Each house had its record of famous marriages. There was the story of how Lord Westmoreland sought the hand of the heiress of Child, the banker, and was repulsed with “Your blood, my Lord, is good, but money is better.” My Lord and the young lady were speedily galloping towards the border, while Mr. Child “breathed hot and instant on their trace.” He had caught them too, but his leader was shot down or his carriage disabled by some trick (the legends vary), and he was too late after all. He made the best of it, of course, and in due time Lady Sophia Fane, daughter of the marriage, inherited grandpa’s fortune and his bank at Temple Bar. Odder still was the marriage, in 1826, of Edward Gibbon Wakefield to Ellen Turner. It was brought about by an extraordinary fraud, and a week after the far from happy couple were run to earth at Calais by the bride’s relatives. They “quoted William and Mary upon me till I was tired of their Majesties’ names,” was Wakefield’s mournful excuse for submitting to a separation. He was afterwards tried for abduction, found guilty, and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment; while a special Act of Parliament (7 and 8 Geo. IV. c. 66) declared the marriage null and void. Wakefield ended strangely as a political economist. Is not his “theory of colonisation” writ large in all the text books? A pair of Lord High Chancellors must conclude our list. In November 1772, John Scott, afterwards Lord Eldon, was married at Blackshiels, in East Lothian, to Bessie Surtees, the bridegroom being but twenty-one. Though the Rev. Mr. Buchanan, minister of an Episcopal congregation at Haddington, officiated, it was a runaway match and an irregular marriage. Lord Erskine, about October 1818, was wedded at the “King’s Head,” Springfield, to Miss Mary Buck (said to have been his housekeeper). He was about seventy, and, one fears, in his dotage. A number of extravagant legends still linger as to the ceremony. He was dressed in woman’s clothes, and played strange pranks. He and his intended spouse had with them in the coach a brace of merry-begots (as our fathers called them), over whom he threw his cloak during the ceremony in order to make them his heirs. It is still a vulgar belief in the North that if the parents of children born out of wedlock are married, the offspring, to be legitimised, must be held under their mother’s girdle through the nuptial rites. Now, by the law of Scotland, such a marriage produces the effect noted; but the presence or absence of the children is void of legal consequence. As far as is known, Erskine had one son called Hampden, born December 5, 1821, and no other by Mary Buck. It is worth noting that Robert Burns, on his road to Carlisle in 1787, fell in by the way “with a girl and her married sister”; and “the girl, after some overtures of gallantry on my side, sees me a little cut with the bottle, and offers to take me in for a Gretna Green affair.” Burns was already wed, Scots fashion, to Jean Armour.