^2 Henry Riddelt on 



I print one or two of her letters, showing her charming 

 personality. Grood hearted, lively, sharp-tongued Mattie Stewart, 

 alive to me though she died in Bath 115 years ago. 



Robert Stewart's brother, Williann, built Wilmont, but it 

 only remained a Stewart possession for two generations, his 

 successor having to sell it owing to financial reverses. It later 

 came into the family of the Reades, descendants of a daughter 

 of Sturrock, so that it came back to the blood but not to the 

 name. The Ixeades were and are well known in the city, the 

 late R. H. S. Reade, Esq., bearing the memory of the family in his 

 name. One of William Stewart's daughters, Eliza, married John 

 Belliiigham, of Castlebellingham, and after her death her husband 

 chose her cousin Kate Clarke as her successor. 



James Templeton, the father of John, married Eleanor 

 Legge, one of the family we are concerned with, and thus John 

 Templeton comes into the singular chain of family connection. 

 John Templeton was one of the great botanists and naturalists of 

 the time. He lived at Cranmore, where he acclimatised very 

 many rare plants, shrubs and trees. John was born in Bridge 

 Street in 1766, and was educated by the famous David Manson. 

 He began to study plants in 1790, after his father's death, chiefly 

 concerned with problems of cultivation in Cranmore, in which 

 he was always singularly successful. In 1793 he laid out an 

 experimental garden. Later on he became the familiar friend of 

 all the great botanists of the day. It was in 1795 that he dis- 

 covered the Irish Rose — " Rosa Hibernica," and got a five-guinea 

 prize from one of the Dublin Societies. So well was he thought 

 of that he was ofi"ered by Sir Joseph Banks what was then a large 

 salary and a free grant of land to go out to Australia for work 

 there. Dr. Thomas Taylor says of him. — " I believe thirty years 

 ago his acquirements in the natural history of organized beings 

 rivalled that of any individual in Europe." He had a singular 

 facility with pencil and brush, and his delineations of plants and 

 birds Avere surprising in their fidelity. He contributed the notes 

 on Natural History to the Belfast Magazine, started in 1808 



