Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 1.djvu/225

 him a miserable wreck upon the shores of life. Many days had not elapsed after the death of Montague Beattie, ere he began to display symptoms of a decayed intellect, in an almost total loss of memory respecting his son. He would search through the whole house for him, and then say to his niece and housekeeper, Mrs Glennie, "You may think it strange, but I must ask you, if I have a son, and where he is." This lady would feel herself under-the painful necessity of bringing to his recollection the death-bed sufferings of his son, which always restored him to reason. And he would then, with many tears, express his thankfulness that he had no child, saying, with allusion to the malady they might have derived from their mother, "How could I have borne to see their elegant minds mangled with madness?" When he looked for the last time on the dead body of his son, and thought of the separation about to take place between himself and the last being that connected him with this sublunary scene, he said, "Now, I have done with the world!" After this, he never bent his mind again to study, never touched the violincello on which he used to be an excellent and a frequent player, nor answered the letters of his friends, except, perhaps, a very few. He commanded his mind, however, to compose the following epitaph on his son; it was the last effort of the Minstrel, and has all his usual happiness in this peculiar branch of composition:

MONTAGU. BEATTIE. Jacobi. Hay. Beattie. Frater. Ejusque. virtutum. et. studiorum. Æmulus. Sepulchrique. cojisors Variarura. Peritus. Artium. Pingendi. imprimis. Natus. Octavo. Julii. MDCCLXXVIII. Multum. Defletus. obiit. Decimo. quarto. Martii. MDCCXCV.

The phrase "sepulchrique consors" was literally true. That space in the roomy grave of his eldest son, which he had calculated on as sufficient for himself, was devoted to receive this second and final hope of his old age.

In March 1797, Dr Beattie became completely crippled with rheumatism, and in the beginning of 1799, he experienced a stroke of palsy, which for eight days so affected his speech that he could not make himself understood, and even forgot several of the most material words of every sentence. At different periods after this, he had several returns of the same afflicting malady; the last, in October 1802, deprived him altogether of the power of motion. He lingered for ten months in this humiliating situation, but was at length relieved from all his sufferings by the more kindly stroke of death, August 18, 1803. He expired without the least appearance of suffering. His remains were deposited close to those of his two sons in the ancient cemetery of St Nicolas, and were marked soon after by a monument, for which Dr James Gregory of Edinburgh, supplied an elegant inscription.

The eminent rank which Dr Beattie holds as a Christian moral philosopher is a sufficient testimony of the public approbation of his larger literary efforts. It may, however, be safely predicted, that his reputation will, after all, centre in his "Minstrel," which is certainly his most finished work, and, every thing considered, the most pleasing specimen of his intellect. If we consider how much original talent, and how much cultivated taste must have been necessary to the composition of this beautiful poem, we will wonder that such should have been found in a professor of a Scottish provincial university, at a time when scarcely any vestige of the same qualifications was to be found out of London. "Beat-