History is beginning to do justice to his character without concealing his weaknesses.

He seems to have been more honest than was the fashion in his time.
Such is the little gathering of family history, for the accuracy of which I am chiefly indebted to my kind friend the Lord Lyon--himself a Burnett.

Perhaps I should apologise for saying even the little I have said of the Dean's pedigree; but while I press into my service the country of his birth and breeding, and the local peculiarities amongst which his life was spent, as possibly having some influence on his character, I could not resist the wish to show another element, drawn from his ancestry, that went to the forming of that character.

Was not our Dean a worthy representative of Puritan leaders who refused to go into the violence of the Covenant--of the Bishop of unreproached life, who read the Thirty-nine Articles with an unconcealed desire to include conscientious Dissenters--of many peaceful gentlemen on the banks of the Dee, who mixed a happy playful humour with a catholic reverence for that Christianity which he could recognise in other sects, though preferring his own?
FOOTNOTES: [7] The present generation of Burnetts think that those slang names were invented by Barclay, but I knew him well, and venture to doubt his humorous powers.

In the midst of "sporting" and violent excitement he was serious in talk, as became the descendant of the old Quakers.
[8] Mrs.Russell had lost her two sons by a strange fatality--both were drowned, the elder, Lockhart, while skating at Bath, about 1805-6, James, the younger, in crossing the river Dee in a boat rowed by himself in 1827.
III.
Edward Ramsay left Somersetshire amidst the general regrets of his parishioners and neighbours, and entered on his Edinburgh career 1st January 1824.