Untitled - Electric Scotland

2 LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP TAIT [CH. i.
score years and ten can, when the life is closed, be recorded
in detail by a competent witness still alive and strong.
The biographers of Archbishop Tait have gratefully to
acknowledge the benefit of this unusual aid. The Arch -
bishop s sister, Charlotte, Lady Wake, who was twelve
years his senior, and who survived him for six years, has
written in full and graphic detail her reminiscences of his
early life. Many of these reminiscences had in later years
the advantage of his personal correction, and such of them
will be quoted as are necessary to give a sufficient picture
of his home and boyhood.
" Two
hundred years ago," says Lady Wake,
"
there
dwelt in Aberdeenshire transplanted, however, from the
south of Scotland a family valued for their worth, the
Taits 1 of Ludquharn, of the class that used to be known
in Scotland by the name of bonnet lairds, - -honest men,
living on their own farms, and wearing the broad blue
*
bonnet that marked the simplicity of rural and patri
archal lives far removed from the fashions and customs of
towns."
The family had many branches, and some of its members
seem to have been active in other work besides the cultiva
tion of their farms. The ample records which remain of
Aberdeenshire life during the earlier Jacobite strifes picture
them as the leading builders and handicraftsmen, advancing
steadily in prosperity and social status in the country-side.
William Tait of Ludquharn was laid to rest, as the stone
over his grave records, "in the year of human salvation
1725, with Agnes Clerk his wife," and in the same grave,
in the parish churchyard of Longside, Aberdeenshire, rests
his son Thomas, whose merits are recorded in an elaborate
Latin epitaph from the ready pen of his friend and pastor,
:
Tait
"
is said to be an old Norse name, signifying affection. Some
curious legends connected with it are to be found in Ferguson s English
Surnames, chapter viii.