Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 2.djvu/89

 ordering and well-being of his kingdom, Robert called Sir James Douglas to bis couch, and addressed him in somewhat the following manner : " Sir James, my dear and gallant friend, you know well the many troubles and severe hardships I have undergone in recovering and defending the rights of my crown and people, for you have participated in them all. When I was hardest beset of all, I made a vow, that if I ever overcame my difficulties, I would assume the cross, and devote the remainder of my days to warring against the enemies of our Lord and Saviour. But it has pleased providence, by this heavy malady, to take from me all hope of accomplishing, what, in my heart and soul, I have earnestly desired. Therefore, my dear and faithful companion, knowing no knight more valiant, or better fitted than yourself for such a service, my earnest desire is, that when I am dead, you take my heart with you to Jerusalem, and deposit it in the holy sepulchre, that my soul may be so acquitted from the vow which my body is unable to fulfil" All present shed tears at this discourse. "My gallant and noble king," said Douglas, "I have greatly to thank you for the many and large bounties which you have bestowed upon me ; but chiefly, and above all, I am thankful, that you consider me worthy to be intrusted with this precious charge of your heart, which has ever been full of prowess and goodness ; and I shall most loyally perform this last service, if God grant me life and power." The king tenderly thanked him for his love and fidelity, saying, " I shall now die in peace." Immediately after Robert's decease, his heart was taken out, as he had enjoined, and the body deposited under a rich marble monument, in the choir of the Abbey church of Dunfermline.

So died that heroic, and no less patriotic monarch, to whom the people of Scotland, in succeeding ages, have looked back with a degree of national pride and affection, which it has been the lot of few men in any age or country to inspire. From a state of profligate degeneracy and lawless barbarity, originating in, and aggravated by, a foreign dominion and oppression, he raised the poor kingdom of Scotland to a greater degree of power and security than it had ever before attained; and by a wise system of laws and regulations, forming, in fact, the constitution of the popular rights and liberties, secured to posterity the benefit of all the great blessings which his arms and policy had achieved.

BRUCE,, an eminent divine of the seventeenth century, a collateral relation of the sovereign who bore the same name, and ancestor at the sixth remove of the illustrious Abyssinian traveller, was born about the year 1554, being the second son of Sir Alexander Bruce of Airth in Stirlingshire, by Janet, daughter of Alexander, fifth Lord Livingston, and Agnes, daughter of the second Earl of Morton. We learn from Birrel's Diary, a curious chronicle of the sixteenth century, that Sir Alexander, the father of this pious divine, was one of those powerful Scottish barons, who used to be always attended by a retinue of armed servants, and did not scruple, even in the streets of the capital, to attack any equally powerful baron with whom they were at feud, and whom they might chance to meet. Birrel tells us, for instance, that on " the 24th of November, 1567, at two in the afternoon, the laird of Airth and the laird of Weeims [ancestor of the Earl of Wemyss] mett upon the heigh gait of Edinburghe [the High Street], and they and thair followers faught a verey bloudy skirmish, wher ther wes maney hurte on both sydes by shote of pistole." The father of the subject of this memoir was descended from a cadet of the Bruces of Clackmannan, who, in the reign of James I. of Scotland, had married the eldest daughter of William de Airthe, and succeeded to the inheritance. The Bruces of Clackmannan, from whom, we believe, all the Bruces of Stirlingshire, Clackmannanshire, Kinross, &c., (including the Earl of Elgin, ) are descended, sprung from a- younger son of Robert de Bruce, the competitor with Baliol for the Scottish throne, and