ng
before the King the merit of his services and his claims to favour. The
letter which he addressed to George the First, when in Holland, was
printed by Tonson, during the year 1715, with prefatory remarks by Sir
Richard Steele, whose comments upon this production of a man who,
scarcely a year after it was written, set up the standard of the
Pretender at Braemar, are expressed in these terms:

"It gives me a lively sense of the hardships of civil war, wherein all
the sacred and most intimate obligations between man and man are to be
torn asunder, when I cannot, without pain, represent to myself the
behaviour of Lord Mar, with whom I had not even the honour of any
further commerce than the pleasure of passing some agreeable hours in
his company: I say, when even such little incidents make it irksome to
be in a state of war with those with whom we have lived in any degree of
familiarity, how terrible must the image be of rending the ties of
blood, the sanctity of affinity and intermarriage, and the bringing men
who, perhaps in a few months before, were to each other the dearest of
all mankind, to meet on terms of giving death to each other at the same
time that they had rather embrace!" Thus premising, and declaring that
he could with difficulty efface from his mind all remains of good will
and pity to Lord Mar, Sir Richard Steele subjoins a document, fatal to
the reputation of Lord Mar--the following letter, which Lord Mar
addressed to the King, in explanation of his conduct.

LORD MAR TO THE KING.

"Sir,

"Having the happiness to be your Majesty's subject, and also the
honour of being of your servants, as one of your Secretaries of
State, I beg leave by this to kiss your Majesty's hand, and
congratulate your happy accession to the Throne; which I should have
done myself the honour of doing sooner, had I not hoped to have had
the honour of doing it personally ere now. I am afraid I may have
had the misfortune to be misrepresented to your Majesty, and my
reason for thinking so is, because I was the only one of the late
Queen's servants whom your Ministers here did not visit, which I
mentioned to Mr. Harley and the Earl of Clarendon, when they went
from hence to wait on your Majesty; and your Ministers carrying so
to me was the occasion of my receiving such orders as deprived me of
the honour and satisfaction of waiting on them and being known to
them. I s