the Stuarts—from which stock Lady Anne was sprung.[1] Even if she believed what was so untrue, spiteful gossip of the kind came very badly from her. Lady Anne Vane Monson was the great-granddaughter of Charles II., her mother having been Lady Grace Fitzroy, daughter of the first Duke of Cleveland, son of Charles II. by Barbara Villiers (Lady Castlemaine). She was the eldest daughter of the first Earl of Darlington, and had been the second wife of the Honourable Charles Hope-Weir, prior to her marriage with the gallant and Honourable George Monson. She must have been at least forty-five years of age, if not more, when she left England for an unequal struggle against a tropical climate.
But the saddest entry in his journal which, perhaps, Francis ever made was that of the death which comes third on the list, viz. "1776, November 29, Mr. Alexander Mackrabie at Ganjam." This poor fellow was taken ill in August, and was sent to sea—but, getting worse, he landed at Ganjam, where he lingered till November. He had just been appointed to a writership in the Service.
"The loss," says Mr. Merivale, "of this clever, lively, unselfish, and most attached dependent evidently affected Francis very deeply. There is something very touching in Mackrabie's numerous letters to his chief during this absence, addressed to his 'dearest and best friend,' wishing him once more all happiness, and assuring him, 'sick or well, I am yours with the truest affection.' He seems not only to have loved his brother-in-law as a friend, but to have worshipped him almost as an idol." "Your own feelings," Francis writes to an old friend of both, "will give you the best idea of the affliction that has fallen upon me."
When Francis had been in Calcutta about two and a half years he wrote to a friend in England, "My health is perfectly established, my spirits high, and, with good management, I am a match for the
- ↑ Lady Anne would have avoided trenching on this or similar topics in the familiar conversation with Francis, if she had had a suspicion that he was the man who had written this about a cousin of hers, another offshoot from the same stock of the "Merry Monarch." "The character of the reputed ancestors of some men has made it possible for their descendants to be vicious in the extreme without being degenerate. Those of your Grace, for instance, left no distressing examples of virtue even to their legitimate posterity, and you may look back with pleasure to an illustrious pedigree in which heraldry has not left a single good quality upon record to insult or upbraid you. You have better proofs of your descent, my lord, than the register of a marriage or any troublesome inheritance of reputation. There are some hereditary strokes of character by which a family may be as clearly distinguished as by the blackest features of the human face." (Junius to Duke of Grafton.)
