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Lives of Eminent Men of Aberdeen

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Lives of Eminent Men of Aberdeen NYPL RESEARCH LIBRARIES 3 3433 08253730 3 - - j : EMINENT MEN OF ABERDEEN. ABERDEEN: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, BY D. CHALMERS AND CO. LIVES OF EMINENT MEN OF ABERDEEN. BY JAMES BRUCE ABERDEEN : L. D. WYLLIE & SON S. MACLEAN ; W. COLLIE ; SMITH ; ; AND J. STRACHAN. W. RUSSEL ; W. LAURIE ; EDINBURGH: WILLIAM TAIT ; GLASGOW: DAVID ROBERTSON; LONDON : SMITH, ELDER, & CO. MDCCCXLI. THE NEW r TILDEN FOUr R 1, TO THOMAS BLAIKIE, ESQ., LORD PROVOST OF ABERDEEN, i's Folum? IS INSCRIBED, WITH THE HIGHEST RESPECT AND ESTEEM FOR HIS PUBLIC AND PRIVATE CHARACTER, AND FROM A SENSE OF THE INTEREST WHICH HE TAKES IN EVERY THING THAT CONCERNS THE HONOUR AND WELFARE OF HIS NATIVE CITY, BY HIS MUCH OBLIGED AND MOST OBEDIENT SERVANT, JAMES BRUCE. A 2 CONTENTS PAGE. ( JOHN BARBOU'R . 1 BISHOP ELPHINSTONE 22 BISHOP GAVIN DUXBAR . .57 DR. THOMAS MORISON . 76 GILBERT GRAY . 81 BISHOP PATRICK FORBES . 88 DR. DUNCAN LIDDEL . .115 GEORGE JAMIESON . 130 BISHOP WILLIAM FORBES . 152 DR. ARTHUR JOHNSTON . 171 EDWARD RABAN ... .193 DR. WILLIAM GUILD . 197 ALEXANDER ROSS . 225 GEORGE DALGARNO . 252 JOHN SPALDING . .202 HENRY SCOUGAL . 270 ROBERT GORDON . 289 PRINCIPAL BLACKWELL 303 ELIZABETH BLACKWELL . 307 DR. CAMPBELL . .319 DR. BEATTIE . 305 DR. HAMILTON . 3*1 DR. BROWN . 393 PREFACE IN offering this volume to the public, the writer trusts, that, with all its imperfections, it will be found not uninteresting to his townsmen, or, perhaps, to the general reader. At least it had frequently occurred to him, that an amusing and instructive book might be made on the subject which he has handled. The volume does not contain one half of the lives which the author would have wished to have placed in it. He has been obliged to lay aside biographies which would have been well worthy of insertion. Those who do not consider the r difficulty of selling a large work will ask w hy they have not got the lives of Gilbert Jack, Dr. William Barclay, Walter Donaldson, John John- ston, David Wedderburn, Dr. Patrick Dun, Andrew Cant, Provost Jaffray, the very learned Dr. John Forbes, Andrew Baxter the metaphy- sician, the Gregories, Gibbs the architect, Mor- PREFACE. ison the botanist, Baillie Skene, the Rev. John Bisset, Professor John Kerr, the Gerards, and the to which \ve that all these Fordyces ; answer, men are fairly entitled to places in a collection of Aberdeen biographies, and would all have been here had there been room for them. This volume is the first of its kind, as far as the writer is aware, that has been published in Scotland. On the Continent, numerous com- pilations have been made of the biographies of " men belonging to particular cities. The au- thors belonging to such and such towns," says " Jeremy Collier, have been taken care of by several collectors. Thomasinus has given us a of those of Padua those of register ; Bumaldi, Bologna; Hieronymo Rubei has preserved those of Ravenna Coria and those of ; Ripamonte, Milan has the ; Hugolino Verrino mustered writers of Florence Sanders has done as much ; for those of Ghent and so has Julius ; Puteanus for the of Verona Lewis Jacob has left lawyers ; an account of the authors of Chalon upon the Saone the ; and Sieur Pitton has done the same for those of Aix in Provence." To this list, fur- nished by Collier, several additions might be made. PREFACE. XI While the writer feels a warm interest in the honour of Aberdeen, he has not judged it a wise method of promoting that honour to deal in undeserved eulogiums on the eminent men whom it has produced. He also could never discover the propriety of the practice, in common use, of making every man a saint whose good fortune it his life has been to have written ; and he ven- tures to express an opinion, that the cause of morality and truth is not in very safe keeping with writers who adopt this system. Without troubling the reader any further with professions, the writer may be allowed to state, with great deference, however, to the judgment of those who think otherwise and may know much better, that he conceives that the great end and object of writing history should be, not the mere settling of disputed dates and the fix- ing of contested localities, nor even the clearing up of the family connexions of great men and " the tracing of endless genealogies which," as " the apostle says, minister questions rather than godly edifying," but the exhibition, according to the writer's ability, of human nature in its vari- ous appearances the exposure to the world of truth in all its loveliness, and virtue with all her Xll PREFACE. charms. This