Comments in refutation of pretensions advanced for the first time, and statements in a recent work "The Stirlings of Keir and their family papers"

vi PREFACE.
he found it had been printed under the auspices and for the behoof of
Mr Stirling of Keir, the honourable Member for Perthshire, but compiled
by his advisers and agent.
And it is with much regret that, on further examination, he discovered
that these gentlemen had risked and sanctioned gross errors and misre-
presentations in fact, to his prejudice. Thej have not only almost
ignored the Drumpelliers and their rights and claims in what is pretended
to be a full history of the Sterlings, but most unwarrantably, without a
shadow or tittle of evidence, arrogated, on the other hand, for the first
time, to their principal, a descent from the Stirlings of Cadder, with the
chieftaincy, moreover, of the entire name, as their direct representative,
notwithstanding the long undoubted and legally unchallenged preoccupa-
tion, as has been proved, of that identical status by Drumpelher — who
yet is here even excluded from the field of competition — and in the face
too of the actual abandonment by the Keir in- 1818 of the Stirling contest
with his family, though before peremptorily advanced and hostilely
proclaimed — his after recreancy and prostration in that year, so irrecon-
cilable with his vaunts — and, in other words, real discomfiture on the
occasion.*
The presumption, if not audacity, of the procedure, in the peculiar cir-
cumstances, somewhat at first startled Drumpellier; but recollecting that
his family status was truly impregnable to attack, and that he stood, as it
were, upon a rock, and therefore confident that the attack of such subal-
tern work could be easHy repulsed, it in the main commoved him but
little. But what did give him concern, and the very idea of which
occasioned him much annoyance, was, that the futile and unwarrantable
pretensions enunciated in the above work made it incumbent upon him
to appear before the public, which he was most unwilling to do, in order
to make a full statement of the Drumpellier right, and at once unmask
* See, for all this, Chapters II. and III. of the Exposition.