he
repaired to Aix la Chapelle, where he died in May 1732.

His wife survived him twenty-nine years, only to be the victim of mental
disease, and, as it has been said, of cruelty and neglect. She became
insane, and was placed under the charge of her sister, Lady Mary W.
Montague, who, it has been reported, from avarice, stinted her
unfortunate sister of even the common necessaries of life, and
appropriated the allowance to herself. But this statement has been
disproved.[172]

The latter years of Lord Mar were passed neither in idleness, nor wholly
in the intrigues of the Court at Albano. His amusement was to draw plans
and designs for the improvement of Scotland, which he had loved "not
wisely," but to which his warmest affections are said to have ever
recurred. In 1728 he composed a paper, in which he suggested building
bridges on the north and south sides of the city of Edinburgh: he
planned, also, the formation of a navigable canal between the Forth and
the Clyde. His beloved Alloa was sold by the Commissioners of the
forfeited estates to his brother, Lord Grange, who, in 1739, conveyed it
to Lord Erskine, his nephew. Lord Mar's children were enriched by the
gratitude of Gibbs, the architect, who bequeathed to the offspring of
his early patron the greatest part of his fortune.

The Earl of Mar was succeeded by his son, Thomas Lord Erskine, who was
deprived of the famed title of Mar by his father's attainder. Lord
Erskine was appointed by Government, Commissary of Stores at Gibraltar.
His marriage with Lady Charlotte Hope being without issue, the title was
restored to the descendant of Lord Grange, and consequently to the
children of the unfortunate Lady Grange, whose sufferings, from the
effects of party spirit, seem to belong more properly to the page of
romance, than to the graver details of history.

The conduct of John Erskine, Earl of Mar, has afforded a subject of
comment to two men of very different character, John Lockhart of
Carnwath, and the Master of Sinclair. Neither of the portraits drawn by
these master-hands are favourable; and they were, in both instances,
written under the influence of strong, yet transient impressions of
disappointment and suspicion. The mind naturally seeks for some safer
steersman to guide opinion than the intemperate though honest Jacobite,
Lockhart, or the sarcastic and slippery friend, Sinclair. The worst
peculiarity in the career of Mar was, that no one trusted him; towar