Though tenth Earl (the first of the hereditary Marischals to be ‘belted earl’ was William, in 1458), George Keith was apt to mock at hereditary _noblesse_. _Stemmata quid faciunt?_ He had a story of a laird who grumbled, during a pestilence, ‘In such times a gentleman is not sure of his life.’ The date of his birth was never known. In old age he cast an agreeable mystery about this point. He was once heard to say that he was twenty-seven in 1712; if so, he died at ninety-three (1778). Others date his birth in 1693, others in 1689; d’Alembert says (on the authority of one who had the fact from Ormonde) that he was _premier brigadier_ of that general’s army in 1712. An engraving from a portrait of the Earl as a young man represents him as then twenty-three years of age. If the engraving was done in Paris, as seems probable, in 1716, he would be born in 1693. Oddly enough the pseudo-Memoirs of Madame de Créquy (who is made to speak of him as her true love) throw a similar cloud over the year of her birth. Concerning the Earl’s father, Lockhart of Carnwath writes that he had great vivacity of wit, an undaunted courage, and a soul capable of great things, ‘but no seriousness.’ His mother, of the house of Perth, was necessarily by birth a Jacobite. The song makes her say: I’ll be Lady Keith again The day the King comes o’er the water. The Earl’s tutor was probably Meston, the Jacobite wit and poet. The Earl succeeded his father in 1712. His own first youth had been passed in Marlborough’s wars; from 1712 to the death of Queen Anne, and the overthrow of hopes of a Restoration by the Tories, he lived about town, a brilliant colonel of Horse Guards, short in stature and slight in build, but with a beautiful face, and dark, large eyes. So we see him in the portrait of about 1716. The following letter, the earliest known letter of the Earl, displays him as a disciplinarian. Conceivably the mutinous Wingfeild was a Jacobite, but, by September 12, 1714, the chance for a rising of the Guards for King James had passed, Queen Anne was dead, and the Earl was still colonel in the army of George I. _To Lord Chief Justice Parker_ Stowe MSS. 750, f. 58. ‘September 12, 1714.