with English law, as his travels had extended his knowledge of the civil law and the modern European systems which followed it. He thus acquired a singular advantage when he came to write on law, regarding it from a cosmopolitan, or international, rather than a merely local or national point of view. His actual discharge of judicial duty at this time was short, for after the death of Cromwell the courts in Scotland were shut—a new commission issued in 1660 not having taken effect, it being uncertain in whose name the commission ought to run. It was during this period that Stair became intimate with Monk, who is said to have been advised by him when he left Scotland to call a full and free parliament. Soon after the Restoration Stair went to London, where he was received with favour by Charles, knighted, and included in the new nomination of judges in the Court of Session on 13 February 1661. He was also put on various important commissions, busied himself with local and agricultural affairs, and, like most of the Scottish judges of this and the following century, acted with zest and credit the part of a good country gentleman. In 1662 he was one of the judges who refused to take the declaration that the National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant were unlawful oaths, and, forestalling the deposition which had been threatened as the penalty of continued non-compliance, he placed his resignation in the king's hands. The king, however, summoned him to London, and allowed him to take the declaration under an implied reservation. The next five years of Stair's life were comparatively uneventful, but in 1669 a family calamity, the exact facts of which will probably never be ascertained, overtook him. His daughter Janet, who had been betrothed to Lord Rutherfurd, was married to Dunbar of Baldoon, and some tragic incident occurred on the wedding night, from the effects of which she never recovered. As the traditions vary on the central fact, whether it was the bride who stabbed her husband, or the husband who stabbed the bride, no credence can be given to the mass of superstitions and spiteful slander which surrounded it, principally levelled at Lady Stair. Sir Walter Scott took the plot of his Bride of Lammermoor from this incident, but he disclaimed any intention of making Lord Stair the basis for Sir