the publication of 'Percy's Reliques,' has as yet done but little towards supplying us with good histories of private families. We have had ballads, diaries, collections of papers almost innumerable. The invaluable writings of Scott have everywhere made the ancient life of Europe far more intelligible to us, and more affectionately regarded by us, than it was a hundred years ago. Indeed there was need of some such influence, after the predominant tone of the eighteenth century. The worldly wits of that period, though they had, among their unquestionable merits, much good sense and good nature, seem to have lost both when they meddled with their own ancestors. If they wanted an heroic example, they were willing enough to go to Plutarch; but they thought, with Gray, that the age of Froissart was barbarous.' Voltaire treated the Crusaders as knaves and madmen. Horace Walpole sneered at Sir Philip Sidney. Lord Chesterfield, forgetful of the saying of that maternal grandfather, Lord Halifax, from whom he derived so much of his peculiar wit, that 'the contempt of scutcheons is as much a disease in this age as the over-valuing them was in former times'-delighted in ridiculing pedigree and heralds. One of his cleverest essays in the World was against birth. He hung up two portraits, 'Adam de Stanhope' and 'Eve de Stanhope,' among his ancestors. And he said, with a great deal of humour, to a herald of that time, 'You foolish man, you don't understand your own foolish business!' Voltaire, Walpole, and Chesterfield represent thousands of inferior minds; and this way of talking on such subjects was long a predominant fashion. The higher class of

wits

wits have now given up ridiculing the traditions of Europe, though the taste for joking on the old text 'Stemmata quid faciunt?' is still prevalent among those Cockneys who fancy that a sentiment which has survived the ridicule of Juvenal is likely to fall before the wags of the nineteenth century! People are more ready, however, in spite of these deriders, to inquire what good family histories we possess than they were some time ago; partly because of the taste for antiquities diffused by Scott and others, partly because the feeling against such studies was carried so much too far, and partly because, after some generations of experience, we begin to see that our modern men are not so superior to the ancient gentlemen as they often loudly proclaim themselves to be.

The uses of good family histories are many and various. In the first place, they are excellent illustrations of general history, inasmuch as the history of a few families of a certain rank is the history of their whole times. Then they embody a vast number of those personal details and bits of local colour which help the narrator to describe an age, and the reader to feel as if he had lived in it. They have a human, a tender, and a personal interest. Their poetic value is not to be forgotten; that by which they enable us to trace character from generation to generation, and touch the mind with admiration or awe as it watches the conduct of a high race in the varying events of successive ages. To the families themselves such histories are of the highest importance, and by them they ought to be treasured as were by the old Romans those laudationes, some of which were extant in Cicero's time, and were used at family funerals, and which they preserved 'ad memoriam laudum domesticarum et ad illustrandam nobilitatem suam.' That robust people, we need scarcely say, set the highest store on family traditions; and when they yielded their political liberty at last, the truth of these traditions asserted itself—for the greatest man the change produced came of one of their oldest houses. It is as well to remember this by no means irrelevant fact; since we cannot for an instant admit the justice of the vulgar prejudice that such fundamental truths as that of race can cease to be true because the conditions under which they exhibit themselves are changed. And we say so in limine, that we may vindicate our subject from the suspicion of being merely of antiquarian curiosity.

In former days, it was the custom in most families to keep a kind of register, wherein the head of the house entered from time to time such notes respecting its members as seemed good to him. Fine, quaint, pious old documents they were, and as different in moral as in physical colour from the more business-like records which now stand in their stead. Their object especially was to

