lue in itself, but as borrowing some estimation from the era of which it speaks, and the names which that era introduces to their notice. It is only with reference to this sort of chronicle that it pretends to claim your attention, and that he who reads it could now pretend to make it worthy of your hearing. That waning age, and often interrupted health, which have so long delayed its production, even in a very imperfect state, have blunted, he is well aware, those powers which the world were kindly disposed to estimate, more from their application and tendency than from their intrinsic worth.

The first favoured lot of age is to retain its powers undecayed; the next is his who is sensible of their decay, and diffident of their exertions. The Society will pardon this little digression of egotism in one who will never probably be heard by it again in the first person, and who scarce presumes to expect that any partial friends will deem him of importance enough to recal him to its remembrance in the third.

JOHN HOME, of whose life I am to read the following sketch, was born at Leith, on the 22d day of September, 1722, O. S. He was the son of Mr Alexander Home, town-clerk of Leith, and Mrs Christian Hay, daughter of Mr John Hay, writer in Edinburgh, of a respectable family in the north

of Scotland. His father was a son of Mr Home of Flass, in the county of Berwick, a lineal descendant of Sir James Home of Cowdenknows, ancestor of the present Earl of Home.

Mr Home (according to the narrative, for which I am indebted to an intimate friend and relation of his) was educated at the Grammar School of Leith, and the University of Edinburgh. In both these seminaries he prosecuted his studies with remarkable diligence and success. While he attended the University, his talents, his progress in literature, and his peculiarly agreeable manners, soon excited the attention, and procured him in no small degree the favour, both of the professors and of his fellow students. At this early period of life he entered into strict bonds of friendship with the late Drs Robertson, Blair, Drysdale, and several others, of whom I shall, in a subsequent part of this Memoir, give a more particular account.

As he was educated with a view to obtain a situation as a minister of the Church of Scotland, his studies were, of course, for some time principally calculated to qualify him for the performance of the several duties incumbent on a clergyman. His character as a zealous and accomplished student, became in a few years very conspicuous. After passing, with much approbation, through the various trials, which candidates for acquiring the station of probationers for the ministry are required

to undergo, he was licensed to preach the gospel by the Presbytery of Edinburgh on the 4th day of April 1745, O. S.

His sincere attachment to the ecclesiastical and civil constitution of his country was, with his usual warmth and openness of mind, displayed in some of his early appearances in the pulpit. *

The progress of his professional studies and occupations was interrupted by the breaking out of the Rebellion in 1745. This furnished an occasion for that military ardour, that chivalrous spirit, which his natural temperament and favourite course of reading had produced and fostered. He took the side of whiggism, as whiggism was then understood, and freedom, as British freedom was then conceived, and became a volunteer in a loyal corps, which was formed in Edinburgh with the original purpose of defending that city from the attack of the rebels, of which he has given a full account in his History of that Rebellion. In this corps he served at the unfortunate battle of Falkirk, and, after the defeat, was taken prisoner along with some others of his fellow volunteers, and committed to the Castle of Doune in Perthshire, from which the party contrived to escape by cutting their bed-clothes into ropes, and letting themselves down from the window of the room in which they were confined. One of their number (Mr Bar

row,* a young English student, then in Edinburgh, an early and intimate acquaintance of Mr. Home's) broke his leg in the descent; but Mr Home escaped unhurt, and, eluding the vigilance of the Jacobite party, who, in truth, were neither very active nor rigid in their measures of precaution or of resentment, took up his residence for some time with his relations at Leith, and applied himself to that sort of study which his intended clerical profession required, but always mixed, if not interrupted, by the kind of reading to which his inclination led, that of the historians and classics of Greece and Rome.

His temper was of that warm susceptible kind which is caught with the heroic and the tender, and which is more fitted to delight in the world of sentiment than to succeed in the bustle of ordinary life.. This is a disposition of mind well suited to the poetical character, and, accordingly, all his earliest companions agree that Mr Home was from his childhood delighted with the lofty and heroic ideas which embody themselves in the description or narrative of poetry. One of them, nearly a coëval of Mr. Home's, our respected and venerable colleague Dr A. Ferguson, says, in a letter to me, that Mr Home's

* Mr Barrow was the "Genial Youth" mentioned in Collins's Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands.

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favourite model of a character, on which, indeed, his own was formed, was that of Young Norval, in his tragedy of Douglas, one endowed with chivalrous valour and romantic generosity, eager for glory beyond every other object, and, in the contemplation of future fame, entirely regardless of the present objects of interest or ambition. It was upon this ideal model of excellence that Mr Home's own character was formed, and the same glowing complexion of mind which gave it birth, coloured the sentiments and descriptions of his ordinary discourse; he had a very retentive memory, and was fond of recalling the incidents of past times, and of dramatizing his stories by introducing the names and characters of the persons concerned in them. The same turn of mind threw a certain degree of elevation into his language, and heightened the' narrative in which that language was employed; he spoke of himself with a frankness which a man of that disposition is apt to indulge, but with which he sometimes forgot that his audience was not always inclined to sympathize, and thence he was accused of more vanity than in truth belonged to his character. The same warm colouring was employed in the delineation of his friends, to whom, in his estimation, he assigned a rank which others did not always allow. So far did he carry this propensity, that, as Dr Robertson used jokingly to say, he invested them with a sort of supernatural"