John Gibson Lockhart, next to Boswell the greatest of British biographers, though Mr. Saintsbury is inclined to class him even above Boswell, was born in the manse of Cambusnethan, June 12, 1794.[20] He came of an ancestry of which he might well be proud. Some of the best blood of Scotland ran in his veins. Lockhart of Lee, in Lanarkshire, was probably the source of his family. The Lockharts had owned territory in the Upper Ward for centuries, Symington, or Symon's Town, famous now chiefly as a junction on the Caledonian Railway, being, perhaps, their earliest possession. The name is thought to be derived from Symon Locard, who founded its church and assumed lordship of the locality in the reign of Malcolm the Maiden. Lee itself may have been acquired about the close of the thirteenth century by William Locard, whose son, another Symon, was companion to 'the Good' Sir James Douglas on his hazardous mission with the heart of Bruce. Every schoolboy knows how Douglas fell on a blood-red field of Spain, how he flung the royal casket in front of him with the cry, 'Forward, brave heart, as thou wert wont; Douglas will follow thee or die,' and how Locard assumed the lead, rescued the King's heart and the body of his comrade, and, like a wise man, returned to Scotland. Bruce's heart he laid by the high altar at Melrose, the Douglas with his own dear dust in the Kirk of St. Bride, among the Lanarkshire uplands. It was this Symon who brought to Scotland the famous Lee Penny--Scott's 'Talisman,' the most celebrated charm in the country--a heart-shaped, dark-red stone now set in a groat of Edward IV., with a silver chain and ring attached, and long sought after by the superstitious as a positive cure for the worst ailments of man and beast.