biography, excellently done, in _Angling Songs_, by Miss Stoddart, the
poet's daughter (Blackwoods, Edinburgh, 1889). Mr. Stoddart was born
on St. Valentine's Day 1810, in Argyll Square, Edinburgh, nearly on
the site of the Kirk of Field, where Darnley was murdered. He came of
an old Border family. Miss Stoddart tells a painful tale of an aged
Miss Helen who burned family papers because she thought she was
bewitched by the seals and decorated initials. Similar follies are
reported of a living old lady, on whose hearth, after a night of
destruction, was once found the impression of a seal of Mary of
Modena. I could give only too good a guess at the _provenance_ of
_those_ papers, but nobody can interfere. Beyond 1500 the family
memories rely on tradition. The ancestors owned lands in the Forest of
Ettrick, and Williamhope, on the Tweed hard by Ashestiel. On the
Glenkinnon burn, celebrated by Scott, they hid the prophets of the
Covenant "by fifties in a cave." One Williamhope is said to have been
out at Drumclog, or, perhaps, Bothwell Brig. This laird, of enormous
strength, was called the Beetle of Yarrow, and was a friend of Murray
of Philiphaugh. His son, in the Fifteen, was out on the Hanoverian
side, which was _not_ in favour with the author of _The Death-Wake_.
He married a daughter of Veitch of The Glen, now the property of Sir
Charles Tennant. In the next generation but one, the Stoddarts sold
their lands and took to commerce, while the poet's father won great
distinction in the Navy. The great-great-grandfather of the poet
married a Miss Muir of Anniston, the family called cousins (on which
side of the blanket I know not) with Robert II. of Scotland, and, by
another line, were as near as in the sixth degree of James III.

As a schoolboy, Mr. Stoddart was always rhyming of goblin, ghost,
fairy, and all Sir Walter's themes. At Edinburgh University he was a
pupil of Christopher North (John Wilson), who pooh-poohed _The