distinction of manner were hereditary, was educated to the point of real learning, was merry, witty, generous - the Egeria of how many! And now it would appear that the impression left with her contemporaries had been one which the Austrian grande dame could only hear of with mixed emotions. She had been introduced to the vast public of the famous author as a hoyden with her hair tumbled down enchanting as were the outlines and colouring of the picture, that could not fail to wound spiritual vanity a little. "A vision. It was a young lady, the loveliness of whose very striking features was enhanced by the animation of the chase and the glow of the exercise, mounted on a beautiful horse, jet black.. She wore, what was then somewhat unusual, a coat, vest, and hat, resembling those of a man, which fashion has since called a riding-habit. Her long black hair streamed on the breeze, having in the hurry of the chase escaped from the ribbon which bound it. Some very broken ground, through which she guided her horse with the most admirable address and presence of mind, retarded her course and brought her closer to me. I had, therefore, a full view of her uncommonly fine face and person, to which an inexpressible charm was added by the wild gaiety of the scene and the romance of her singular address and unexpected appearance." VOL. CCXVI.-NO. MCCCX. Mr Andrew Lang has said that all men who read Rob Roy become innocent rivals of Francis Osbaldistone. But that is not really true. Broadly speaking, it is only the man of the world who is allured by the Dianas of life. Thorncliff, John, Richard, and William Osbaldistone, sullenly writhing under the lash of their cousin's wit, are exemplars of the male resentful, because suffering from what, in the strange language of the moment, must be called the inferiority complex. Jane Anne, looking inscrutably between her narrowed eyelids at the diligent reader, wondered, no doubt, if her girlish tongue had really been so reminiscent of scorpions, and if poor dear Walter Scott had himself been stung, for the criticism with which his admiration for his heroine was peppered did seem to betray latent irritation. on her Own And when their troubled youth was over and their married life was of the past, Francis Osbaldistone wrote : in the eyes of the half-fledged playful despotism, again shaded law student whose genius one off into melancholy and serious had fostered so untiringly, and feeling, to lead me back her with whose love affairs one willing subject had so nobly bored oneself. hard terms." It was now fully explained why its author had never sent Rob Roy travelling to Styria. A mettle quean "so Rob Roy Macgregor labelled Miss Vernon. "The rose of the wilderness, the heath-bell of Cheviot," was the toast of Justice Inglewood. "And let her health go round, around, "She's a wild slip that," unctuously pronounced Andrew Fairservice. But she was a Greek and Latin scholar, spoke the languages of modern Europe, was acquainted with their literature, and was grounded in philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy. As she said of herself: "I assure you there has been some pains taken in my education, although I can neither sew a tucker, nor work cross-stitch, nor, as the vicar's fat wife, with as much truth as elegance, goodwill, and politeness, was pleased to say in my behalf, do any other useful thing in the varsal world." Witchery was her lover's explanation of her dominion over him. "It cost her but a change of look and tone, from that of real and haughty resentment to that of kind and "You know how long and happily I lived with Diana. You know how I lamented her. But you do not-cannot know, how much she deserved her husband's sorrow." The heroine of the novel died in tranquil old age, in the country of her birth, with those she loved around her. The novelist had come to an end of his rousing tale, and would tie up the ends neatly, as others of his trade since, and without subservience to the unescapable domination of character over destiny. Countess von Purgstall, making impartial survey from her hillock of pillows of her own far away young womanhood, knew that, given herself, and all that had gone to the making of herself, the circumstances of her own last years and of her dying hour were an inevitability— her own death on that account was better art' than that of Mrs Francis Osbaldistone. We are what biology has made us, and in the veins of Jane Anne Cranstoun there rioted some of the most turbulent blood in Scotland. Her father, George Cranstoun, was the youngest son of the fifth Lord Cranstoun— a peerage named after the lands own grandmother was Anne, daughter of Sir Alexander Don of Newtown, and his mother was Lady Jean Ker, whose family ramifications occupy four and a half of the pages of Mr Burke. She bore her husband twelve children, and George Cranstoun, her seventh son, married Miss Maria Brisbane of Brisbane in Ayrshire, whose mother had been a Nicholson of