_Traditions from Remote Periods._--From time to time notices have
appeared in "N. & Q." of "remote events brought down to our own times
through few links:" to these, if you should think it merits insertion, I
beg to contribute the following Note from Chambers's _Life and Works of
Burns_, vol. iii. p. 205. In the address to Mr. Maxwell, of Terraughty,
on his birthday (p. 204.), Burns says, 7th line:
"This day[4] thou metes threescore eleven,"
and Mr. Chambers remarks:
"The person addressed in these verses, John Maxwell, Esq., of
Terraughty and Munches, was a leading public man in the county of
Dumfries. He was on several accounts very remarkable, but
particularly for his birth, and the proximity into which his
family history brings us with events comparatively remote; for Mr.
Maxwell was grandson's grandson, and no more, to the gallant and
faithful Lord Herries, who on bended knees entreated Queen Mary to
prosecute Bothwell as the murderer of her husband, and who
subsequently fought for her at Langside. One cannot learn without
a pleasing kind of surprise, that a relation in the fifth degree
of one who was _Warden of the West Marches in 1545_, should have
lived to the close of the French Revolution wars, which was the
case of Mr. Maxwell, for he died in _January 1814_."
[Footnote 4: Middle of December, 1791.]