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MUSSELBURGH, January 26,
1800.
HAVING observed how
carelessly, and consequently how falsely, history is written, I have
long resolved to note down certain facts within my own knowledge,
under the title of Anecdotes and Characters of the Times,
that may be subservient to a future historian, if not to embellish
his page, yet to keep him within the bounds of truth and certainty.
I have been too late
in beginning this work, as on this very day I enter on the
seventy-ninth year of my age; which circumstance, as it renders it
not improbable that I may be stopped short in the middle of my
annals, will undoubtedly make it difficult for me to recall the
memory of many past transactions in my long life with that precision
and clearness which such a work requires. But I will admit of no
more excuses for indolence or procrastination, and endeavour (with
God's blessing) to serve posterity, to the best of my ability, with
such a faithful picture of times and characters as came within my
view in the humble and private sphere of life, in comparison with
that of many others, in which I have always acted; remembering,
however, that in whatever sphere men act, the agents and instruments
are still the same, viz, the faculties and passions of human nature.
The first characters which I could
discriminate were those of my own family, which I was able to mark
at a very early age. My father was of a moderate understanding, of
ordinary learning and accomplishments for the times, for he was born
in 1690; of a warm, open, and benevolent temper; most faithful and
diligent in the duties of his office, and an orthodox and popular
orator. He was entirely beloved and much caressed by the whole
parish. [He was minister of the parish of Prestonpans.] My mother
was a person of superior understanding, of a calm and firm temper,
of an elegant and reflecting mind; and considering that she was the
eldest of seven daughters and three sons of a country clergyman,
near Dumfries, and was born in 1700, she had received an education,
and improved by it, far beyond what could have been expected. Good
sense, however, and dignity of conduct, were her chief attributes.
The effect of this was, that she was as much respected as my father
was beloved.
They were in very narrow circumstances till the stipend was largely
augmented in the year 1732. Two of the judges, who were his heritors,
Lords Grange and Drummore, came down from the bench and pleaded his
cause. [His
heritors—that is to say, proprietors of land in his parish liable to
contribute to the payment of his stipend.—J. H. B.
One of the advantages of the increased
stipend is recorded by the author in his MS. Recollections: "In the
overflow of wealth my father took it in his head to make me a small
apartment to study in. This was a little hole off the dining-room. .
. . This dining-room was the apartment in which my mother received
her morning visitors and she being without dispute the wisest woman
in the parish, and had still pretensions to be handsome although
turned thirty, she was resorted to for advice by all the women of
the parish, high and low. In this secret cell I heard perfectly
whatever was going on in the parish, whether it was the expected
marriage of a daughter, or the reformation of a prodigal son or
unfaithful husband. Whatever occasioned doubt or perplexity, or
required advice, were laid before my sagacious mother. This made me
master of all the secrets of the parish, and wonderful to tell, I
did not abuse this casual confidence into which I fell so
prematurely, for, as I was never very inquisitive into other
people's affairs, I was no fool when I found out things by
accident."] And
the estate of the patron, then Morison of Prestongrange, being under
sequestration, it was with little difficulty that a greater
augmentation than was usual at that period was obtained; for the
stipend was raised by it from o to £zoo per annum.
In the year 1729, the good people had a
visit from London that proved expensive and troublesome. It was Mrs.
Lyon, a sister of my father's, and her son and daughter. Her
deceased husband was Mr. Lyon of Easter Ogill, a branch of the
Strathmore family, who had been in the Rebellion 1715, and, having
been pardoned, had attempted to carry on business in London, but was
ruined in the South Sea [Scheme.] This lady, who came down on
business, after a few weeks went into lodgings in Edinburgh, where
she lost her daughter in the smallpox, and soon after returned to my
father's, where she remained for some months. She was young and
beautiful, and vain, not so much of her person (to which she had a
good title) as of her husband's great family, to which she annexed
her own, and, by a little stretch of imagination and a search into
antiquity, made it great also. Her son, who was a year and a half
older than myself, was very handsome and good-natured, though much
indulged. My father was partial to him, and I grew a little jealous.
But the excess of his mother's fondness soon cured my father of his;
and as I was acknowledged to be the better scholar of the two, I
soon lost all uneasiness, and came to love my cousin most sincerely,
though he intercepted many of the good things that I should have
got. Not long
after this, another sister of my father's came down from London, who
was a widow also, but had no children. She stayed with us for a
year, and during that time taught me to read English, with just
pronunciation and a very tolerable accent—an accomplishment which in
those days was very rare. Long before she came down, I had been
taught to read by an old woman, who kept a school, so perfectly,
that at six years of age I had read a large portion of the Bible to
a dozen of old women, who had been excluded the church by a crowd
which had made me leave it also, and whom I observed sitting on the
outside of a door, where they could not hear. Upon this I proposed
to read a portion of Scripture to them, to which they agreed, and
set me on a tombstone, whence I read very audibly to a congregation,
which increased to about a score, the whole of the Song of Solomon.
This would not deserve to be noted, but for the effect it had
afterwards. ["This first attempt to preach made a great noise, and I
was clubbed by the vulgar a minister already selected and set apart
by the Lord. The caresses I met with on this account were not to my
taste, for I did not feel any merit in having read a few chapters,
and I did not like to be a minister."—M.S. Recollections.]
There lived in the town and parish of
Preston-pans at this time several respectable and wealthy
people—such as the Mathies, the Hogs, the Youngs, and the Shirreffs.
There still remained some foreign trade, though their shipping had
been reduced from twenty to half the number since the Union, which
put an end to the foreign trade in the ports of the Firth of Forth.
There was a custom-house established here, the superior officers of
which, with their families, added to the mercantile class which
still remained, made a respectable society enough.
The two great men of the parish,
however, were Morison of Prestongrange, the patron, and the
Honourable James Erskine of Grange, one of the Supreme Judges. The
first was elected Member of Parliament for East Lothian in the first
Parliament of Great Britain, although the celebrated Andrew Fletcher
of Saltoun was the other candidate.
