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David Steuart Erskine,
11th Earl of Buchan
(1742-1829)
Founder of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland
Grandson of Sir James Steuart of Coltness, the young Erskine was
educated at the University of Glasgow and spent a few years in the army
before devoting himself to the history and antiquities of his native
country, of which his most lasting memorial is the Society of Antiquaries
of Scotland which he founded in 1780. He succeeded to the Earldom in
1767, took his seat in the House of Lords, and managed to secure the
reform of the system by which the Scottish representative peers were
elected. He purchased the estate of Dryburgh in 1787 and lived there
for the rest of his life.
Buchan was able to persuade Sir Walter Scott to accept a burial
plot at Dryburgh Abbey, among those of his Haliburton ancestors. In
1791 he instituted an annual festival to commemorate the poet James
Thomson (1700-1748), gifting to the University Library in 1808 a copy
of "The seasons" (1730) which had been presented to Buchan's father by
the printer Andrew Millar and which included a number of holograph poems
by Thomas together with a portrait sketch of the poet attributed to
William Aikman. An enthusiastic collector all his life, he assembled
a "Commercium Epistolicum Literarium" or repository of literary
correspondence, which he offered for sale first to the Faculty of Advocates,
who declined and then to the antiquary David Laing,
who purchased it, sold some of it to the London collector Upcott, later
bequeathed the remainder to Edinburgh Unversity Library. Erskine was
also the patron who enabled the young woman who was to become known
to the world as James Miranda Barry to attend the University of Edinburgh
as a man, qualify in medicine in 1812, and achieve a successful career
as an army medical officer.
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