the funeral feast as though to a solemn picnic; and other provisions of all kinds were purchased in quantities sufficient to have stocked the Black Douglas's terrible larder many times over, while the wine and ale were reckoned by puncheons and buckets.

Montrose's life at college seems to have been much the same as that of any young man of rank and fortune to-day at Christ Church or Trinity. He mixed freely in all the diversions of the place and time, hunted, hawked, and shot, played golf on the links of St. Andrews and tennis in the court at Leith. At archery he was especially skilful. In the second year of his residence he won the prize annually shot for by the students, a silver arrow with a medal bearing the name of the winner, and this he held against all competitors while he remained at the University. His walls were hung with his bows, just as to-day the successful cricketers and oarsmen of Oxford and Cambridge arrange round their rooms the instruments of their triumphs. Eminent in those accomplishments which always secure the admiration of the young, profuse in hospitality to his friends, liberal to the poor, and especially to those needy professors of the fine arts who were never slow in those days to scent out a generous patron, he evidently began even in these early years to engage the attention of his contemporaries. His own estates and tenants were not neglected; but his vacations were mostly passed in visits to the houses of his brothers-in-law and of the heads of the various branches of his clan, each of whom, according to the custom of the time, was considered as in some sort the guardian of his young chief, though Lord Napier, Sir William Graham of Claverhouse, and Patrick Graham of Inchbrakie seem to have had the largest share in an office which with a young gentleman of such cheerful tastes and dispositions can have been no sinecure.

This merry life was not, however, without a check. In April, 1628, his sister Dorothea was married from Napier's house in Edinburgh to young James Rollo, and both then and afterwards at Carnock in Fife, where the honeymoon was spent, there had been high festival. The result of all this gaiety, alternated with days of hard exercise in the saddle and on the links, was that the lad fell sick on his return to college. For some days he was seriously ill. Two doctors were called in, and to judge by their fees must have been assiduous in their visits. They ordered their patient's long curls to be ruthlessly shorn, and they ordered also a diet which strikes our modern notions as curiously generous for a young fellow who, to speak plainly, had probably been only over-eating himself. However, nature and the doctors together triumphed—or, it may be, nature in spite of the doctors; and after a few weeks' confinement, cheered by chess and cards and the gift of a valuable hawk from his kinsman of Fintrie, Montrose was once more about at his old occupations—one of the first recorded acts of his convalescence being a breakfast-party given to some of his young friends who had been most attentive to him in his sickness.

Of his studies we know much less than of his amusements. Sums for the purchase and binding of books appear in his accounts, which were kept as scrupulously by his new tutor, Master John Lambye, as by Master Forrett at Glasgow, and from the same source we learn that he had begun the study of Greek. Plutarch's Lives, Cæsar's Commentaries, Lucan, and Quintus Curtius were now added to his library, though the verses found written in some of them must belong to a later date. Undergraduates, more happy than their descendants, were not in those days pestered with examinations; but that Montrose at least attended lectures after a fashion is clear from an entry in his tutor's accounts of the sum of twenty-nine shillings paid to "a scholar who writes my lord's notes in the school." But we may suppose that his studies were directed more by his own tastes and dispositions than by the curriculum of the place, which, as was the case not so long ago in our English Universities, was not likely to be very sternly enforced on the young aristocrats who then frequented St. Andrews. It is, however, certain that he cannot have passed his time only in play. More fortunate in some respects than another famous member of his House, Montrose has never been called a block-head because he spelled no better than the rest of his world. Among his contemporaries his reputation stood high. "He was of very good parts," says Clarendon, "which were improved by a good education;" and posterity has accepted the verdict. His intellect was indeed quick and eager rather than solid. His classical knowledge was that rather of a poet than a scholar, and his poetical fame must be content to rest upon a few stanzas which have taken their place among English lyrics; but it will be seen that he had read and thought much on those problems of government which the inhabitants of this kingdom were then seriously addressing themselves to solve. A book published after his death by Thomas Saintserf (son of the Bishop of Galloway), who had been his secretary during the stormiest years of his life, bears witness, in a dedication to his son, to the polished and scholarly tone of the conversation he loved to encourage among his associates. We are told, and may believe, that the few and enforced pauses in his short tumultuous career were relieved by study; but no man turns to that solace in his hours of disappointment who has not felt at least some touch of its enchantment in his youth. We may therefore conclude that he found some time amid the gaieties of St. Andrews to read the books that had been bought for him.

Among the houses that Montrose visited was Kinnaird Castle, the seat of Lord Carnegie, his nearest neighbour in Forfarshire. The families were already connected by the marriage of Eupheme, Lord Carnegie's youngest sister, to Robert Graham of Morphie. The tie was now to be drawn closer.[2] There were six daughters at Kinnaird Castle, and to the youngest of these, Magdalene, Montrose began to pay his court. The wooing was not long. His guardians were well pleased to see their young chief in a fair way to carry on the line; and that chief, in youth as in manhood, was not wont to linger over anything he undertook. He was married in the private chapel of the castle on November 10th, 1629. The bride's age is not known, but as the bridegroom can only just have completed his seventeenth year, they may be fairly allowed the conventional title of the young couple. There is a tradition that she had been previously courted by the Master of Ogilvy, which, if true, might suggest that she had some advantage of Montrose in years. But nothing is certainly known of her—of her appearance, tastes, or temper, of the course of her married life or her relations with her husband. She bore him four sons, the second coming into the world just as his father attained his majority, and died in 1645.

According to the terms of the marriage-contract the next three years were passed at Kinnaird Castle, but no record of them exists. All the bridegroom's books, papers, and furniture were removed from St. Andrews to the castle. We catch a glimpse of him very soon after the marriage on the links at Montrose, and we know that he was made a burgess of Aberdeen shortly before the ceremony. We are also told that after the novelty of his new life had worn off, he applied himself so assiduously to his studies as to become, in the pious old chronicler's words, "not merely a great master, but a critic in the Greek and Latin," of which we may believe so much as we choose. But the only visible memorial of this time is his