But Government took part with Morison,
and Fletcher had only nine votes. Morison had been very rich, but
had suffered himself to be stripped by the famous gambler of those
times, Colonel Charteris, whom I once saw with him in church, when I
was five or six years of age ; and being fully impressed with the
popular opinion that he was a wizard, who had a fascinating power, I
never once took my eyes off him during the whole service, believing
that I should be a dead man the moment I did. This Colonel Charteris
was of a very ancient family in Dumfriesshire, the first of whom,
being one of the followers of Robert Bruce, had acquired a great
estate, a small part of which is still in the family. The colonel
had been otherwise well connected, for he was cousin-german to Sir
Francis Kinloch, and, when a boy, was educated with him at the
village school. Many stories were told of him, [A story of Charteris'
avarice is told by the Hon. John Crawford writing to his sister the
Hon. Peggy Crawford. He says: "Mr. Cummin, the minister, attended
him on his death-bed; he [Charteris] asked at his sister, who is
exceedingly mean, what he should give him; she replied that it was
unusual to give anything on such occasions. `well, then,' says
Charteris, `let's have another flourish from him,' so calling for
prayers. So you see he died as he lived."] which would never have
been heard of had he not afterwards been so much celebrated in the
annals of infamy. He was a great profligate, no doubt, but there
have been as bad men and greater plunderers than he was, who have
escaped with little public notice. But he was one of the Runners of
Sir Robert Walpole, and defended him in all places of resort, which
drew the wrath of the Tories upon him, and particularly sharpened
the pens of Pope and Arbuthnot against him. For had it not been for
the witty epitaph of the latter, [The epitaph begins: "Here
continueth to rot the body of Francis Charteris, who, with an
inflexible constancy, and inimitable uniformity of life, persisted,
in spite of age and infirmity, in the practice of every human vice
except prodigality and hypocrisy: his insatiable avarice exempted
him from the first, his matchless impudence from the second;" and
ends: "He was the only person of his time who could cheat with the
mask of honesty, retain his primeval meanness when possessed of ten
thousand a year, and having daily deserved the gibbet for what he
did, was at last condemned to it for what he could not do."]
Charteris might have escaped in the crowd of gamesters and
debauchees, who are only railed at by their pigeons, and soon fall
into total oblivion. This simple gentleman's estate [Morison's] soon
went under sequestration for the payment of his debts. He was so
imaginary and credulous as to believe that close by his creek of
Morison's Haven was the place where St. John wrote the Apocalypse,
because some old vaults had been discovered in digging a mill-race
for a mill that went by sea-water. This had probably been put into
his head by the annual meeting of the oldest lodge of operative
masons in Scotland at that place on St. John's Day.
My Lord Grange was the leading man in
the parish, and had brought my father to Prestonpans from
Cumbertrees in his native county Annandale, where he had been
settled for four years, and where I was born. Lord Grange was
Justice-Clerk in the end of Queen Anne's reign, but had been
dismissed from that office in the beginning of the reign of George i.,
when his brother, the Earl of Mar, lost the Secretary of State's
office, which he had held for some years. After this, and during the
Rebellion [of 1715], Lord Grange kept close at his house of Preston,
on an estate which he had recently bought from the heirs of a Dr.
Oswald, but which had not long before been the family estate of a
very ancient cadet of the family of Hamilton. During the Rebellion
[of 1715], and some time after, Lord Grange amused himself in laying
out and planting a fine garden, in the style of those times, full of
close walks and labyrinths and wildernesses, which, though it did
not occupy above four or five acres, cost one at least two hours to
perambulate. This garden or pleasure-ground was soon brought to
perfection by his defending it from the westerly and south-westerly
winds by hedges of common elder, which in a few years were above
sixteen feet high, and completely sheltered all the interior
grounds. This garden continued to be an object of curiosity down to
the year 1740, insomuch that flocks of company resorted to it from
Edinburgh, during the summer, on Saturdays and Mondays (for Sunday
was not at that time a day of pleasure), and were highly gratified
by the sight, there being nothing at that time like it in Scotland,
except at Alloa, the seat of the Earl of Mar, of which indeed it was
a copy in miniature.
My Lady Grange was Rachel Chiesly, the
daughter of Chiesly of Dalry, the person who shot President Lockhart
in the dark, when standing within the head of a close in the
Lawnmarket, because he had voted against him in a cause depending
before the Court. [It was not, strictly speaking, a decision of the
Court that infuriated Chiesly, but a finding in an arbitration. He
was desirous, and thought himself entitled, to leave his wife, with
whom he had quarrelled, and his children, to starve. The question of
his liability for their support having been referred to President
Lockhart and Lord Kemnay, they found him bound to make his family an
allowance. It may be proper to explain that Grange and his wife were
not Lord and Lady in the English sense, as a peer and peeress, but
by the custom of Scotland, which gives "Lord" to a judge, and used
to give "Lady" to the wife of a landed proprietor.—J. H. B.] He was
the son or grandson of a Chiesly, who, in Baillie's Letters, is
called Man to the famous Mr. Alexander Henderson; that is to say,
secretary, for he accompanied Mr. Henderson on his journey to
London, and having met the Court somewhere on their way, Chiesly was
knighted by Charles I.; so that, being a new family, they must have
had few relations, which, added to the atrocious deed of her father,
had made the public very cool in the interest of Lady Grange. This
lady had been very beautiful, but was of a violent temper. She had,
it was said, been debauched by her husband before marriage; and as
he was postponing or evading the performance of his promise to marry
her, it was believed that, by threatening his life, she had obtained
the fulfilment of it.
It was Lord Grange's custom to go
frequently to London in the spring; and though he seemed quiet and
inactive here, it was supposed that he resented his having been
turned out of the Justice-Clerk's office in 1714, and might secretly
be carrying on plots when at London. Be that as it may, he had
contracted such a violent aversion at Sir Robert Walpole, that
having, by intrigue and hypocrisy, secured a majority of the
district of burghs of which Stirling is the chief, he threw up his
seat as a Judge in the Court of Session, was elected member for that
district, and went to London to attend Parliament, and to overturn
Sir Robert Walpole, not merely in his own opinion, but in the
opinion of many who were dupes to his cunning, and his pretensions
to abilities that he had not. [A Bill to regulate elections in
Scotland was then passing, and Walpole added to it a clause
disqualifying Judges of the Court of Session from sitting in
Parliament, for the purpose, it was said, of keeping Erskine out.—J.
H. B.] But his first appearance in the House of Commons undeceived
his sanguine friends, and silenced him for ever. He chose to make
his maiden speech on the Witches Bill, as it was called; and being
learned in doemonologia, with books on which subject his library was
filled, he made a long canting speech that set the House in a titter
of laughter, and convinced Sir Robert that he had no need of any
extraordinary armour against this champion of the house of Mar. [The
"Act to repeal the statute made in the first year of King James I.,
intituled `An Act against Conjuration, Witchcraft, and dealing with
evil and wicked Spirits, except so much thereof,"' etc., was passed
early in the session of 1735. Unfortunately, we have no account of
any debate on the measure, and thus lose Erskine's speech, which was
probably curious, for the vulgar superstitions of the day seem to
have taken fast hold on him, and his diary is full of dreams,
prognostics, and communings with persons supernaturally gifted. The
tenor of his "canting speech" may perhaps be inferred from the
following testimony borne in 1743 against the same Bill,by the
Associate Presbytery: "The penal statutes against witches have been
repealed by the Parliament, contrary to the express law of God; by
which a holy God may be provoked, in a way of righteous judgment, to
leave those who are already ensnared to be hardened more and more,
and to permit Satan to tempt and seduce others to the same wicked
and dangerous snares."—J.H.B.] The truth was, that the man had
neither learning nor ability. He was no lawyer, and he was a bad
speaker. He had been raised on the shoulders of his brother, the
Earl of Mar, in the end of the Queen's reign, but had never
distinguished himself. In the General Assembly itself, which many
gentlemen afterwards made a school of popular eloquence, and where
he took the high-flying side that he might annoy Government, his
appearances were but rare and unimpressive; but as he was understood
to be a great plotter, he was supposed to reserve himself for some
greater occasions.
