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

160 COMMENTS ON KEIR PERFORMANCE,
they may perhaps be permitted to say, here transcends the azure. They
oHone bear such bend, with the super-imposition of the Stirling buckles, to
which they are thus exclusively entitled, — a right they honestly maintain, as
they ever will do, in the face of the world, — and guerre a qui le touche.
Careless- Thcrc Is, it may be observed, another piece of carelessness and negligence
want of in the way, partly, in which the Keir arras are given in the Keir Perform-
precision
in giving auce, at the conclusion of the Keir pedigree/ It is merely stated, indepen-
pnrts 01
the Keir dcntlv of the arwis (using the term here in a strict sense), that the " crest "
arms in the ./ - \ o / '
foi-mfno'e ^^ " * ^oors head in profile," and the " supporters two greyhounds." How
possSsing unheraldic really, and unbefitting a true antiquary !— there being here no
souroes*of meutiou of their colours, so important in heraldry — whether the above should
tion™^ be "pi'oper" — that is, in their natural guise, or otherwise depicted, as so
1 See p, 82. often obtaius there. And yet the editor had, in respect to the crest, data to
direct him, which he has completely overlooked. On the occasion of the
knighting of Sir George Stirling of Keir, June 2, 1662, it is mentioned in the
= See p. 50. work,^ as was premised, that he then got for his crest {inter alia), by the
3 See Her- extract " furth of the register," on a wreath, " ane savage head couped, havincr
aldry, first & ' ' to I ' &
^'^4io'°'" '■ ^ ribbon gides (red) or wreath about his head ; " while Nisbet,^ quoting
from the Keir matriculation in the " New Register " in the Lyon Court re-
ferred to, represents it as " a Moor's head couped proper." Here both the
cut and position of the head, with its colour, are pointedly and technically
defined, yet without the editor, as was imperative, in the least availing him-
self of the information. As for the colour of the sup>porters, that is a point
159, note, not SO easily settled ; for judging by Mylne's * and Nisbet's accounts of the
matriculation (quite differently from the Drumpellier in 1818), none, so far
as we can see, were thereby granted ; and Nisbet only adds, that " the family
had heen in use to carry two greyhounds for supporters. But the editor
might, it is thought, and ought to have been, apprised by them how they
should be depicted, and stated it in the Performance, if the common method
and regularity \vas to be adopted, as is notoriously elsewhere, and to which, in
a work of such professed grandeur and scale, there should not have been an
exception. Whether supporters thus assumed, but at what date seems un-
certain (and of course they are not in Sir David Lindsay's matriculation),
were actually otherwise granted, the writer cannot say, nor is it a point in
which the Drumpellier family feel pecidiarly interested.
But, on the head of the Keir arms, the work strangely exhibits a re-