Statements concerning Sir Walter Scott. 267 



It should be mentioned here that David Dunbar seems to 

 have been as unlike the Bucklaw of the tale, as one 

 tolerably honest man can be to another. 



Fourteen years after his first marriage, and probably not 

 very long after his second — to Lady Eleanor Montgomery, 

 a daughter of the Eglinton family (the date of this is not 

 given by the peerages) — comes the elegy on his own death, 

 by a fall from his horse between Edinburgh and Leith. 

 Whether the other poems are from the same hand I do 

 not remember ; but this is by the Episcopal clergyman of 

 the parish, the period being that of the Restoration. David 

 Dunbar must have been something of a character, for the 

 clergyman bewails him as his onl^ hearer. Whether this 

 was literally the case or not, the curates, as the Episcopal 

 clergy were called, were by no means unpopular iu some 

 parts of Galloway. Much must have depended on the 

 individuals. 



But the catalogue of Mr Dunbar's accomplishments is so 

 extraordinary that it shows at least how high the Cavalier 

 ideal was. 



The estate of Baldoon was eventually inherited by his 

 only child, Mary Dunbar, who married Lord Basil Hamilton. 

 It was sold by her great-grandson, the Earl of Selkirk, to 

 provide funds for his not very successful attempt to found 

 a colony, which should be a home for the exiled Highlanders 

 in North America. 



The money, or great part of it, was returned to the 

 family when the Hudson's Bay Company was wound up. 

 The unexpected difficulties encountered by Lord Selkirk in 

 America — it is to be remembered that his elder brother. 

 Burns' Lord Daer, had broken his heart over the turn 

 taken by the French Revolution, in which, like many other 

 young men in England, he had implicitly believed as a work 

 of regeneration — does not much affect the value of his 

 opinion, in his small work on Emigration, that the clearance 

 of the Highlands was in the main a necessary consequence 

 of the change of times after 1745. The statistics given by 

 the Bailie in Rob Roy are known to be from some book of 

 the period ; and besides blackmail from individuals, subsidies 

 both from the English and French governments, kept a 

 fighting population, a possible army, on foot in the north. 