In Mr. Erskine's annual visits to
London, he had attached himself to a mistress, a handsome
Scotch-woman, Fanny Lindsay, who kept a coffeehouse about the bottom
of the Haymarket. This had come to his lady's ears, and did not tend
to make her less outrageous. He had taken every method to soothe
her. As she loved command, he had made her factor upon his estate,
and given her the whole management of his affairs. When absent, he
wrote her the most flattering letters, and, what was still more
flattering, he was said, when present, to have imparted secrets to
her, which, if disclosed, might have reached his life. Still she was
unquiet, and led him a miserable life. What was true is uncertain ;
for though her outward appearance was stormy and outrageous, Lord
Grange not improbably exaggerated the violence of her behaviour to
his familiar friends as an apology for what he afterwards did ; for
lie alleged to them that his life was hourly in danger, and that she
slept with lethal weapons under her pillow. He once showed my father
a razor which he had found concealed there.
Whatever might be the truth, he executed
one of the boldest and most violent projects that ever had been
attempted since the nation was governed by laws; for he seized his
lady in his house in Edinburgh, and by main force carried her off
through Stirling to the Highlands, whence, after several weeks, she
was at last landed in St. Kilda, a desolate isle in the Western
Ocean, sixty miles distant from the Long Island. There she continued
to live to the end of her days, which was not before the year 17—,
in the most wretched condition, in the society of none but savages,
and often with scanty provision of the coarsest fare, and but rarely
enjoying the comfort of a pound of tea, which she sometimes got from
shipmasters who accidentally called. [She was carried off in 1732;
and after being detained about two years in the small island of
Hesker, was conveyed to St. Kilda. On the affair getting wind, she
was afterwards removed to Harris, where she died in 1745, before the
arrangements for obtaining her release, and a full inquiry into the
affair, could be completed.—J. H. B.] Lord Grange's accomplices in
this atrocious act were be lieved to be Lord Lovat and the Laird of
M'Leod, the first as being the most famous plotter in the kingdom,
and the second as equally unprincipled, and the proprietor of the
island of St. Kilda. What was most extraordinary was, that, except
in conversation for a few weeks only, this enormous act, committed
in the midst of the metropolis of Scotland by a person who had been
Lord Justice-Clerk, was not taken the least notice of by any of her
own family, or by the King's Advocate or Solicitor, or any of the
guardians of the laws. Two of her sons were grown up to manhood—her
eldest daughter was the wife of the Earl of Kintore—who acquiesced
in what they considered as a necessary act of justice for the
preservation of their father's life. Nay, the second son was
supposed to be one of the persons who came masked to the house, and
carried her off in a chair to the place where she was set on
horseback. [In a letter by Lady Grange quoted in vol. x. of the
Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries, she says, "'Twas Lord
Lovat and Roderick MI`Leod that stole me." On the other hand, Lord
Lovat defends himself on this charge in a characteristic letter
quoted by Hill Burton: "As to that about my Lady Grange, it is a
much less surprise to me, because they said ten times worse of me,
when that damned woman went from Edinburgh, than they can say now;
for they said it was all my contrivance . . . but I defyed them as I
do now, and do declare to you, upon my honour, that I do not know
what has become of that woman, where she is, or who takes care of
her ; but if I had contrived and assisted, and saved my Lord Grange
from that devil, who threatened every day to murder him and his
children, I would not think shame of it before God or man."]
This artful man, by cant and hypocrisy,
persuaded all his intimate friends that this act was necessary for
the preservation of her life as well as of his; and that it was only
confining a mad woman in a place of safety, where she was tenderly
cared for, and for whom he professed not merely an affectionate
regard, but the most passionate love. It was many years afterwards
before it was known that she had been sent to such a horrid place as
St. Kilda ; and it was generally believed that she was kept
comfortably, though in confinement, in some castle in the Highlands
belonging to Lovat or M'Leod. The public in general, though
clamorous enough, could take no step, seeing that the family were
not displeased, and supposing that Lord Grange had satisfied the
Justice-Clerk and other high officers of the law with the propriety
of his conduct.
From what I could learn at the time, and
afterwards came to know, Lord Grange was in one respect a character
not unlike Cromwell and some of his associates—a real enthusiast,
but at the same time licentious in his morals. [Lord Grange was the
lay head of the Ultra-Presbyterian party, and has been commemorated
by its historian, Robert Wodrow (Analecta, vol. ii.), who notes on
one occasion that "he (Grange) complains much of preaching up mere
morality, and very little of Christ and grace." On another occasion
he is represented by this historian as complaining that "he was
extremely abused by not a few at Edinburgh, and represented as a
hypocrite."] He
had my father very frequently with him in the evenings, and kept him
to very late hours. They were understood to pass much of their time
in prayer, and in settling the high points of Calvinism ; for their
creed was that of Geneva. Lord Grange was not unentertaining in
conversation, for he had a great many anecdotes which he related
agreeably, and was fair-complexioned, good-looking, and insinuating.
After those meetings for private prayer,
however, in which they passed several hours before supper, praying
alternately, they did not part without wine; for my mother used to
complain of their late hours,
and suspected that the claret had flowed liberally.*
* [Those meetings might partly be
calculated to keep Grange free of his wife's company, which was
always stormy and outrageous. I remember well that when I was
invited on Saturdays to pass the afternoon with the two youngest
daughters, Jean and Rachel, and their younger brother John, who was
of my age, then about six or seven, although they had a
well-fitted-up closet for children's play, we always kept alternate
watch at the door, lest my lady should come suddenly upon us; which
was needless, as I observed to them, for her clamour was
sufficiently loud as she came through the rooms and passages.]
In the Recollections there is the
following account of an interview with the lady:-
"I had travelled half a mile westwards
to the Red Burn, which divides Prestonpans from its suburbs the
Cuthill, and was hovering on the brink of this river, uncertain
whether or not I should venture over. In this state I was met by a
coach, which stopped, and which was under the command of Lady
Grange. She ordered her footman to seize me directly and put me into
the coach. It was in vain to fly, so I was flung into her coach
reluctant and sulky. She tried to soothe me, but it would not do.
