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ARNOT, HUGO, a historical and antiquarian
writer of the eighteenth century, was the son of a merchant and
ship-proprietor at Leith, where he was born, December 8th,
1749. His name originally was Pollock, which he changed in early life for
Arnot, on falling heir, through his mother, to the estate of Balcormo in
Fife. As "Hugo Arnot of Balcormo, Esq.," he is entered as a
member of the Faculty of Advocates, December 5, 1772, when just about to
complete his twenty-third year. Previous to this period, he had had the
misfortune to lose his father. Another evil which befell him in early life
was a settled asthma, the result of a severe cold which he caught in his
fifteenth year. As this disorder was always aggravated by exertion of any
kind, it became a serious obstruction to his progress at the bar; some of
his pleadings, nevertheless, were much admired, and obtained for him the
applause of the bench. Perhaps it was this interruption of his
professional career which caused him to turn his attention to literature.
In 1779, appeared his "History of Edinburgh," 1 vol. 4to. a work
of much research, and greatly superior to a literary point of view to the
generality of local works. The style of the historical part is elegant and
epigrammatic, with a vein of causticity highly characteristic of the
author. From this elaborate work the author is said to have only realized
a few pounds of profit; a piratical impression, at less than half the
price, was published almost simultaneously at Dublin, and, being shipped
over to Scotland in great quantities, completely threw the author’s
edition out of the market. A bookseller’s second edition, as it
is called, appeared after the author’s death, being simply the remainder
of the former stock, embellished with plates, and enlarged by some
additions from the pen of the publisher, Mr Creech. Another edition was
published in 8vo, in 1817. Mr Arnot seems to have now lived on terms of
literary equality with those distinguished literary and professional
characters who were his fellow-townsmen and contemporaries. He did not,
however, for some years publish any other considerable or acknowledged
work. He devoted his mind chiefly to local subjects, and sent forth
numerous pamphlets and newspaper essays, which had a considerable effect
in accelerating or promoting the erection of various public works.
The exertions of a man of his public spirit
and enlarged mind, at a time when the capital of Scotland was undergoing
such a thorough renovation and improvement, must have been of material
service to the community, both of that and of all succeeding ages. Such
they were acknowledged to be by the magistrates, who bestowed upon him the
freedom of the city. We are told that Mr Arnot, by means of his influence
in local matters, was able to retard the erection of the South Bridge
of Edinburgh for ten years—not that he objected to such an obvious
improvement on its own account, but only in so far as the magistrates
could devise no other method for defraying the expense than by a tax upon
carters; a mode of liquidating it, which Mr Arnot thought grossly
oppressive, as it fell in the first place upon the poor. He also was the
means of preventing for several years the formation of the present
splendid road between Edinburgh and Leith, on account of the proposed plan
(which was afterwards unhappily carried into effect,) of defraying the
expense by a toll; being convinced, from what he knew of local
authorities, that, if such an exaction were once established, it would
always, on some pretext or other, be kept up. In 1785, Mr Arnot published
"A Collection of Celebrated Criminal Trials in Scotland, with
Historical and Critical Remarks," 1 vol. 4to.; a work of perhaps even
greater research than his history of Edinburgh, and written in the same
acutely metaphysical and epigrammatic style. In the front of this volume
appears a large list of subscribers, embracing almost all the eminent and
considerable persons in Scotland, with many of those in England, and
testifying of course to the literary and personal respectability of Mr
Arnot. This work appeared without a publisher’s name, probably for some
reason connected with the following circumstance. Owing perhaps to the
unwillingness of the author to allow a sufficient profit to the
booksellers, the whole body of that trade in Edinburgh refused to let the
subscription papers and prospectuses hang in their shops; for which reason
the author announced, by means of an advertisement in the newspapers, that
these articles might be seen in the coffee-houses. Mr Arnot received the
sum of six hundred pounds for the copies sold of this work, from which he
would have to pay the expenses of printing a thin quarto: it thus happened
that what was rather the least laborious of his two works, was the most
profitable. Mr Arnot only survived the publication of his Criminal Trials
about a twelvemonth. The asthma had ever since his fifteenth year been
making rapid advances upon him, and his person was now reduced almost to a
shadow. While still young, he carried all the marks of age, and
accordingly the traditionary recollections of the historian of Edinburgh
always point to a man in the extreme of life. Perhaps nothing could
indicate more expressively the miserable state to which Mr Arnot was
reduced by this disease, than his own half-ludicrous, half-pathetic
exclamation, on being annoyed by the bawling of a man selling sand on the
streets: "The rascal!" cried the unfortunate invalid, "he
spends as much breath in a minute as would serve me for a
month!"
