Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 33.djvu/365

 years; it seems also to have been her last. She died, probably in London, 11 Jan. 1854.

Mrs. Litchfield's best part was Emilia. She had great power in irascible characters, had good judgment, a clear articulation, and some vivacity, against which has to be placed a disadvantageous figure. Her portrait by De Wilde as Ophelia is in the Mathews collection in the Garrick Club, where also is a second portrait by Samuel Drummond, A.R.A., presented by John Poole. 

LITHGOW, WILLIAM (1582–1645?), traveller, was born at Lanark in 1582, the elder son of James Lithgow, merchant burgess, by Alison Graham, who in 1603 bequeathed 1,078l. to her husband and three ‘bairnes.’ William styles himself ‘generosus’ in his bond for good conduct (1624), and seems to have claimed kinship with Montrose. Maidment says that ‘the exact period of his birth has not been ascertained,’ and places it conjecturally in 1585; but we learn from the traveller himself that he was thirty-three in 1615 (Travels, p. 377), and ‘past threescore years’ in April 1643 (Surveigh of London, p. 1). He was educated at Lanark grammar school, and is said by Sir Walter Scott, on no discoverable authority, to have originally been bred a tailor (Somers Tracts, vol. iv.). His reasons for leaving Scotland are darkly hinted at by himself in two obscure passages and an obscurer poem, where there is mention of ‘that vndeserued Dalida wrong,’ ‘the scelerate hands of four blood-shedding wolues,’ and ‘one silly stragling lambe,’ of ‘an Armilla staind, whom foule affections preyd, and Lucre gaind,’ and of the maxim that ‘vertue's better borne then noble blood.’ Following a family tradition (1863), in this Delilah we may dimly recognise a Miss Lockhart, in the lamb himself, and in the wolves her brothers, who are said to have caught her and Lithgow together, and cut off his ears, his local nickname hence being ‘Cutlugged Willie’ (, p. x). Anyhow, in ‘the stripling age of adolescency’ he had made two voyages to the Orkneys and Shetlands, and afterwards had surveyed all Germany, Bohemia, Helvetia, and the Low Countries from end to end, when in 1609 he paid a visit to Paris, and stayed there ten months.

The narrative of his nineteen years' travel, during which he claims to have tramped thirty-six thousand miles and odd, begins with his leaving Paris on 7 March 1610 for Rome, which he reached on the fortieth day. He remained in Rome four weeks, and from stanzas 43, 44 of ‘A Conflict betweene the Pilgrime and his Muse’ (1618) would seem to have heard mass, prostrated himself at the elevation, received ‘the holie Blessing,’ and even kissed the pope's foot, though ‘not,’ he explains, ‘for Loue, but for the Crownes.’ Of this, however, there is no hint in the ‘Travels,’ which teem with railings against popery, and in which he asserts that he ‘escaped from the hunting of the blood-sucking Inquisitors’ through a Scottish friend who hid him in the top of the Earl of Tyrone's palace, and on the fourth night leaped the city walls with him. He next proceeded to Naples, Loretto, and Ancona, thence by sea to Venice, Zara, Corfu, and Patras, thence by land to Athens, and thence by sea again to Crete, the Archipelago, Troy, and Constantinople. During these wanderings he was in frequent peril from storm and shipwreck, robbers and pirates, displayed as great valour as piety, helped a French galley-slave to escape, and redeemed from bondage a Dalmatian widow.

After a three months' stay at Constantinople he sailed to Smyrna, Rhodes, Cyprus, and Tripoli, whence, after an excursion to Lebanon, he journeyed to Aleppo. Having missed the Bagdad caravan, and failed to overtake it at ‘Beershacke’ (Birejik, on the Euphrates), he returned to Aleppo, and, wintering there, set out with nine hundred Armenian pilgrims, six hundred Turkish merchants, and one hundred soldiers, and by way of Damascus, Cana, Nazareth, Tyre, and Beersheba, arrived at Jerusalem on Palm Sunday 1612. During a stay there of three weeks he visited the Dead Sea, Jericho, Emmaus, Bethlehem, and Bethany, and spent three days and nights in the church of the Holy Sepulchre to witness the Good Friday and Easter ceremonies.

On 12 May he started for Cairo with eight hundred Copts and six German protestant and four French catholic gentlemen. Three of the Germans perished in the desert of thirst and sunstroke, and the other three, on reaching Cairo, drank themselves to death with strong Cyprus wine in four days. The last left Lithgow heir to all their money, which, after the surrender of a third to the Venetian consul, amounted to 420l. Having seen the pyramids and the sphinx, Lithgow sailed down the Nile to Alexandria, and there took ship for Ragusa with the French gentlemen. They all four died on the voyage, but as they were papists, and left only sixty-nine sequins, which moreover the master of the