She had provoked me on the Sunday, by telling my father that I
played myself at church, that she had detected me smiling at her son
John (exactly of my age), and trying to write with my finger on the
dusty desk that was before me. She was gorgeously dressed : her face
was like the moon, and patched all over, not for ornament, but use.
For these eighty years that I have been wandering in this
wilderness, I have seen nothing like her but General Dickson of
Kilbucho. In short, she appeared to me to be the lady with whom all
well-educated children were acquainted, the Great Scarlet Whore of
Babylon. She landed me at my father's door, and gave me to my
mother, with injunctions to keep me nearer home, or I would be lost.
This, however, drew on a nearer connection, for the two misses, who
had been in the coach, came down with John, who was younger than
them, and invited me to drink tea with them next Saturday: to this I
had no aversion, and went accordingly. The young ladies had a fine
closet, charmingly furnished,with chairs, a table, a set of china
and everything belonging to it. The misses set about making tea, for
they had a fire in the room, and a maid came to help them, till at
length we heard a shrill voice screaming, `Mary Erskine, my angel
Mary Erskine! '
" This was Countess of Kintore
afterwards, and now very near that honour. The girls seemed
frightened out of their wits, and so did the maid. The clamour
ceased; but the girls ordered John and me to stand sentry in our
turns, with vigilant ear, and give them notice whenever the storm
began again. We had sweet-cake and almonds and raisins,of which a
small paper bag was given me for my brother Loudwick, James, Lord
Grange's godson, who came last, being still at nurse. I had no great
enjoyment, notwithstanding the good things and the kisses given, for
I had by contagion caught a mighty fear of my lady from them. But I
was soon relieved, for my father's man came for me at seven o'clock.
The moment I was out of sight of the house, I took up my paper bag
and ate up its contents, bribing the servant with a few, for
Loudwick was gone to his native country to (lie at our
grandfather's. When I read the fable of the `City Mouse and Country
Mouse,' this scene came fresh to my memory. What trials and dangers
have children to go through!"
The Recollections also give the
following'story of Lady Kintore:-
"Lord's Grange's daughter Mary, Countess
of Kintore, was truly a beautiful and lively woman, but had the
misfortune to be married to a lord, little better than a changeling.
She had no children. They lived most part of the year in
Aberdeenshire in the country, which being but desolate she tired
excessively. To amuse herself she contrived to make her lord's valet
fall in love with her and brought him even to a declaration. My
lord, dull as he was, took offence ; my lady observed that he was
jealous, and told him frankly that the young man had declared his
passion, which she had laughed at, but made this condition that he
should not be turned away, as it would ruin the poor young man. My
lord consented, but grew more and more jealous and irksome. She
wanted only a pretence for leaving him, and went to Edinburgh, to
consult her father, she said. The lad, who grew restless with
irresolution and jealousy, soon followed her. And by the
interposition of the father a treaty for a separation commenced; but
Kintore, not yet cured of his passion for his wife, and having but a
small estate, stood out upon terms. He visited her daily, however,
and they were civil to each other. By a contrivance of her father,
however, as it was believed, to whom every guileful plot was at that
time ascribed, the poor fool of a husband was entirely defeated. She
asked him to come to breakfast one morning, when she had a female
friend or two with her. As they did not retire after breakfast, my
lady asked him to go into her dressing-room and mend or make her a
couple of pens, and she would come to him. She did so very soon. He
had laid down the penknife on the table; she, on some short
altercation between them which she brought on, took up the knife and
gave herself a very slight cut in the back part of her neck. She
shrieked immediately. The two friends broke in, who found her lord
in the act of wresting the knife from her hand, looking timid and
dismayed and terrified beyond all conception. She exclaimed that he
had attempted to murder her—he that never killed a fly all his life.
The father, who not far off, soon appeared on the scene, and
threatening a justiciary process for an assault with an intention to
murder, soon prevailed with the simpleton of an Earl (now completely
cured of love for his wife) to agree to a deed of separation with a
handsome allowance for his wife."
Notwithstanding this intimacy, there
were periods of half a year at a time when there was no intercourse
between them at all. My father's conjecture was, that at those times
he was engaged in a course of debauchery at Edinburgh, and
interrupted his religious exercises. For in those intervals he not
only neglected my father's company, but absented himself from
church, and did not attend the sacrament—religious services which at
other times he would not have neglected for the world. Report,
however, said that he and his associates, of whom a Mr. Michael
Menzies, a brother of the Laird of St. Germains, and Thomas Elliott,
W.S. (the father of Sir John Elliott, physician in London), were
two, passed their time in alternate scenes of the exercises of
religion and debauchery, spending the day in meetings for prayer and
pious conversation, and their nights in lewdness and revelling. Some
men are of opinion that they could not be equally sincere in both. I
am apt to think that they were, for human nature is capable of
wonderful freaks. There is no doubt of their profligacy; and I have
frequently seen them drowned in tears, during the whole of a
sacramental Sunday, when, so far as my observation could reach, they
could have no rational object in acting a part. [Grange kept a
diary, a portion of which was printed in 1834, under the title,
Extracts from the Diary of a Member of the College of Justice. It
tends, on the whole, to confirm Carlyle's view of his character ;
but it is drier reading than one would expect from the self-communings
of a man whose character was cast between extremes so wide apart,
and whose career had been so remarkable. Along with the hankering
after dreams and prophecies already alluded to, it contains chiefly
accounts of his conduct and views in the proceedings of the church
courts. It mentions some pieces of conduct on his own part, which,
if not criminal, would not then, or now, be deemed very consistent
with honour—as, for instance, how he examined a private diary kept
by the family tutor, in order that he might see what was said
therein about himself and his household; and the result, as people
who pursue such investigations usually find, was not agreeable. Each
reader will judge for himself how much sincerity there is in the
following extract from the diary:—"I have reason to thank God that I
was put out from the office of Justice-Clerk, for beside many
reasons from the times and my own circumstances, and other reasons
from myself, this one is sufficient—that I have thereby so much more
time to employ about God and religion. If I consider how very much
more I have since I was neither concerned in the Court of Justiciary
nor in the politics, how can I answer for the little advances I have
made in the knowledge of religion ? If, while I have that leisure, I
be enabled, through grace, to improve it for that end, I need not
grudge the want of the 40o sterling yearly: for this is worth all
the world, and God can provide for my family in his own good time
and way" (p. 34).]
the passions grants dispensations with
more facility than the Church of Rome.
About this time two or three other
remarkable men came to live in the parish. The celebrated Col.
