Drummond Place 1 LORD ROBERTSON. I93
antiquarian taste consorted with the musical skill
ancl critical sagacity of the editor of the ? Minuets
and Songs, by Thomas, sixth Earl of Kellie.??
At his death, in 1851, a desire was felt by many
of his friends that his collection of antiquities
should, like that of his friend Scott, be preserved
as a memorial of him, but from circumstances
over which his family had no control this was
found to be impossible, so the vast assemblage of
rare and curious objects which crowded every room
in No. 28 was dispersed. The very catalogue of
them, filling upwards of fifty pages, was in some of
its features strongly indicative of the character of
the man.
Among them we find--? A smd box made from
a leg of the table at which King James VIII. sat
on his first landing here;? ?fragment of Queen
Mary?s bed-curtains;? ?? hair of that true saint
and martyr Charles I., taken from his coffin at
Windsor, and given to me by the Hon. Peter
Drummond Burrel at Edinburgh, December,
1813;? ?piece of the shroud of King Robert the
Bruce i1 piece of a plaid worn by-Prince Charles
in Scotland;? ?silk sash worn by the prince;?
?pair of gloves belonging to Mary Queen of
Scots;? ?cap worn by her when escaping from
Lochleven;? &c. He had a vast collection of
coins, some of which were said to be discovered
in consequence of a dream. I? The child of a Mr.
Christison, in whose house his father was lodging
in 1781, dreamt that a treasure was hid in the
cellar. Her father had no faith in the dream, but
Mr. Sharpe had the place dug up, and a copper
pot full of coins was found.?
One of the chief features of his drawing-room in
Drummond Place was a .quaint monstrosity in
bronze, now preserved in the British Museum. It
was a ewer fashioned in the shape of a tailless lion,
surmounted by an indescribable animal, half hound
and half fish, found in a vault of his paternal castle
of Hoddam, in Dumfries-shire. Charles Kirk patrick
Sharpe was laid amid his forefathers in the family
burial-place in Annandale. ?May the earth lie
light on him,? writes one of his friends, ?and no
plebeian dust invade the last resting-place of a
thorough gentleman of the antique type, now
wholly gone with other good things of the olden
time !?
Patrick Robertson, known as Lord Robertson
by his judicial title, was long locally famous as
? I Peter,? one of the most brilliant wits and humorists
about Parliament House, and a great friend of
?Christopher North.? They were called to the
bar in the same year, 1815. Robertsonwas born
in 1793. In 18qz he was Dean of Faculty, and
73
,vas raised to the bench in the following year. He
was famous for his mock heroic speeches on the
:eneral question,? and his face, full of grotesque
humour, and his rotund figure, of Johnson-like
mplitude and cut, were long familiar to all
habitues of the law courts. Of his speeches
Lockhart gives a description in his account of a
Burns dinner in 1818 :-? The last of these presidents
(Mr. Patrick Robertson), a young counsellor
3f very rising reputation and most pleasant manner,
made his approach to the chair amid such a
thunder of acclamation as seems to issue from the
cheeks of the Bacchantes when Silenus gets astride
his ass, in the famous picture of Rubens. Once in
the chair, there was no fear of his quitting it while
any remained to pay homage to his authority. He
made speeches, one chief merit of which consisted
(unlike epic poems) in their having neither beginning,
middle, nor end. He sang songs in which
music was not. He proposed toasts in which
meaning was not. But over everything that he
said there was flung such a radiance of sheer
mother wit, that there was no difficulty in seeing
that the want of meaning was no involuntary want.
By the perpetual dazzle of his wit, by the cordial
flow of his good-humour, but, above all, by the
cheering influence of his broad, happy face, seen
through its halo of purest steam (for even the chair
had by this time got enough of the juice of the
grape), he contrived to diffuse over us all, for a
long time, one genial atmosphere of unmingled
mirth.?
The wit and humour of Robertson were proverbial,
and hundreds of anecdotes used to be current
of his peculiar and invincible powet of closing
all controversy, by the broadest form of reductio ad
abszrrdurn. At a dinner party a learned and pedantic
Oxonian was becoming very tiresome with
his Greek erudition, which he insisted on pouring
forth on a variety of topics xore or less recondite,
At length, at a stage of the discussion on some historical
point, Lord Robertson turned round, and,
fixing his?large grey eyes upon the Englishman,
said, with a solemn and judicial air, ?I rather
think, sir, Dionysius of Halicamassus is against
you there.? ?: I beg your pardon,? said the other,
quickly; ?Dionysius did not flourish for ninety
years after that period !? ?I Oh! ? rejoined Robertson,
with an expression of face that must be
imagined, ? I I made a mistake-I meant nludkeus
of Warsaw.? After that the discussion flowed
no longer in the Greek channg1.a
He was author sf a large quarto volume of singu-
-.
W h d s ?? Memoirs,? rd ii
