"Ravenna, 8bre 16°, 1820.
"The Abbot has just arrived; many thanks; as also for the
_Monastery--when you send it!!!_
"The Abbot will have a more than ordinary interest for me, for an
ancestor of mine by the mother's side, Sir J. Gordon of Gight, the
handsomest of his day, died on a scaffold at Aberdeen for his
loyalty to Mary, of whom he was an imputed paramour as well as her
relation. His fate was much commented on in the Chronicles of the
times. If I mistake not, he had something to do with her escape
from Loch Leven, or with her captivity there. But this you will
know better than I.
"I recollect Loch Leven as it were but yesterday. I saw it in my
way to England in 1798, being then ten years of age. My mother, who
was as haughty as Lucifer with her descent from the Stuarts, and
her right line from the _old Gordons, not the Seyton Gordons_, as
she disdainfully termed the ducal branch, told me the story, always
reminding me how superior _her_ Gordons were to the southern
Byrons, notwithstanding our Norman, and always masculine descent,
which has never lapsed into a female, as my mother's Gordons had
done in her own person.
"I have written to you so often lately, that the brevity of this
will be welcome. Yours," &c.
* * * * *