Burnet, who, though a connection of Claverhouse’s, is very far from displaying any partiality for him, allows that he was ‘a man of good parts.’ Dalrymple records that ‘Dundee had inflamed his mind from his earliest youth, by the perusal of antient poets, historians and orators, with the love of the great actions they praise and describe.’ Finally, there is the testimony of the ‘officer’ who wrote the ‘Memoirs of Dundee’ published in 1714, and who makes direct reference to his ‘liberal education in humanity and in mathematicks.’ The question of Claverhouse’s scholarship is not one of special moment in itself; yet it acquires some interest from the animated controversy to which it has given rise, and which originated in a hasty comment made by Sir Walter Scott. The novelist, after referring to a newly published letter, casually added, ‘Claverhouse, it may be observed, spells like a chambermaid.’ Subsequent writers, interpreting this into a general estimate of Dundee’s educational acquirements, repeated the petty and irrelevant charge, in season and out of season, almost as though the quality of his orthography constituted a test by which his whole character was to be estimated. That Claverhouse was erratic in his spelling cannot be denied. It may be questioned, on the other hand, whether, in this respect, he displayed greater disregard for orthography than the average gentleman of his day. If he wrote ‘I hop’ for ‘I hope,’ ‘deuk’ for ‘Duke,’ ‘seased’ for ‘seized,’ ‘fisik’ for ‘physic,’ and ‘childring’ for ‘children,’ it does not require a very extensive acquaintance with the correspondence of the seventeenth century to know that dukes and earls, and even lawyers and divines, indulged in vagaries equally startling. But, if the arbitrary and occasionally whimsical spelling of his letters affords no proof of exceptional ignorance, the vigour, clearness, and directness of the style in which they are written give them a place rather above than below the epistolatory standard of the time.