Gardiner bought the estate of Banktoun, [The original name of the
estate was Olive Stob. When Colonel Gardiner purchased it from the
Hamilton family in 1733, he changed the name to Banktoun. It
adjoined the battlefield of Prestonpans, and a monument in front of
the house records the death of Colonel Gardiner.] where Lord
Drummore [Hew Dalrymple, second son of Sir Hew Dalrymple of North
Berwick, Lord President of the Court of Session. He took the title
of Lord Drummore when he was raised to the Bench in 1726.] had
resided for a year or two before he bought the small estate of
Westpans, which he called Drummore, and where lie resided till his
death in 1755.
The first Gardiner,
who was afterwards killed in the battle of Preston, was a noted
enthusiast, a very weak, honest, and brave man, who had once been a
great rake, and was converted, as he told my father, by his reading
a book called Gurnall's Christian Armour, which his mother had put
in his trunk many years before. He had never looked at it till one
day at Paris, where he was attending the Earl of Stair, who was
ambassador to that court from the year 1715 to the Regent's death,
when, having an intrigue with a surgeon's wife, and the hour of
appointment not being come, he thought he would pass the time in
turning over the leaves of the book, to see what the divine could
say about armour, which he thought he understood as well as he. He
was so much taken with this book, that he allowed his hour of
appointment to pass, never saw his mistress more, and from that day
left off all his rakish habits, which consisted in swearing and
whoring (for he never was a drinker), and the contempt of sacred
things, and became a serious good Christian ever after.
Dr. Doddridge has marred this story,
either through mistake, or through a desire to make Gardiner's
conversion more supernatural, for he says that his appointment was
at midnight, and introduces some sort of meteor or blaze of light,
that alarmed the new convert. ["He thought he saw an unusual blaze
of light fall on the book while he was reading, which he at first
imagined might happen by some accident in the candle. But lifting up
his eyes, he apprehended, to his extreme amazement, that there was
before him, as it were suspended in the air, a visible
representation of the Lord Jesus Christ upon the Cross, surrounded
on all sides with a glory ; and was impressed as if a voice, or
something equivalent to a voice, had come to him, to this effect
(for he was not confident as to the very words), ` Oh, sinner I did
I suffer this for thee, and are these the returns?' But whether this
were an audible voice, or only a strong impression on his mind
equally striking, he did not seem very confident; though, to the
best of my remembrance, he rather judged it to be the former."—Doddridge's
Remarkable Passages in the Life of Colonel Gardiner, § 32.] But this
was not the case ; for I have heard Gardiner tell the story at least
three or four times, ["The leading circumstances I have frequently
heard him repeat when only my father and .I, and the Rev. Mr. John
Glen, his son's tutor were there, though Dr. Doddridge in his
account has varied the circumstances."—Recollections.] to different
sets of people—for he was not shy or backward to speak on the
subject, as many would have been. But it was at mid-day, for the
appointment was at one o'clock; and he told us the reason of it,
which was, that the surgeon, or apothecary, had shown some symptoms
of jealousy, and they chose a time of day when he was necessarily
employed abroad in his business.
I have also conversed with my father
upon it, after Doddridge's book was published, who always persisted
in saying that the appointment was at one o'clock, for the reason
mentioned, and that Gardiner having changed his lodging, he found a
book when rummaging an old trunk to the bottom, which my father said
was Gurnall's Christian Armour, but to which Doddridge gives the
name of The Christian Soldier; or, Heaven Taken by Storm, by Thomas
Watson. ["The Christian in Complete Armour; or, A Treatise on the
Saints' War with the Devil: wherein a discovery is made of the
policy, power, wickedness, and stratagems made use of by that enemy
of God and his people; a magazine opened from whence the Christian
is furnished with special arms for the battle, assisted in buckling
on his armour, and taught the use of his weapons—together with the
happy issue of the whole war.-By WILLIAM GURNALT., A.M., formerly of
Lavenham, Suffolk. 1656-62." Three volumes quarto. The Christian
Soldier; or, Heaven Taken by Storm, one of many works written by
Thomas Watson, one of the non-juring clergy driven out by the Act of
Conformity, appears to be very rare ; it is not in the list of its
author's works in `'Watt's Bibliotheca. Doddridge, before he wrote
his well-known Remarkable Passages, had preached and published a
funeral sermon on Colonel Gardiner, which he called The Christian
Warrior Animated and Crowned—an evident assimilation to the title of
Watson's book.—J. H. B.] Doddridge, in a note, says that his edition
of the story was confirmed in a letter from a Rev. Mr. Spears, in
which there was not the least difference from the account he had
taken down in writing the very night in which the Colonel had told
him the story. This Mr. Spears had been Lord Grange's chaplain, and
I knew him to have no great regard to truth, when deviating from it
suited his purpose; at any rate, he was not a man to contradict
Doddridge, who had most likely told him the story. It is remarkable
that, though the Doctor had written down everything exactly, and
could take his oath, yet he had omitted to mark the day of the week
on which the conversion happened, but, if not mistaken, thinks it
was Sabbath. This aggravates the sin of the appointment, and hallows
the conversion.
The Colonel, who was truly an honest,
well-meaning man and a pious Christian, was very ostentatious;
though, to tell the truth, he boasted oftener of his conversion than
of the dangerous battles he had been in. As he told the story,
however, there was nothing supernatural in it; for many a rake of
about thirty years of age has been reclaimed by some circumstance
that set him a-thinking, as the accidental reading of this book had
done to Gardiner. He was a very skilful horseman, which had
recommended him to Lord Stair as a suitable part of his train when
lie was ambassador at Paris, and lived in great splendour. Gardiner
married Lady Frances Erskine, one of the daughters of the Earl of
Buchan, a lively, little, deformed woman, very religious, and a
great breeder. Their children were no way distinguished, except the
eldest daughter, Fanny, who was very beautiful, and became the wife
of Sir James Baird. [Fanny became the wife of Sir William Baird,
fifth baronet of Saughton.]
Lord Drummore, one of the Judges, was a
second or third son of the President Sir Hew Dalrymple, of North
Berwick, a man very popular and agreeable in his manners, and an
universal favourite ! He was a great friend of the poor, not merely
by giving alms, in which he was not slack, but by encouraging
agriculture and manufactures, and by devoting his spare time in
acting as a justice of peace in the two parishes of Inveresk and
Prestonpans, where his estate lay, and did much to preserve the
peace of the neighbourhood, and to promote the peace of the country.
It were happy for the country, if every man of as much knowledge and
authority as the Judges are supposed to have, would lay himself out
as this good man did. By doing so they might prevent many a lawsuit
that ends in the ruin of the parties. Lord Drummore had many
children. Mr.
