his
countrymen in his _Reminiscences_; and although he and I were not
kindred of blood, his relatives and friends were very much mine, and my
uncles and aunts were also his.

Edward Bannerman Burnett, known in after life as Edward Ramsay, and
Dean of Edinburgh, was born at Aberdeen on the last day of January 1793.
His father, Alexander, second son of Sir Thomas Burnett, Baronet, of
Leys, was an advocate, and sheriff of Kincardineshire, where the family
estates lay. The sheriff was of delicate constitution, and travelled in
the south of Europe for his health, until obliged to fly from the French
Revolution; and at Aberdeen, the first place where he and his wife
stopped, Edward was born. The Dean's mother was Elizabeth, the elder
daughter of Sir Alexander Bannerman of Elsick, and she and her sister
Mary, afterwards Mrs. Russell, were co-heirs of his estates in the
pretty valley of the Feugh, including the whole parish of Strachan, of
which the southern part, looking over into the _How_ of the Mearns, was
Mrs. Burnett's portion; the northern, with the beautiful bank of Dee
where Blackhall stands, falling to Mrs. Russell. Both sisters were
eminently handsome. I have a tradition of the young ladies, when they
first came from their York school to Edinburgh, being followed and gazed
at by passengers in the streets, for their beauty; and there are many
still living in Edinburgh who long after gazed with admiration on the
fine old lady, the Dean's mother, bending over her embroidery frame in
her window in Darnaway Street.

Alexander Burnett and his wife Elizabeth Bannerman had a large family.
Edward, the fourth son, when very young, was taken by his grand-uncle,
Sir Alexander Ramsay, and sent to school near his own house at Harlsey
in Yorkshire. Edward's first school, to which he was sent in 1801, made
a remarkable impression upon the Dean's memory. "I believe," he says,
"at that period (the very beginning of the century) it was about the
most retired village in England not of a mountainous district. No
turnpike road went through the parish. It lay in the line of no
thoroughfare. The only inhabitants of education were the clergyman, a
man of great simplicity of character, who had never been at the
University, and my great-uncle, of above fourscore, and a recluse. The
people were uneducated to an extent now unusual. Nearly all the letters
of the village were written by my uncle's gardener, a Scotchman, who,
having the degree of