The Earl was not a great man. In conspiracy, in war, in government, in diplomacy, he was a rather oddly ineffectual man. He had, in short, a genius for goodness, and an independence of spirit, a perfect disinterestedness, an inability to blind himself to disagreeable facts, and to the merits of the opposite side—a balance, in fact, of temperament and of humour—which are inconsistent with political success. We may wish that his taste in jokes had been less that of the _philosophes_. We may wish that, if the Cause was indeed hopeless, he had deserted it without reproaching his old master. He might have abstained from disseminating the tattle of Helvetius. There is very little else which mortal judgment can find to reprehend in brave, honest, generous, humorous, kind George Keith, who was, without Christian faith, the pattern of all the Christian virtues. He was of two worlds—the old Royalist world, and the Age of Revolution—yet undisturbed in heart he lived and died, Vetustæ vitæ imago, Et specimen venientis ævi.[33] III MURRAY OF BROUGHTON In black contrast to the name, the character, the happy life and peaceful, kindly end of the good Earl Marischal stand the infamy, the ruined soul, the wretched existence and miserable death of John Murray of Broughton. ‘No lip of me or mine comes after Broughton’s!’ said the Whig father of Sir Walter Scott, as he threw out of window the teacup from which the traitor had drunk. Murray was poisonous; was shunned like a sick, venomed beast. His name was blotted out of the books of the Masons’ lodge to which he belonged; even the records of baptisms in his Episcopal chapel attest the horror in which he was held for thirty years, for half his life. Yet this informer remained, through that moiety of his degraded existence, true in heart to the Cause which the Earl Marischal forsook and disdained, true to his affection for his Prince; and it is even extremely probable that, after he became titular King, Charles, on a secret expedition to England, visited Murray in his London house. The vacant, contemned years, when his beautiful wife had ceased to share his infamy, were partly beguiled in the composition of the ‘Memorials,’ which Mr. Fitzroy Bell has edited, with reinforcements from the Stuart MSS., the papers in the Record Office, and the archives of the Quai d’Orsay. In these we find a spectacle which is rare: a traitor convicted, exposed, detested, yet still clinging to the Cause which he wrought for and sold, still striving to batter himself into his own self-respect, and to extenuate or bluster out his own dishonour. The Earl Marischal has left us no memoirs; a manuscript which he gave to Sir Robert Murray Keith has been lost. But Murray’s papers are still in the possession of his great-grandson by a second marriage, Mr. George Siddons Murray, who has generously sanctioned their publication.