Robert Keith of Craig, who was afterwards ambassador at many courts,
and who was a man of ability and very agreeable manners, came also
about this time to live in the parish. [Under the title of "Felix,"
a brief but interesting sketch of Ambassador Keith will be found in
Mrs. Alison Cockburn's Letters and Memoirs of her Own Life, with
notes by T. Craig-Brown.] His sons, Sir Robert Murray Keith, K.B.,
and Sir Basil Keith, were afterwards well known. [Abundant
information about this family will be found in the Memoirs and
Correspondence of Sir Robert Murray Keith, 1849. The elder Keith was
ambassador at Vienna, and subsequently at St. Petersburg, during the
revolution which placed the Empress Catherine on the throne. His
wife was the prototype of Scott's sketch of Mrs. Bethune Baliol. The
son, Sir Robert, was the ambassador in Denmark who saved Queen
Caroline Matilda, George III.'s sister, from the fate to which she
was destined on account of the affair of Struensee.—J. H. B.]
There lived at the same time there,
Colin Campbell, Esq., a brother of Sir James, of Arbruchal, who was
Collector of the Customs; and when he was appointed a Commissioner
of the Board of Customs, George Cheap, Esq., became his successor, a
brother of the Laird of Rossie, all of whom had large families of
seven or eight boys and girls, which made up a society of genteel
young people seldom to be met with in such a place.
When I was very young, I usually passed
the school vacation, first at Mr. Menzies', of St. Germains, and
afterwards at Seton House, when the family came to live there upon
the sale of their estate. I was very often there, as I was a great
favourite of the lady's, one of the Sinclairs of Stevenson, ["That
the lady of St. Germains liked my company I need not wonder, for
then I only listened and her tongue never lay, for she was truly as
eloquent as her nephew, the first President Dundas."—Recollections.]
and of her two daughters, who were two or three years older than I
was. These excursions from home opened the mind of a young person,
who had some turn for observation.
The first journey I made, however, was
to Dumfriesshire, in the summer 1733, when I was eleven years of
age. There I not only became well acquainted with my grandfather,
Mr. A. Robison [minister of Tinwald], a very respectable clergyman,
and with my grandmother, Mrs. Jean Graham, and their then unmarried
daughters; but I became well acquainted with the town of Dumfries,
where I resided for several weeks at Provost Bell's, whose wife was
one of my mother's sisters, two more of whom were settled in that
town—one of them, the wife of the clergyman, Mr. Wight, and the
other of the sheriff-clerk. I was soon very intimate with a few boys
of this town about my own age, and became a favourite by teaching
them some of our sports and plays in the vicinity of the capital,
that they had never heard. [* On this journey it was that I first
witnessed an execution. There was one Jock Johnstone who had been
condemned for robbery, and, being accessory to a murder, to be
executed at Dumfries. This fellow was but twenty years of age, but
strong and bold, and a great ringleader. It was strongly reported
that the thieves were collecting in all quarters, in order to come
to Dumfries on the day of the execution, and make a deforcement as
they were conducting Jock to the gallows, which was usually erected
on a muir out of town. The magistrates became anxious ; and there
being no military force nearer than Edinburgh, they resolved to
erect the gallows before the door of the prison, with a scaffold or
platform leading from the door to the fatal tree, and they armed
about one hundred of their stoutest burgesses with Lochaber axes to
forma guard round the scaffold. The day and hour of execution came,
and I was placed in the window of the provost's house directly
opposite the prison : the crowd was great, and the preparations
alarming to a young imagination : at last the prison-door opened,
and Jock appeared, enclosed by six town-officers. When he first
issued from the door, he looked a little astonished ; but looking
round a while, he proceeded with a bold step. Psalms and prayers
being over, the rope was fastened about his neck, and he was
prompted to ascend a short ladder fastened to the gallows, to be
thrown off. Here his resistance and my terror began. Jock was
curly-haired and fierce-looking, and very strong of his size—about
five feet eight inches. The moment they asked him to go;up the
ladder, he took hold of the rope round his neck, which was fastened
to the gallows, and, with repeated violent pulls, attempted to pull
it down ; and his efforts were so strong that it was feared he would
have succeeded. The crowd, in the meantime, felt much emotion, and
the fear of the magistrates increased. I wished myself on the top of
Criffel, or anywhere but there. But the attempt to go through the
crowd appeared more dangerous than to stay where I was, out of sight
of the gallows. I returned to my station again, resolving manfully
to abide the worst extremity.
Jock struggled and roared, for he became
like a furious wild beast, and all that six men could do, they could
not bind him ; and having with wrestling hard forced up the pinions
on his arms, they were afraid, and he became more formidable ; when
one of the magistrates, recollecting that there was a master mason
or carpenter, of the name of Baxter, who was by far the strongest
man in Dumfries, they with difficulty prevailed with him, for the
honour of the town, to come on the scaffold. He came, and, putting
aside the six men who were keeping him down, he seized him, and made
no more difficulty than a nurse does in handling her child: he bound
him hand and foot in a few minutes, and laid him quietly down on his
face near the edge of the scaffold, and retired. Jock, the moment he
felt his grasp, found himself subdued, and became calm, and resigned
himself to his fate. This dreadful scene cost me many nights' sleep.
N.B.—The greater portion of this
narrative is taken from the Recollections, where itismore fully,
and, as it seemed to the Editor, more picturesquely told, than in
the note appended by the author to his Autobiography.—J. H. B.]
At this time, too, I made a very
agreeable tour round the country with my father and Mr. Robert
Jardine [minister of Lochmaben], the father of Dr. Jardine,
afterwards minister of Edinburgh. Though they were very orthodox and
pious clergymen, they had, both of them, a very great turn for fun
and buffoonery; and wherever they went, made all the children quite
happy, and set all the maids on the titter. That they might not want
amusement, they took along with them, for the first two days, a Mess
John Allan, a minister who lay in their route, with whom they could
use every sort of freedom, and who was their constant butt. As he
had no resistance in him, and could only laugh when they rallied
him, or played him boyish tricks, I thought it but very dull
entertainment. Nor did I much approve of their turning the backsides
of their wigs foremost, and making faces to divert the children, in
the midst of very grave discourse about the state of religion in the
country, and the progress of the gospel. Among the places we visited
was Bridekirk, the seat of the eldest cadet of Lord Carlyle's
family, of which my father was descended. I saw, likewise, a small
pendicle of the estate which had been assigned as the portion of his
grandfather, and which he himself had tried to recover by a lawsuit,
but was defeated for want of a principal paper. We did not see the
laird, who was from home; but we saw the lady, who was a much
greater curiosity. She was a very large and powerful virago, about
forty years of age, and received us with much kindness and
hospitality; for the brandy-bottle—a Scotch pint—made its appearance
immediately, and we were obliged to take our morning, as they called
it, which was indeed the universal fashion of the country at that
time. This lady, [Miss Swan of Auchencraig, wife of William Carlile
of Bridekirk.] who, I confess, had not many charms for me, was said
to be able to empty one of those large bottles of brandy, smuggled
from the Isle of Alan, at a sitting. They had no whisky at that
time, there being then no distilleries in the south of Scotland.
