Page:The Marquess of Dalhousie.djvu/28

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20
DALHOUSIE'S WORK IN INDIA

as a personal biography. It is due to him to state that although the main body of my work was written before I had access to his volume, yet that I found it necessary to re-write the present chapter and enrich it from the new materials, especially those supplied by Dr. Grant, in Captain Trotter's book. In the other eleven chapters I confine myself to the materials which I had already collected.

James Andrew Broun Ramsay, tenth earl, and first and only Marquess of Dalhousie, was born at Dalhousie Castle on the 22nd of April, 1812. 'The house,' writes the Queen when recording her visit to it, 'is a real old Scotch castle of reddish stone.' Built in the twelfth century, and restored and added to in the present one, the stronghold of the Dalhousies now stands calmly on the beautiful bank of the South Esk, as the trains fly down the incline hard by, through Cockpen parish, before slackening their speed into Edinburgh. An ancestor of the family had saved King James the Sixth of Scotland in the Gowrie conspiracy, and the strong character of the long line of Lords of Dalhousie impressed itself alike on the history and the poetry of Scotland — from the Maecenas-Dalhousie of The Gentle Shepherd to the old bachelor Laird o' Cochpen.

James, the future Governor-General of India, was the third son of the ninth earl. His father,