had a mansion with a very fine library in London (128 Park Street, Grosvenor Square), where he exercised a wide hospitality. He was one of the original thirty-five members of the Philobiblon Society in 1854, and was also a member of the Athenæum Club (he was elected in 1849 under rule 2). From 1848 he was a familiar figure in literary society, and was specially friendly with Lord Dufferin and his circle, with the Duc d'Aumale, with Thackeray, Monckton Milnes, Dean Milman, and Peter Cunningham. Prescott during his sojourn in London met him at Lockhart's, and wrote of him afterwards to Ford as ‘that prince of good fellows’ (October 1850). To the ‘Times’ of 4 Sept. 1858 Stirling sent an appreciative memoir of Ford, and in ‘Fraser's Magazine’ for March 1859 he paid a like tribute to Prescott (this was privately printed with additions; both were reprinted in ‘Miscellaneous Essays’). On 27 Nov. 1862 he was elected rector of St. Andrews University by 101 votes as against 59 recorded for Lord Dalhousie. His excellent address was not published at the time, though a few copies were struck off (see, however, Miscellaneous Essays; cf. Knight's Rectorial Addresses, 1894). In 1865, by the death of his uncle, Sir John Maxwell, Stirling succeeded to his baronetcy, and assumed the additional name of Maxwell. In 1870 he was elected rector of Aberdeen University by the casting vote of the chairman, but declined to accept the honour. In 1871 he took an active part in organising a loan exhibition in Edinburgh of pictures, manuscripts, and relics relating to Sir Walter Scott, and in November 1872 he wrote the preface for the quarto catalogue of the exhibition (1872). On 5 Feb. 1872 he was installed rector of Edinburgh University, and on 27 April 1876 chancellor of Glasgow University (both of his addresses are in the ‘Collected Works,’ vol. vi.). On 21 June 1876 he was created D.C.L. by the university of Oxford, and in the same year he had the exceptional honour for a commoner of being nominated a knight of the Thistle.
These literary and academic distinctions did not prevent Stirling-Maxwell from an energetic discharge of his duties of landed proprietor. On the contrary, he devoted extraordinary care to the breeding of shorthorn cattle, and both in this matter, and more particularly with regard to the breed of Clydesdale horses, he raised the standard which had been attained by his immediate predecessors; in both classes of animals a ‘Keir strain’ came to be highly valued. He joined the Highland and Agricultural Society in 1841, took a leading part in the direction of the shows at Perth (1861) and at Stirling (1864), and on 15 Jan. 1868 was elected honorary secretary of the society, a post which he held until his death; he was also president of the Glasgow Agricultural Society.
Meanwhile he indulged with absorbing eagerness in the collection of works of art and vertu and in many other hobbies, which tended to become the serious business of his life. His collection of sixteenth-century engravings and blocks for head and tail pieces was probably unrivalled. He himself acquired no little skill in the designing of initial letters. Other hobbies were the collation and bibliography of proverbs and the application of the bewildering variety of newly invented photographic processes. As an ardent bibliographer he was a regular frequenter of the reading-room at the British Museum, and referred more than once with gratitude to its ‘420 feet of wall covered to the height of six feet with books of reference.’ He was appointed a trustee in 1872, and he was also a trustee of the National Gallery and a member of the senate of London University (1874–8).
Sir William died of a fever at Venice on 15 Jan. 1878, and was buried with his ancestors in Lecropt church. He married first, at Paris, on 26 April 1865, Anna Maria (d. 8 Dec. 1874), third daughter of David Leslie Melville, tenth earl of Leven and Melville, and by her left two sons, Sir John Maxwell Stirling-Maxwell, present baronet, at one time M.P. for the College division of Glasgow, and Archibald, lieutenant in Princess Louise's Argyll highlanders. Sir William married as his second wife, on 1 March 1877, an old and attached friend, Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton [q. v.]; she was at the time confined to her room by indisposition, and she died on 15 June following.
There is a watercolour drawing of the historian as a child at Keir, painted by W. Douglas in 1824. A mezzotint was engraved from a photograph by R. B. Parkes as a frontispiece to the sixth volume of the ‘Collected Works’ in 1891, and there is a copperplate, by the same engraver, from a portrait by George Richmond, R.A., at Keir (prefixed to vol. i. of ‘Works’ in 1891). A terra-cotta bust, modelled in 1873 by Francis J. Williamson, is in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
It was not until five years after Stirling-Maxwell's death that his most elaborate historical work became available to the public under the title ‘Don John of Austria, or Passages from the History of the Sixteenth Century, 1547–1578,’ 1883, 2 vols. 8vo. It was edited and prefaced by Sir G. W. Cox,