[This interview is thus related in the Recollections:- "The laird
was gone to Dumfries, much to our disappointment; but the lady came
out, and, in her excess of kindness, had almost pulled Mr. Jardine
off his horse; but they were obstinate, and said they were obliged
to go to Kelhead ; but they delivered up Mess John Allan to her, as
they had no farther use for him. I had never seen such a virago as
Lady Bridekirk, not even among the oyster-women of Prestonpans. She
was like a sergeant of foot in women's clothes ; or rather like an
overgrown coachman of a Quaker persuasion. On our peremptory refusal
to alight, she darted into the house like a hogshead down a slope,
and returned instantly with a pint bottle of brandy—a Scots pint, I
mean—and a stray beer-glass, into which she filled almost a bumper.
After a long grace said by Mr. Jardine—for it was his turn now,
being the third brandy-bottle we had seen since we left Lochmaben—she
emptied it to our healths, and made the gentlemen follow her example
: she said she would spare me as I was so young, but ordered a maid
to bring a gingerbread cake from the cupboard, a luncheon of which
she put in my pocket. This lady was famous, even in the Annandale
border, both at the bowl and in battle : she could drink a Scots
pint of brandy with ease ; and when the men grew obstreperous in
their cups, she could either put them out of doors, or to bed, as
she found most convenient."]
The face of the country was particularly
desolate, not having yet reaped any benefit from the union of the
Parliaments ; nor was it recovered from the effects of that century
of wretched government which preceded the Revolution, and commenced
at the accession of James. The Border wars and depredations had
happily ceased ; but the borderers, having lost what excited their
activity, were in a dormant state during the whole of the
seventeenth century, unless it was during the time of the grand
Rebellion, and the struggles between Episcopacy and Presbytery.
On this excursion we dined with Sir
William Douglas of Kelhead, whose grandfather was a son of the
family of Queensberry. When he met us in his stableyard, I took him
for a grieve or barnman, for he wore a blue bonnet over his thin
grey hairs, and a hodden-grey coat. But on a nearer view of him, he
appeared to be well-bred and sensible, and was particularly kind to
my father, who, I understood, had been his godson, having been born
in the neighbourhood on a farm his father rented from Sir William.
My father's mother, who was Jean Jardine, ["By this lady he (Dr.
Carlyle's father) was connected with the family of Queensberry of
which Sir William (Douglas) was a branch. For the Jardines had twice
married daughters of that house. My father passed much of his youth
at Jardine Hall, for his mother dying when he was an infant, he
resided there with an aunt who kept house for Sir John Jardine."--Recollections.]
a daughter of the family of Applegarth, had died a week after his
birth in 1690. His father lived till 1721.
In the evening we went to visit an old
gentleman, a cousin of my father's, James Carlyle of Brakenwhate,
who had been an officer in James II.'s time, and threw up his
commission at the Revolution rather than take the oaths. He was a
little fresh-looking old man of eighty-six, very lively in
conversation, and particularly fond of my father. His house, which
was not much better than a cottage, though there were two rooms
above stairs as well as below, was full of guns and swords, and
other warlike instruments. He had been so dissolute in his youth
that his nickname in the country was Jamie Gaeloose. His wife, who
appeared to be older than himself, though she was seven years
younger, was of a very hospitable disposition. This small house
being easily filled, I went to bed in the parlour while the company
were at supper. But, tired as I was, it was long before I fell
asleep ; for as my father had told me that I was to sleep with my
cousin, I was in great fear that it would be the old woman.
Weariness overcame my fear, however, and I did not awake till the
tea-things were on the table, and did not know that it was the old
gentleman who slept with me till my father afterwards told me, which
relieved me from my anxious curiosity. After breakfast our old
friend would needs give us a convoy, and mounted his horse, a grey
stallion of about fourteen and a half hands high, as nimbly as if he
had been only thirty. Not long after he separated from us, I took an
opportunity of asking my father what had been the subject of a very
earnest conversation he had had the evening before, when they were
walking in the garden. He told me that his cousin had pressed him
very much to accept of his estate, which he would dispose to him, as
his only surviving daughter had distressed him by her marriage, and
he had no liking to her children. My father had rejected his
proposal, and taken much pains to convince the old gentleman of the
injustice and cruelty of his procedure, which had made him loud and
angry, and had drawn my curious attention. He died three years
after, without a will, and the little estate was soon drowned in
debt and absorbed into the great one, which made my father say
afterwards that he believed he had been righteous overmuch.
This was the first opportunity I had of
being well acquainted with my grandfather, Mr. Alexander Robison,
who was a man very much respected for his good sense and steadiness,
and moderation in church courts. He had been minister at Tinwald
since the year 1697, and was a member of the commission which sat
during the Union Parliament. He was truly a man of a sound head, and
in the midst of very warm times was resorted to by his neighbours,
both laity and clergy, for temperate and sound advice. He lived to
the year 1761, and I passed several summers, and one winter
entirely, at his house, when I was a student. He had a tolerably
good collection of books, was a man of a liberal mind, and had more
allowance to give to people of different opinions, and more
indulgence to the levities of youth, than any man I ever knew of
such strict principles and conduct. His wife, Jean Graham, connected
with many of the principal families in Galloway, and descended by
her mother from the Queensberry family (as my father was, at a
greater distance by his mother, of the Jardine Hall family), gave
the worthy people and their children an air of greater consequence
than their neighbours of the same rank, and tended to make them
deserve the respect which was shown them. When I look back on the
fulness of very good living to their numerous family, and to their
cheerful hospitality to strangers—when I recollect the decent
education they gave their children, and how happily the daughters
were settled in the world; and recollect that they had not £70 per
annum besides the £500 which was my grandmother's portion, £100 of
which was remaining for the three eldest daughters as they were
married off in their turns, it appears quite surprising how it was
possible for them to live as they did, and keep their credit. What I
have seen, both at their house and my father's, on their slender
incomes, surpasses all belief. But it was wonderful what moderation
and a strict economy was able to do in those days.
