He hated his
heir presumptive, sold the estate of Rochdale,--a proceeding afterwards
challenged--and cut down the trees of Newstead, to spite him; but he
survived his three sons, his brother, and his only grandson, who was
killed in Corsica in 1794.
On his own death in 1798, the estates and title passed to George Gordon,
then a child of ten, whom he used to talk of, without a shadow of
interest, as "the little boy who lives at Aberdeen." His sister Isabella
married Lord Carlisle, and became the mother of the fifth Earl, the poet's
nominal guardian. She was a lady distinguished for eccentricity of
manners, and (like her son satirized in the _Bards and Reviewers_) for the
perpetration of indifferent verses. The career of the fourth lord's second
son, John, the poet's grandfather, recalls that of the sea-kings from whom
the family claim to have sprung. Born in 1723, he at an early age entered
the naval service, and till his death in 1786 was tossed from storm to
storm. "He had no rest on sea, nor I on shore," writes his illustrious
descendant. In 1740 a fleet of five ships was sent out under Commodore
Anson to annoy the Spaniards, with whom we were then at war, in the South
Seas.
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