The silly conceited fool is not rare anywhere, but only occasionally are his sayings or doings amusing. Harry Erskine’s elder brother the Earl of Buchan was as well known in Edinburgh as himself. He certainly had brains, but was very pompous and puffed up. When Sir David Brewster was a young man and only beginning to make his name a paper of his on optics was highly spoken of. “You see, I revised it,” said the Earl with sublime conceit. Asked if he had been at the church of St. George’s in the forenoon, “No,” he said, “but my mits are left on the front pew of the gallery. When the congregation see them they are pleased to think that the Earl of Buchan is there.” He believed himself irresistible with the other sex. He thus addressed a handsome young lady: “Good-bye, my dear, but pray remember that Margaret, Countess of Buchan, is not immortal.” An article in the _Edinburgh Review_ once incurred his displeasure, so he laid the offending number down in the hall, ordered his footmen to open the front door of his house in George Street, and then solemnly kicked out the offending journal. When Scott was ill, Lockhart tells us the Earl composed a discourse to be read at his funeral and brought it down to read to the sick man, but he was denied admittance. The Scots have always been noted for taking themselves seriously. _Nemo me impune lacessit_ is no empty boast. In Charles the Second’s time the Bishop of St. Asaph had written a treatise to show that the antiquity of the royal race was but a devout imagination; that the century and more of monarchs of the royal line of Fergus were for the most part mere myth and shadow. Sir George Mackenzie grimly hinted that had my Lord been a Scots subject, it might have been his unpleasant duty to indict him for high treason. An earlier offender felt the full rigour of the law. In 1618 Thomas Ross had gone from the north to study at Oxford. He wrote a libel on the Scots nation and pinned it to the door of St. Mary’s Church. He was good enough to except the King and a few others, but the remaining Caledonians were roundly, not to say scurrilously, rated. Possibly the thing was popular with those about him, but the King presently discovered in it a deep design to stir up the English to massacre the Scots. Ross was seized and packed off to Edinburgh for trial. Too late the unfortunate man saw his error or his danger. His plea of partial temporary insanity availed him not, his right hand was struck off and then he was beheaded and quartered, his head was stuck on the Netherbow Port and his hand at the West Port. To learn him for his tricks, no doubt!