object, in favour of which he is obliged to confess that he entertains a strong prejudice, the writer has never lost sight of for an instant in these or pages ; but, directly indirectly, has framed every sentence in accordance with it. On this account, perhaps he will not be very strongly reviled for stepping, as he has some- times done, out of his more immediate subject, in order to do something, in an humble way, in vindication and support of the neglected interests of sound morality and sound religion, as appli- cable to the most trifling as well as to the most important actions of men. LIVES OP EMINENT MEN OF ABERDEEN. JOHN BARBOUR. OF the life of this great poet and historian, whose writings have done honour to Scotland, the memo- rials discovered by the most anxious researches are exceedingly scanty. That he was born at Aberdeen, as stated by Hume of Godscroft, and, after him, by Dr. Mackenzie and is others, extremely probable ; but not fully authenticated. The conjectures regard- ing his parentage are various. There is no sufficient evidence that he was the son of Andrew Barbour, who had possessed a tenement in the Castle Street of Aberdeen, from which, in the year 1350, a burgess of the called city, Matthew Pinchach, had granted an endowment to the Carmelite Friars, as appears from a charter given by David II. to that body, of the B 2 EMINENT MEN OF ABERDEEN. date of 1360.* Still less satisfactory is the supposi- tion that he was the son of John Barber, or Barbour, in favour of whom David II. in the year 1328, issued an order to Sir Alexander Seaton, Governor of Ber- a of In ad- wick, for the payment of sum money. -f the dition to these conjectures, Dr. Jamieson suggests writers is probability that our poet, who by some said to have been educated at Arbroath, might be related to Robert Barbour, who, in 1309, received of from Kins:D Robert Bruce a charter of the lands of these Craigie, in Forfarshire. Though the first opinions appears to carry most weight, as it connects Barbour' s father with Aberdeen, it must be confessed that all of them rest on no better evidence than that derived from the sameness of the name which, it is the likely, was a very common one and circumstance that there is nothing in the chronology to contradict belief in them. Mr. Pinkerton, a writer of more acuteness than antiquaries usually possess, has, in the absence of anything like evidence, prudently abstained from hazarding a guess on the birthplace or parentage of the poet. J It is as evident from his writings, as from the rank which he afterwards held in the Church, that Barbour received a learned education. On what authority it has been asserted that he was educated at Arbroath, * Jamieson's Barbour, p. 3. In this charter, the name Barbour, or Barber, which no doubt originated from the profession, is curiously translated Barbitonsor. t Irving's Lives of the Scottish Poets, vol. i. p. 254. Pinkerton's Barbour, vol. i. p. xviii. Tytler's Lives of Scottish Worthies, vol. ii. p. 139. JOHN BARBOUR. 3 we have been unable to discover. A School of Divinity and Canon Law had existed at Aberdeen since the of Alexander II. and it has been reign ; supposed that Barbour had availed himself of the learning which it could supply, and had afterwards studied at Oxford. In the year 1357, he was Archdeacon of Aberdeen, under which title we find that he was nominated by the Bishop, one of the Commissioners, who were to meet at Edinburgh, in order to take measures for liberating King David, who had been kept a prisoner in England since the battle of Nevil's Cross.* This notice of Barbour, being then Arch- deacon of Aberdeen, is all the evidence from which conjectures have been drawn about the year of his birth. Lord Hailes, indeed, fancies that his descrip- tion of the person of Sir Thomas Randolph, who died in 1331, must have been drawn from personal observ- ation but the itself does not authorize this ; passage opinion. From his being Archdeacon in this year, most authorities, thinking it unlikely that he could have arrived at that rank in the Church till he was about forty, have placed his birth in the years 1316 to 1319. Mr. Pinkerton makes it ten years later. By * "The Scots prelates granted powers to certain persons to act for them in Parliament at Edinburgh, and to concur in every thing which might be requisite for effecting the deliverance of their sovereign. The Bishop of Aberdeen named three Commissioners : one of them was John, Archdeacon of Aberdeen [John Barbour, the metrical historian.] Like Commissions were granted by the and of of and of Bishop Chaplain Moray, Glasgow, Duukeld ; by the Bishop of Argyle, by the Chapter of Ross, by the Prior and Chapter of St.
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