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 (1793-1878), 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 Steuart Barry (c1790-1865) to attend the University of Edinburgh as a man, qualify in medicine in 1812, and achieve a successful career as an army medical officer.