keep

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keep the rising generation in mind of the virtues of their genitors, and to teach the heir to avoid, above all, becoming labes generis, one of the greatest curses that can befal a man, as Sir Philip Sidney's father observes to him. To be sure, literary merit was not a characteristic of these works. If they soared above being registers, it was usually at the risk of the gravity of remote descendants. Our early genealogical and heraldic literature is perhaps the most curious we possess. 'Here endeth,' says Caxton, commending to the reader a book of a similar class in 1484, the book of the Ordre of Chivalry, which book is translated out of French into English, at a request of a gentyl and noble esquire, by me William Caxton.' . . 'Which book is not requisite to every common man to have, but to noble gentylmen.' In the 'Boke of St. Alban's,' two years later, we are informed that Japhet was a gentleman, but that Cain and Ham were churls, and that the Virgin Mary was a princess of coatarmour. One principal object of such treatises was to teach the reader how a 'perfit gentylman' might be known from an 'imperfect clown.' Indeed old Sir John Ferne, the author of the 'Blazon of Gentrie' (1586), hurls defiance at an imaginary 'churl' on his very title-page, by describing his work as 'compiled by John Ferne, gentleman, for the instruction of all gentlemen bearers of arms- -whom, and none other, this work concerneth.' A number of 'privileges of the gentry'-unknown, of course, to the law of the land-are usually strung together in old heraldic books, along with facts about lions at which the Zoological Society would burst with laughter, and traditions about the assumption of shields which would cause merriment in Hanwell. No wonder that a similar oddity extends itself to early family histories, such as in time came to be written at formal length, instead of the mere registers in question. No wonder that a thorough-going ancient-for the 'ancients' are modern in tone compared with these genealogical men-loved to begin with the patriarchs; while Urquhart of Cromartie carried off the palm by fairly deducing his lineage from Adam without a break, in that Promptuary of Time' which still, we believe, fetches some three guineas at sales as a curiosity. The Emperor Maximilian once took a turn in a similar direction, and had a mania for being traced to Noah. Sages reasoned, and counsellors coaxed in vain, till the cure came from his cook, who was also no common buffoon. As it is,' said that functionary, "I reverence you as a kind of god; but if you insist on being derived from Noah, I must hail your majesty as a cousin.'

A good old family history invariably begins with a family legend. Like nations, families have their mythical period. The

first man of the line is generally the mythical personage. Sometimes he is a gigantic reflection of the descendant, like the Spectre of the Brocken-a king, or a demigod, or a wizard. Sometimes the same love of wonder takes just the opposite turn; and he is a poor reaper or a forester, raised to wealth and fame by an act of romantic heroism. Take the History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus,' by David Hume of Godscroft. Could we do better than begin with that Edinburgh folio of 1644, which was a first favovrite with Sir Walter Scott? Godscroft was, like his illustrious namesake, a cadet of the great family of Hume, itself a branch of the still greater family of Dunbar. He flourished in the time of Jaines VI. Here is the account which he gives of the celebrated tradition about the First Douglas. It is a pretty fair specimen of an old manner of telling an old story-a feudal fable in the language of a pedantic age :

According, then, to the constant and generall tradition of men thus was their originall. During the reign of Soloathius, King of Scotland, one Donald Bane (that is, Donald the White or Fair) having possest himself of all the Western Islands (called Ebudes or Hebrides), and intitling himself King thereof, aspired to set the crown of Scotland also upon his head. For effectuating whereof he gathered a great army, wherein he confided so much that he set foot on the nearest continent of Scotland, to wit, the province of Kintyre and Lorne. The King's Lievetenants, Duchal and Culen, made head against him with such forces as they could assemble on the sudden. Donald, trusting to the number of his men, did bid them battell, and so prevailed at first that he made the King's army give ground, and had now almost gained the day, and withall the kingdome that lay at stake, both in his own conceit and the estimation of his enemies. In the mean time a certain nobleman, disdaining to see so bad a cause have such good successe, out of his love to his prince and desire of honour, accompanied with his sons and followers, made an onset upon these prevailing rebels with such courage and resolution that he brought them to a stand, and then heartening the discouraged fliers, both by word and example, he turns the chase, and in stead of victory they got a defeat; for Donald's men being overthrown, and fled, he himself was slain. The fact was so much the more noted as the danger had been great, and the victory unexpected. Therefore the King being desirous to know of lievetenants the particulars of the fight, and inquiring for the author of so valiant an act, the nobleman being thene in person, answer was made unto the King in the Irish tongue (which was then only in use), Sholto Du glasse; that is to say, Behold yonder black, gray man! pointing at him with the finger, and designing him by his colour and complexion, without more ceremony or addition of titles of honour. The King, considering his service and merits in preserving his crowne, and delighted with that homely designation, rewarded him royally with many great lands, and imposed upon him the name of Douglas, which hath

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