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

2 COMMENTS ON KEIR PERFORMANCE,
they often further contribute, by means of writs and muniments first dis-
closed, important facts and information in the broader and more public
departments of history and law, esjicciaUy consistorial. But then, such works
must not be hastily or inadequately undertaken — careless or inaccm-ate — but,
on the other hand, duly comj^iled and matui'ed — gi'ammatical withal, and
without unfair bias, make-weights, and platitudes — ^charges to which, it is to
be regretted, in a certain degi'ee, the Keir Performance may be obnoxious,* and
with a decided selection of what is truly new and material, else they may
sadly disajjpoint expectations, and injm-e the very cause they design to serve.
Mere assumption and gratuitous inferences also — singularly not yet sufii-
ciently exploded with us, and in which our antiquarian writers formerly
indulged — should especially be .substituted, in this more enUghtened age, by
strict and apposite reasoning built on sound and relevant facts, after the
bright precedent and example set us by Lord Hailes, in all antiquarian
discussions — including genealogy — to which iiights of fancy, not imseldom
their chief basis, are alien. He, and those distinguished in the same sure
track, are the only authorities and models to be adopted on such occa-
sions, to the complete exclusion of secondary manipulators Hke Douglas,
Playfair, &c., and that much-to-be-dejjrecated class who did so much last
century to bring Scotch pedigrees and private histories into discredit and
disrepute. The first, the callous or unwitting bastardiser of the Hamiltons,
the strange result of his undue venal attempts to enhance then- Scotch
antiquity,! is the Coryphaius of tricks and sad devices in his native gene-
alogy, whose dishonest and unprincipled practices in that dejjartment are
* For example, in part, of such, on the preposterous aud untenalile for a moment's no-
grounds of carelessness and strange omis- tice. Douglas, however, while he also palms off
sions, with grammatical error, see Addenda this fable, in order to add a few inches to their
to this Chapter, under No. I., with relative Scotch antiquity makes the above patriarch „ jjeierred tn
particulars. It is proposed, in the course of Gilbert figure as early as 1272, by means of a by Douglas
this Exposition, to throw all notes, with their grant then of the chiu'ch of Cragyn to the chartulary
subjects aud evidence, too long for paginal Abbey of Paisley, witnessed, as he states, by seeiiis '
insertion, into the Addenda. " Gilbertus de Hambleton, Walterus, Senes- ^""J^Sf,
' ' ' ^ first edition,
f Walter FiTZGiLBERT DE " Hameldon," of callus Scotie, Comes de Menteth."^ There is v..i. i. p.sa".
man Roll, the county of Lanark, who swore fealty to nothing in support of the identity of the latter
ciubcopy, Edward I. in 1296,' like so many of his Scotch Gilbert with the preceding ; and further still, 3 Maitland
''■ ' ^' compatriots, is the earliest ancestor legally upon examination of his authority, the Chaxt- {iJj^tj^"*''
proved of the Lanarkshire Hamiltons, or of ulary of Paisley,' it will be found that he merely P- 32.
Cadzow, or noble house of Hamilton, their pre- figures in the grant, not, as aliove, first witness,
tended descent from an English Earl of Leices- even before the Earl of Menteth (there grossly
ter antecedently, by genealogists, being too misrepresented also by Douglas, as Stewart of
1 See Rag