About this time was heard decisively the great cause between the Houses of Douglas and Hamilton, by appeal to the Lords,--a cause as singular and as ambiguous as perhaps ever came before a court of judicature. The last Duke of Douglas,[167] a kind of lunatic, had at various periods made different wills; at first in favour of the Hamiltons, the nearest males of his race; but latterly he had substituted as his heir the son of his sister, who having offended him by marrying a poor, elderly gentleman,[168] had retired to France, and there, though herself past fifty, had been, or pretended to have been, delivered of two boys,[169] of whom one only survived. A cloud of circumstances concurred to make the Hamiltons suspect that both children were supposititious, and purchased of different peasants. The Duchess of Douglas, a woman of bold and masculine spirit, and herself a Douglas, who had artfully procured to get married to the Duke after the death of his sister, whom she had never seen, espoused the cause of Lady Jane’s children, and prevailed on the Duke, in his last days, to restore the inheritance to his rejected nephew. The widow Duchess of Hamilton, one of the beautiful Gunnings, and of a spirit equally proud and pertinacious, though of the most delicate frame and form and outward softness, as obstinately defended the cause of her sons, particularly of the youngest, who had been named the former heir; and being incited by one Andrew Stuart, a very able young man, and one of the trustees of her children, she, at immense expense to the Duke, her son, had pursued the disquisition into the births of Lady Jane’s children; and, by the books of the police at Paris, had, at the distance of near twenty years, and by the industry of Stuart, collected such a mass of circumstantial evidence, that it seemed to many men to prove that Lady Jane had never been with child, nor ever resided long enough in one place to give even an air of probability that she had lain in; to which should be added, that Lady Jane could never fix on any consistent account of the person in whose house, or of the house in which she had been delivered, and in which she allowed she had not staid above three or four days. Much proof appeared of Lady Jane’s art and hypocrisy: on the other side, little or none that she had acted like a mother, having neglected the younger child entirely for a year;[170] and the survivor proving to have all probable appearance of a swarthy French peasant,[171] and no ways resembling his pretended parents, who were fair and sandy, like most Scots. The Duke, Lady Jane’s brother, had, till near his death, been persuaded of the imposture; and the cause coming before the Lords of Session in Scotland, had, after the fullest discussion, been determined in favour of the Hamiltons. Mankind grew wonderfully divided in their opinions, when the cause was now brought before the English Peers. Though the cheat, if one, had its foundation, and almost