Oarnock. It will be realised that when the hour came that their daughter with her superfluity of quarterings must seek the suffrages of the Austrian Court, Jane Anne was able to ruffle it there serenely. in Midlothian appointed by the most famous soldiers of charters of David II. and his time. George Cranstoun's Robert II. to Thomas of Cranstoun. Since 1170, when the name of Elfric de Cranstoun appears in the charter of the Abbey of Holyrood, the Cranstouns had passed into the race by their marriages the characteristics of many a vigorous family. The first known ancestress was Janet, daughter of Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch, Warden of the Middle Marches, knighted at Flodden, and done to death by the Kerrs in Edinburgh High Street. The Cranstoun wives, as usually occurred in those centuries, were invariably the daughters of neighbours, and there is an Elizabeth Johnstone of Elphinstone, and Margaret, who was one of the Ramsays of Dalhousie, a family for ever protesting against the domination of the English-raiding, capturing castles, and persisting as soldiers and sailors and statesmen ever since. The next marriage to Barbara Gray of Foulis brought into relationship the Ogilvys and the Ruthvens and their agitated backgrounds; and William, third Lord Cranstoun, who was taken prisoner with King Charles at the battle of Worcester and imprisoned in the Tower, had for mother Lady Elizabeth Stewart, daughter of the last and ill-begotten Earl of Bothwell, and for wife Lady Mary Leslie, who could trace royal descent from Ludwig of Hungary who died 1270, and who was herself daughter of one of But that hour did not strike until she was nearly forty years of age, and it may be said at once that of her childhood and young girlhood nothing is known, for few family letters have been preserved. Inferences have to be made, and the first is that as the fourth of five surviving children of the seventh son of a race that had known attainder of what had never been great possessions, Jane Anne was not reared in luxury. Who was in the impecunious Scotland of that date! There is no hint that her father belonged to any profession, nor where the children were born, nor where brought up. Affirmation can only begin round about the year 1790, by which time her father was dead, her mother was living in her native county of Ayr, her elder sister Margaret was married to a prosperous cradle, and what it proclaims laird there, Cunninghame of is not a habit of dejection, but Lainshaw, and her younger a habit of impatience. The sister Helen was the wife of summer sun was shining, the Dugald Stewart of Catrine, world was wide and glowing, Professor of Moral Philosophy and she was cooped up in a in the University of Edin- street-the domestic exchequer burgh, who had been tutor possibly providing holiday jourto her cousin Lord Lothian. neying for brother George but That the married sisters did not for herself, and the arrangetheir best to supply Jane Anne ments made by and insisted with a husband too is the safest on by herself indubitably; but of surmises, and it is also pretty not amusing on that account. safe to assert that when the younger brother, George Cranstoun, began to attend the classes of the Professor of Civil Law in Edinburgh, and Jane Anne, now rising thirty,' established herself with him in a tiny flat in Frederick Street, the Cranstoun family at large purred a sort of secondary approval of this present solution of existence for her. Frederick Street what a cage! But the caged is sometimes the most startling member of a community. One has but to recall a parrot dominating a drab household from its perch in the window to recognise that. And their sardonic antipathy to all dowdiness of mind and of appearance gives the essence of parrot-hood to the Diana-Janes of life. "This here place is very dull," wrote Miss Cranstoun from Edinburgh to Walter Scott at Montrose during the summer vacation of 1790. It is the lively proclamation of one who was never dull even in her It Was anything-romanticism and buoyancy apart-fundamentally very amusing? was not amusing to be poor, and quite as bored with household drudgery as Diana of the novel. George Cranstoun goes on a visit to his closest friend Thomas Thomson at his home at the manse of Dailly. Mrs Thomson has spoilt George sadly; he cannot get a shirt washed so that he is able to wear it, nor anything done as it was done at Dailly," writes the sister gaily. We can believe that she was not an expert in the art of ruffling shirts, and can almost hear her invective as she stands at the task; and that she was in any way meticulous as a housekeeper is extremely unlikely. You cannot keep open house on very small means without a good deal of laisser faire, and the Frederick Street flat had its continuous guests. Mrs MacCunn1 says :— "The intellectual centre of Edinburgh society was the home-an old belated country 1 Sir Walter Scott's Friends.' Published by Blackwood. |