ALEXANDER GORDON, THE ANTIQUARY. 35 



feared tliat the heirs had no adequate faith in the marketable value 

 of hieroglyphic elucidations, and the world still awaits the publica- 

 tion of this Critical Essay. 



From an old diary kept by a South Carolinian gentleman, about a 

 century ago, to which General de Saussure has had access, it appears 

 that Frances Gordon married, on the 30th May, 1763, John Troup, 

 probably the same whose name figures along with that of her brother, 

 as John Troup, Attorney-at-Law, among the Freemasons of the 

 Union Kilwinning Lodge of Charleston. 



At this point all traces of Alexander Gordon, the elder, are 

 lost. During the late war, the registry books of almost all the 

 churches in Charleston were destroyed, and a diligent search among 

 the older tombstones of its cemeteries has failed to reveal the 

 last resting-place of himself or his descendants. But if Roman 

 antiquary ever follows from the Old World on a pilgiimage to the 

 tomb of the author of the Itinerarium Septentrionale, it must be 

 sought, or fancied, beneath the shade of some Pride of India or other 

 semi-tropical tree, where the River Ashley finds its way to the At- 

 lantic through a region devoid of older antiquities than the trail of 

 extinct forest tribes. "Wlien Alexander Gordon settled in South 

 Carolina, the Catawbas, Yamassees, Cherokees, and other aboriginal 

 tribes still clung to their old hunting grounds, much as the tribes 

 of ancient Caledonia hovered round the settlements of its Roman 

 colonists, when Inveresk and Cramond were the Roman sea-ports of 

 the Forth. But such analogies were little heeded in that eighteenth 

 century. The Roman antiquary had exchanged the favourite re- 

 searches of his Scottish itinerary for more obscure Egyptian mys- 

 teries ; and it maybe doubted if, amid the novel duties of Provincial 

 Registrar, it ever occurred to him that he stood in a relation to 

 those native tribes, the aboriginal owners of the soil, analogous to 

 that of a prefect of the old Roman proprietor among the Gadeni and 

 Otadeni of the Lothians. 



Among the paintings and drawings, plans, and surveys of Roman 

 walls, altars, inscriptions, and all else, which Alexander and Frances 

 Charlotte, his son and daughter, inherited from the antiquary, there 

 must have been some covetable fruits of his early labours, more ap- 

 preciable now than then, if they have escaped the ravages of time, 

 and the still more destructive violence of civil war. Above all, 

 there fell to the share of Alexander Gordon, jun., the portraiture 



