. [I
was so much the youngest of a numerous family that I had no
playfellow, and for that reason listened with all my ears to
the grown people's conversation, most especially when my
mother and the friends of her youth got upon old stories;
nor did I lose my taste for them when I grew old enough to
converse with her on equal terms, and enquire into
particulars.] Now I am [an] ancient [tabby] myself, I should
be a great treasure of anecdote to anybody who had the same
humor,--but I meet with few who have. They read vulgar tales
in books, Wraxall, and so forth, what the footmen and maids
only gave credit to at the moment, but they desire no
farther information. I dare swear many of your readers never
heard of the Duke of Argyle before. 'Pray, who was Sir
Robert Walpole,' they ask me, 'and when did he live?'--or
perhaps--'Was not the great Lord Chatham in Queen Anne's
days?'[113]

[Footnote 113: In 1827, Lady Louisa wrote for Caroline,
Lady Scott, a great-granddaughter of the duke, _Some
Account of John, Duke of Argyle, and his Family_. This
delightful memoir was first printed (privately) in 1863.
It was published in 1899, in _Selections from the
Manuscripts of Lady Louisa Stuart_.]

"[Amongst the persons most pleased here is Lady Charlotte
Lindsay. She has the true North humor, and love of humor,
and she does enjoy it heartily. They] have, to help [them],
an exemplification on two legs in [their] country
apothecary, whom you have painted over and over without the
honor of knowing him; an old, dry, arguing, prosing,
obstinate Scotchman, very shrewd, rather sarcastic, a sturdy
Whig and Presbyterian, _tirant un peu sur le democrate_.
Your books are birdlime to him, however; he hovers about the
house to obtain a volume when others have done with it. I
long to ask him whether Douce Davie was any way _sib_ to
him. He acknowledges he would not _now_ go to Muschat's
Cairn at night for any money--he had such a horror of it
'sixty years ago' when a laddie. But I am come to the end of
my fourth page, and will not tire you with any more
scribbling....

"P. S.--If I had known nothing, and the whole world had told
me the contrary, I should have found you out in that one
pare