Ohituary Notices. xxvii 
deep root ; and this may have helped to its welcome by the popular 
voice. Besides the original stem of Bonshaw and the branch of 
Drum, the name is found in Dumbartonshire, Forfarshire, and other 
Scottish counties. The Irwins of Roscommon, Cromwellian settlers, 
claim descent from the family of Drum ; and the first great writer 
of the United States, proud that he united the name of Washington 
with that of Irvine, sent an engraving of his portrait to the Laird of 
Drum, in token of his belief that his Scottish blood was derived 
from the same source. 
The son of Charles I.’s sheriff, as faithful a royalist and strenuous 
an anti-Covenanter as his father, was sentenced to death for his 
principles, but escaped execution by the victory of Montrose at 
Kilsyth. After the Restoration he declined a patent of nobility as 
Earl of Aberdeen, which had been offered to his father by Charles 
I., because the patent could not be made at the date of the offer. 
The memories of such a name and ancestry clustering round the 
old tower, the ruined chapel, and the ancient Forest of Drum, could 
scarcely fail to transmit a taste for Scottish history, music, and song, 
and an attachment to Conservative principles and Episcopal and 
anti-Co venanting tenets. Nor will other traits in the character of 
his forebears, which with this view have been glanced at in the 
foregoing sketch, be found wanting in the subject of the present 
notice, as in a gallery of family pictures we are sometimes struck 
by the recurrence of the same features in a feudal baron, a cavalier, 
and a modern gentleman. 
Mr Irvine was educated at home under a tutor, and afterwards at 
Marischal College, Aberdeen. During or shortly after completing 
his collegiate course, he came into contact with a group of men 
almost contemporaries, but most of them a little older than himself, 
who were destined to extend the credit of the town and county of 
Barbour, Boece, and Spalding, as the most fertile seed-plot in 
Scotland for historical talent ; Hill Burton, the critical, yet vigorous, 
historian of Scotland ; Dr Grub, the exact annalist of the Episcopal 
Church ; John Stuart and Joseph Robertson, the two most thorough 
students of Scottish records in their time. With three other Aber- 
donians, who acquired honourable fame in the same field, he had 
early opportunities of intercourse — Mr Cosmo Innes, son of the 
neighbouring Laird of Durris, who became the Professor of History 
