John, ninth Lord Maxwell, killed Sir James Johnstone, with whom he had an old feud, in 1(3U8. Maxwell fled the country, but was sentenced to death in his absence. Returning after four years, he was betrayed into the power of the government by a kinsman, and was beheaded at Edinburgh, May 21, 1613. Lord Byron, in the preface to Childe Harold, says that "the good-night in the beginning of the first canto was suggested by Lord Maxwell's Goodnight in the Border Minstrelsy." Scott's text (Minstrelsy, 1802, i, 194) is based on B.
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