Materials for a complete life of the Earl do not exist. We are obliged to follow him by aid of slight traces in historical manuscripts, biographies, memoirs, and letters, published or unpublished. Even in this unsatisfactory way, the Earl is worth pursuing: for if he left slight traces on history, and was never successful in action, he was a man, and a humourist, of singular merit and charm, a person almost universally honoured and beloved through three generations. This last of the Earls Marischal of Scotland was certainly one of the most original and one of the most typical characters of the eighteenth century. Losing home, lands, and rank for the cause of Legitimism, the Earl was the reverse of a fanatical Royalist; indeed he seems to have become a Jacobite from Republican principles. These were strengthened, no doubt, by his great experience of kings; but even when he was a young man his bookplate bore the motto _Manus hæc inimica tyrannis_. Then probably, as certainly in later life, he loved to praise Sidney, and others who (in his opinion) died for freedom. Yet the Earl was ‘out,’ for no Liberal cause, in 1715, and in 1719: while he was plotting against King George and for King James, till 1745. He was admitted to the secret of the rather Fenian Elibank Plot in 1752, and only reconciled himself with the English Government in 1759. On his death-bed he called himself ‘an old Jacobite,’ while, for twenty years at least, his favourite companions had been the advanced thinkers, prelusive to the Revolution, Rousseau, Hume, d’Alembert, Voltaire, Helvetius. All this appears the reverse of consistent. The Earl gave up everything, and risked his life often, for the White Rose, while his opinions, religious and political, tended in the direction of the Red Cap of Liberty and the Rights of Man. The explanation is that the Earl, when young, a patriotic Scot, and a persecuted Episcopalian, saw ‘freedom’ in the emancipation of Scotland from a foreign tyrant, the Elector of Hanover; in the Repeal of the Union, and in the relief of his religious body from the tyranny of the Kirk. Till his death he was all for liberty, and could not bear to see even a caged bird. These were the unusual motives (these, and the influence of his mother, a Jacobite by family and sentiment) which converted a born Liberal into a partisan of the King over the Water. Thus this representative of traditional and romantic Scottish loyalty to the Stuarts was essentially a child of the advanced, and emancipated, and enlightened century which succeeded that into which he was born.