immediately
on the decease of his brother; is it likely that he, always indifferent
to royal honours, always faithful to his brother, and now almost dying,
would have done so had he known that his brother had left a son? The
Countess of Albany, who never relinquished her Stuart position, and who
was extremely devoted to children, left her fortune to the painter
Fabre; is it likely she would have done so had she been aware that she
possessed a child of her own? But there is yet further evidence--I
scarcely know whether I should say positive or negative, but in point of
fact perhaps both at once, since it is evidence that the word of one, at
least, of the joint authors of the _Tales of the Century_ cannot
outweigh the silence of all other authorities. Five years before the
brothers Allan, or Stuart, whichever they should be called, mysteriously
informed the world of the adventures of the Jolair Dhearg, the elder of
the two, once John Hay Allan, now John Sobieski Stuart, had brought out
a magnificent volume, price five guineas, entitled _Vestiarium
Scoticum_, and purporting to be a treatise on family tartans written
somewhere in the 16th century, and now edited for the first time. The
history of this work, as stated in the preface, was well-nigh as
complicated and as romantic as the history of the Jolair Dhearg. The
only reliable copy of three known by Mr. Sobieski Stuart, of which one
was said to exist in the library of the Monastery of St. Augustine at
Cadiz, and another had been obtained from an Edinburgh sword-player and
porter named John Ross, was in the possession of the learned editors,
and had been given by the fathers of the Scots College at Douay to
Prince Edward Stuart, from whom it had, in some unspecified but
doubtless extremely romantic manner (probably sewn in the swaddling
clothes in which the Jolair Dhearg was consigned to Admiral O'Haloran)
descended to Mr. John Sobieski Stuart. This venerable heraldic document
appears, if one may judge by the review in the _Quarterly_, to have
been well-deserving of publication, owing to the extremely new and
unexpected information which it contained upon Scottish archaeology.
Among such information may be mentioned that it derived several clans
from other clans with which they were well known to have no possible
connection; that it extended the use of tartans to border-families who
had never heard of such a thing; that it contained many words and
expressions hitherto en