The maiden name of the subject of this sketch was Carolina Oliphant. She was the third daughter and fifth child of Laurence Oliphant, Esq., of Gask, Perthshire, who had espoused his cousin Margaret Robertson, a daughter of Duncan Robertson, of Strowan, and his wife a daughter of the second Lord Nairne. The Oliphants of Gask were cadets of the formerly noble house of Oliphant; whose ancestor, Sir William Oliphant, of Aberdalgie, a powerful knight, acquired distinction in the beginning of the fourteenth century by defending the castle of Stirling, against a formidable siege by the first Edward. Carolina was born in the mansion house of Gask, on the 16th of July, 1766. Her father was so keen a Jacobite, that she, along with other two of his children, were named after Prince Charles Edward. Even the Prayer-Books which he put into his children’s hands had the names of the exiled family pasted over those of the reigning one. He could not bear the name of the “German lairdie and his leddy,” to be mentioned in his presence, and when any of the family read the newspapers to him, the reader was sharply reproved if their majesties were designated anything else than the “K—— and Q——.” The antecedents of the family naturally produced this strong feeling. Carolina’s father and grandfather had borne arms under Prince Charles in the fatal campaign of 1745-6, which crushed for ever the hopes of the Stuarts; and her grandmother had a lock from the hair of the young Chevalier, which was given to her the day it was cut. The childhood of Carolina Oliphant was thus passed amidst family traditions eminently fitted to stir her warm imagination. Not only so, the natural surroundings of her home were of the kind to nourish the poetic faculty. It was the “Land of brown heath and shaggy wood, Land of the mountain and the flood,” where green vales bedeck the landscape with verdure and beauty; farmhouses stand half-way up the braes, shadowed with birches; and old castles frown in feudal dignity. Amid such magic scenes, Miss Oliphant grew into that loving familiarity with nature in all its various moods, which imparts to her verses one of their many charms. She entered eagerly into all the pleasures which the world can afford its votaries. So energetic was she in her gaiety, that “finding at a ball, in a watering-place, that the ladies were too few for the dance, she drove home, and awoke a young friend at midnight, and stood in waiting till she was equipped to follow her to the dance.”