Among the portraits and caricatures of the
well known John Kay, may be found several faithful, though somewhat
exaggerated, memorials of the emaciated person of Hugo Arnot. As a natural
constitutional result of this disease he was exceedingly nervous and
liable to be discomposed by the slightest annoyances: on the other hand,
he possessed such ardour and intrepidity of mind, that in youth he once
rode on a spirited horse to the end of the pier of Leith while the waves
were dashing over it and every beholder expected to see him washed
immediately into the sea! On another occasion having excited some
hostility by a political pamphlet and being summoned by an anonymous foe
to appear at a particular hour in a lonely part of the King’s Park, in
order to fight, he went and waited four hours on the spot, thus perilling
his life in what might have been the ambuscade of a deadly enemy. By means
of the same fortitude of character, he beheld the gradual approach of
death with all the calmness of a Stoic philosopher. The magistrates of
Leith had acknowledged some of his public services, by the ominous
compliment of a piece of ground in their church-yard; and it was the
recreation of the last weeks of Mr Arnot’s life to go every day to
observe the progress made by the workmen in preparing this place for his
own reception. It is related that he even expressed considerable anxiety
lest his demise should take place before the melancholy work should be
completed. He died, November 20th, 1786, when on the point of completing
his 37th year; that age so fatal to men of genius that it may almost be
styled their climacteric. He was interred in the tomb fitted up by himself
at South Leith.
Besides his historical and local works, he
had published, in 1777, a fanciful metaphysical treatise, entitled,
"Nothing," which was originally a paper read before a well-known
debating club styled the Speculative Society, being probably suggested to
him by the poem of the Earl of Rochester on the equally impalpable subject
of Silence. If any disagreeable reflection can rest on Mr Arnot’s
memory for the free scope he has given to his mind in this little essay—a
freedom sanctioned, if not excused, by the taste of the age—he must be
held to have made all the amends in his power by the propriety of his
deportment in later life; when he entered heartily and regularly into the
observances of the Scottish episcopal communion, to which he originally
belonged. If Mr Arnot was any thing decidedly in politica, he was a
Jacobite, to which party he belonged by descent and by religion, and also
perhaps by virtue of his own peculiar turn of mind. In modern politics he
was quite independent judging all men and all measures by no other
standard than their respective merits. In his professional character, he
was animated by a chivalrous sentiment of honour worthy of all admiration.
He was so little of a casuist, that he would never undertake a case,
unless he were perfectly self-satisfied as to its justice and legality. He
had often occasion to refuse employment which fell beneath his own
standard of honesty, though it might have been profitable, and attended by
not the slightest shade of disgrace. On a case being once brought before
him, of the merits of which he had an exceedingly bad opinion he said to
the intending litigant in a serious manner "Pray, what do you suppose
me to be?" "Why," answered the client, "I understand
you to be a lawyer." "I thought, Sir," said Arnot sternly,
"you took me for a scoundrel." The litigant, though he perhaps
thought that the major included the minor proposition, withdrew abashed.
Mr Arnot left eight children, all very young; and the talent of the family
appears to have revived in a new generation, viz., in the person of his
grandson, Dr David Boswell Reid, whose "Elements of Chemistry"
has taken its place amongst the most useful treatises on the science, and
who was selected by Government, on account of his practical skill, to plan
and superintend the ventilation of the new houses of parliament, in the
prosecution of which object he has for several years been conducting the
most costly and prolonged, if not the most successful, experiment of the
kind ever made.
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