In my infancy I had witnessed the
greatest trial they had ever gone through. Their eldest son, a youth
of eighteen, who had studied at Glasgow College, but was to go to
the Divinity Hall at Edinburgh in winter 1724, to be near my father,
then removed to Prestonpans, went to Dumfries to bid farewell to his
second sister, Mrs. Bell, and left the town in a clear frosty night
in the beginning of December, but having missed the road about a
mile from Dumfries, fell into a peat pot, as it is called, and was
drowned. He was impatiently expected at night, and next morning. Iy
brother and I had got some halfpence to give him to purchase some
sugarplums for us, so that we were not the least impatient of the
family. What was our disappointment, when, about eleven o'clock,
information came that he had been drowned and our comfits lost! This
I mention merely to note at what an early age interesting events
make an impression on children's memories, for I was then only two
years and ten months old, and to this day I remember it as well as
any event of my life. [Here it may not be improper to relate an
extraordinary incident to show how soon boys are capable of deep
imposture. There was a boy at school in the same class with me whose
name was Mathie. He was very intimate with me, and was between
eleven and twelve years old, when all at once he produced more money
than anybody, though his mother was an indigent widow of a
shipmaster, and continued only to deal in hoops and stakes for the
support of her family. This boy having at different times showed
more money than I thought he had any right to have, I pressed him
very close to tell me how he had got it. After many shifts, he at
last told me that his grandfather had appeared to him in an evening,
and disclosed a hidden treasure in the garret of his mother's house,
between the floor and the ceiling. He pretended to show inc the
spot, but would never open it to me. He made several appointments
with me, which I kept, to meet the old gentleman, but he never
appeared. I tried every method to make him confess his imposture,
but without effect. After some time, I heard that he had robbed his
mother's drawers.]
Two years after this journey into my
native country, which had the effect of attaching me very much to my
grandfather and his family, and gave him a great ascendant over my
mind, I was sent to the College of Edinburgh, which I entered on the
1st of November 1735. [We had a very good master at Prestonpans, an
Alexander Hannan, an old fellow-student of my father's, whom he
brought there, and who implicitly followed his directions. He
possessed excellent translations of the classics.] I had the
good-luck to be placed in a house in Edinburgh where there was very
good company; for John, afterwards Colonel Maxwell, and his brother
Alexander, were boarded there, whose tutor, being an acquaintance of
my father's, took some charge of me. John WVitherspoon, the
celebrated doctor, was also in the house; and Sir Harry Nisbet of
Dean, and John Dalrymple, now Sir John of Cranstoun, not being able
to afford tutors of their own, and being near relations of the
Maxwells, came every afternoon to prepare their lessons under the
care of our tutor.
The future life and public character of
Dr. Witherspoon are perfectly known. At the time I speak of he was a
good scholar, far advanced for his age, very sensible and shrewd,
but of a disagreeable temper, which was irritated by a flat voice
and awkward manner, which prevented his making an impression on his
companions of either sex that was at all adequate to his ability.
This defect, when he was a lad, stuck to him when he grew up to
manhood, ["His manner was inanimate and drawling; but the depth of
his judgment, the solidity of his arguments, and the aptitude with
which they were illustrated and applied, never failed to produce a
strong impression on the Assembly."—Somerville's Memoirs of my Life
and Times.] and so much roused his envy and jealousy, and made him
take a road to distinction very different from that of his more
successful companions.
John Maxwell was remarkably tall and
well made, and one of the handsomest youths of his time, but of such
gentle manners and so soft a temper that nobody could then foresee
that he was to prove one of the bravest officers in the allied army
under Prince Ferdinand in the year 1759.
Sir Harry Nisbet was a very amiable
youth, who took also to the army, was a distinguished officer and
remarkably handsome, but fell at an early age in the battle of Val
[?]. The
character of Sir John Dalrymple, whom I shall have occasion to
mention afterwards, is perfectly known ; it is sufficient to say
here that the blossom promised better fruit. [The author of the
Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland, in which so much light is
thrown on the history of the later Stewarts and the Revolution
period.—J. H. B.]
I was entered in Mr. Kerr's [Mr. Kerr
was Professor of Greek in King's College, Aberdeen, and was
transferred to the Humanity Chair in Edinburgh University in 1734.
He died in 1741. ] class, who was at that time Professor of
Humanity, and was very much master of his business. Like other
schoolmasters, he was very partial to his scholars of rank, and
having two lords at his class—viz., Lord Balgonie and Lord Dalziel—he
took great pains to make them (especially the first, for the second
was hardly ostensible) appear among the best scholars, which would
not do, and only served to make him ridiculous, as well as his young
lord. The best by far at the class were Colonel Robert Hepburn of
Keith ; James Edgar, Esq., afterwards a Commissioner of the Customs;
[An account of "Commissioner Edgar" will be found in Kay's Edinburgh
Porlrails.—J. H. B.] Alexander Tait, Esq., Clerk of Session; and
Alexander Bertram, of the Nisbet family, who died young. William
Wilkie the poet and I came next in order, and he (Mr. Kerr) used to
allege long after that we turned Latin into English better than they
did, though we could not so well turn English into Latin; which was
probably owing to their being taught better at the High School than
we were in the country. I mention those circumstances because those
gentlemen continued to keep the same rank in society when they grew
up that they held when they were boys. I was sent next year to the
first class of mathematics, taught by Mr. M`Laurin, [Professor
M'Laurin, the youngest son of the Rev. John M'Laurin, minister of
Glenderule, was born at Kilmodan in 1698. Entering Glasgow
University in his eleventh vear, he took his M.A. degree at the age
of fifteen, was appointed Professor of Mathematics in Aberdeen
University at nineteen, and transferred to Edinburgh in 1725.] which
cost me little trouble, as my father had carried me through the
first book of Euclid in the summer. In this branch I gained an
ascendant over our tutor, Pat. Baillie, afterwards minister of
Borrowstounness, which he took care never to forget. He was a very
good Latin scholar, and so expert in the Greek that he taught
Professor Drummond's class for a whole winter when he was ill. But
he had no mathematics, nor much science of any kind. One night, when
I was conning my Latin lesson in the room with him and his pupils,
he was going over a proposition of Euclid with John Maxwell, who had
hitherto got no hold of the science. He blundered so excessively in
doing this that I could not help laughing aloud. He was enraged at
first, but, when calm, he bid me try if I could do it better. I went
through the proposition so readily that he committed John to my care
in that branch, which he was so good-natured as not to take amiss,
though he was a year older than I was. At the end of a week he fell
into the proper train of thinking, and needed assistance no longer.
Mr. M'Laurin was at this time a favourite professor, and no wonder,
as he was the clearest and most agreeable lecturer on that abstract
science that ever I heard. He made mathematics a fashionable study,
which was felt afterwards in the war that followed in 1743, when
nine-tenths of the engineers of the army were Scottish officers. The
Academy at Woolwich was not then established. |
