Produced by Al Haines [Frontispiece: _John, third Marquess of Bute, with his Mother aet 9 from a picture at Mount Stuart_] JOHN PATRICK THIRD MARQUESS OF BUTE, K.T. (1847-1900) A MEMOIR BY THE RIGHT REV. SIR DAVID HUNTER BLAIR BT., O.S.B. AUTHOR OF "A MEDLEY Of MEMORIES," ETC. WITH PORTRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 1921 All rights reserved TO THE MEMORY OF MY FRIEND {vii} PREFACE Just twenty years have passed away since the death, at the age of little more than fifty, of the subject of this memoir--a period of time not indeed inconsiderable, yet not so long as to render unreasonable the hope that others besides the members of his family (who have long desired that there should be some printed record of his life), and the sadly diminished numbers of his intimate friends, may be interested in learning something of the personality and the career of a man who may justly be regarded as one of the not least remarkable, if one of the least known, figures of the closing years of the nineteenth century. Disraeli, when he published fifty years ago his most popular romance, thought fit to place on the title-page a motto from old Terence: "Nosse omnia haec salus est adulescentulis."[1] Was he really of opinion--it is difficult to credit it--that the welfare of the youth of his generation depended on their familiarising themselves with the wholly imaginary life-story of "Lothair"? the romantic, sentimental, and somewhat invertebrate youth who owed such {viii} fame as he achieved to the fact that he was popularly supposed to be modelled on the young Lord Bute--though never, in truth, did any hero of fiction bear less resemblance to his fancied prototype.