ate'er he to his mistress did or said,
He threw the bridegroom from the nuptial bed,
Into the chimney did so his rival maul,
His bruised bones ne'er were cured but by the fall.

One of the marginal notes ascribed to William Dunlop applies to the
above lines. "She had betrothed herself to Lord Rutherfoord under horrid
imprecations, and afterwards married Baldoon, his nevoy, and her mother
was the cause of her breach of faith."

The same tragedy is alluded to in the following couplet and note:

What train of curses that base brood pursues, When the young nephew weds
old uncle's spouse.

The note on the word "uncle" explains it as meaning "Rutherfoord, who
should have married the Lady Baldoon, was Baldoon's uncle." The poetry
of this satire on Lord Stair and his family was, as already noticed,
written by Sir William Hamilton of Whitelaw, a rival of Lord Stair
for the situation of President of the Court of Session; a person much
inferior to that great lawyer in talents, and equally ill-treated by the
calumny or just satire of his contemporaries as an unjust and partial
judge. Some of the notes are by that curious and laborious antiquary,
Robert Milne, who, as a virulent Jacobite, willingly lent a hand to
blacken the family of Stair.

Another poet of the period, with a very different purpose, has left
an elegy, in which he darkly hints at and bemoans the fate of the
ill-starred young person, whose very uncommon calamity Whitelaw, Dunlop,
and Milne thought a fitting subject for buffoonery and ribaldry. This
bard of milder mood was Andrew Symson, before the Revolution minister
of Kirkinner, in Galloway, and after his expulsion as an Episcopalian
following the humble occupation of a printer in Edinburgh. He furnished
the family of Baldoon, with which he appears to have been intimate, with
an elegy on the tragic event in their family. In this piece he treats
the mournful occasion of the bride's death with mysterious solemnity.

The verses bear this title, "On the unexpected death of the virtuous
Lady Mrs. Janet Dalrymple, Lady Baldoon, younger," and afford us the
precise dates of the catastrophe, which could not otherwise have been
easily ascertained. "Nupta August 12. Domum Ducta August 24. Obiit
September 12. Sepult. September 30, 1669." The form of the elegy is
a dialogue betwixt a passenger and a domestic servant. The first,
recollecting that he had passed that way lately, and seen all around
enlivened