by writers who have sent forth volumes in the form of Memoirs of their Own Times, Personal Recollections, Remarks upon Past Scenes, etc. etc.  It is not within the scope of this work to examine these, nor can I specify the many communications I have from different persons, both at home and in our colonial possessions; in fact, the references in many cases have been lost or mislaid.  But I must acknowledge, however briefly, my obligations to Dr. Carruthers, Inverness, and to Dr. Cook, Haddington, who have favoured me with valuable contributions.

Now, when we come to examine the general question of memoirs connected with contemporary history, no work is better known in connection with this department of Scottish literature than the History of his Own Times, by my distinguished relative, Dr. Gilbert Burnett, Bishop of Salisbury.  Bishop Burnett’s father, Lord Crimond, was third son of my father’s family, the Burnetts of Leys, in Kincardineshire.  There is now at Crathes Castle, the family seat, a magnificent full-length portrait of the Bishop in his robes, as Prelate of the Garter, by Sir Godfrey Kneller.  It was presented by himself to the head of his family.  But, as one great object of the Bishop’s history was to laud and magnify the personal character and public acts of William of Orange, his friend and patron, and as William was held in special abhorrence by the Jacobite party in Scotland, the Bishop holds a prominent, and, with many, a very odious position in Scottish Reminiscences; in fact, he drew upon himself and upon his memory the determined hatred and unrelenting hostility of adherents to the Stuart cause.  They never failed to abuse him on all occasions, and I recollect old ladies in Montrose, devoted to the exiled Prince, with whom the epithet usually applied to the Prelate was that of “Leein’ Gibby[14].”

Such language has happily become a “Reminiscence.”  Few would be found now to apply such an epithet to the author of the History of his Own Times, and certainly it would not be applied on the ground of the Jacobite principles to which he was opposed.  But a curious additional proof of this hostility of Scottish Jacobites to the memory of Burnett has lately come to light.  In a box of political papers lately found at Brechin Castle, belonging to the Panmure branch of the family, who, in ’15, were forfeited on the ground of their Jacobite opinions and adherence to the cause of Charles Edward, there has been found a severe and bitter supposed epitaph for Bishop Burnett.  By the kindness of the Earl of Dalhousie I was permitted to see this epitaph, and, if I chose, to print it in this edition.  I am, however, unwilling to stain my pages with such an ungenerous and, indeed, I may say, so scurrilous a representation of the character of one who, in the just opinion of our Lyon King-at-Arms, himself a Burnett of the Kemnay branch, has characterised the Bishop of Salisbury as “true and honest, and far beyond the standard of his times as a Clergyman and as a Bishop.”  But the epitaph found in these Panmure papers shows clearly the prejudices of the age in which it was written, and in fact only embodies something of that spirit and of those opinions which we have known as still lingering in our own Reminiscences.