received was of a general and less
authentic nature, but quite sufficient to make him acquainted with
the name, history, and circumstances of the gentleman, whom we shall
endeavour, in a few words, to introduce more accurately to our readers.

Jonathan Oldenbuck, or Oldinbuck, by popular contraction Oldbuck,
of Monkbarns, was the second son of a gentleman possessed of a small
property in the neighbourhood of a thriving seaport town on the
north-eastern coast of Scotland, which, for various reasons, we shall
denominate Fairport. They had been established for several generations,
as landholders in the county, and in most shires of England would have
been accounted a family of some standing. But the shire of----was filled
with gentlemen of more ancient descent and larger fortune. In the last
generation, also, the neighbouring gentry had been almost uniformly
Jacobites, while the proprietors of Monkbarns, like the burghers of
the town near which they were settled, were steady assertors of the
Protestant succession. The latter had, however, a pedigree of their
own, on which they prided themselves as much as those who despised them
valued their respective Saxon, Norman, or Celtic genealogies. The first
Oldenbuck, who had settled in their family mansion shortly after the
Reformation, was, they asserted, descended from one of the original
printers of Germany, and had left his country in consequence of the
persecutions directed against the professors of the Reformed religion.
He had found a refuge in the town near which his posterity dwelt,
the more readily that he was a sufferer in the Protestant cause, and
certainly not the less so, that he brought with him money enough to
purchase the small estate of Monkbarns, then sold by a dissipated laird,
to whose father it had been gifted, with other church lands, on the
dissolution of the great and wealthy monastery to which it had belonged.
The Oldenbucks were therefore, loyal subjects on all occasions of
insurrection; and, as they kept up a good intelligence with the borough,
it chanced that the Laird of Monkbarns, who flourished in 1745, was
provost of the town during that ill-fated year, and had exerted himself
with much spirit in favour of King George, and even been put to expenses
on that score, which, according to the liberal conduct of the existing
government towards their friends, had never been repaid him. By dint
of solicitation, however, and borough interest, he contrived t