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Rh placed under the care of a Mr Sinclair, an indulged presbyterian minister, who at that time kept a school of great celebrity at Ormiston, a village in east Lothian. Under Mr Sinclair, in whose school, as in all schools of that kind at the time, and even in the family, no language but Latin was used, Carstairs acquired a perfect knowledge of that language, with great fluency of expressing himself in it, and a strong taste for classical learning in general. He had also the good fortune to form, among the sons of the nobility who attended this celebrated seminary, several friendships, which were of the utmost consequence to him in after life.

Having completed his course at the school, Mr Carstairs entered the college of Edinburgh in his nineteenth year, where he studied for four years under Mr, afterwards Sir William Paterson, who in later life became clerk to the privy council of Scotland. Under this gentleman he made great proficiency in the several branches of the school philosophy then in vogue ; but the distracted state of the country determined his father to send him to study divinity in Holland, where many of his brethren, the persecuted ministers of the church of Scotland, had already found an asylum. He was accordingly entered in the university of Utrecht, where he studied Hebrew under Leusden and Divinity under Herman Witsius, at that time two of the most celebrated professors in Europe. He had also an opportunity, which he carefully improved, of attend- ing the lectures of the celebrated Graevius, who was at this time in the vigour of his faculties and the zenith of his reputation. The study of theology, however, was what he made his main business, which having completed, he was licensed as a preacher of the gospel, but where or by whom seems not to have been known by any of his biographers. In all probability, it was by some of the classes of Holland. Being strongly attached to the presbyterian system, in which he had been educated, and for adherence to which his father was a sufferer at home, and himself in a limited sense a wanderer in a strange land, for it was to avoid the taking of unnecessary or unlawful oaths imposed by the bishops that he had been sent by his father to study at Utrecht, he naturally took a deep interest in the affairs of his native country, and was early engaged in deliberating upon the means of her deliverance. On sending him to Holland by the way of London, his father introduced him by letter to an eminent physician of that city, who kindly furnished him with a letter to the physician of the prince of Orange. This latter gentleman, upon the strength of his friend's recommendation, introduced Carstairs to the Pensionary Fogel, who finding him so much a master of every thing relative to the state of parties and interests in Great Britain, introduced him to a private interview with his master, the prince, who was at once struck with his easy and polite address, and with the extent of his political knowledge. This favourable opinion was heightened by subsequent interviews, and in a short time nothing of consequence was transacted at his court relative to Great Britain, till Carstairs had been previously consulted. Holland had, from the first attempts of the court after the Restoration to suppress the presbyterians, been the general resort of such of the Scottish clergy as found it impossible to retain their stations, and they were soon followed by numbers of their unhappy countrymen who had vainly perilled their lives on the fatal fields of Pentland and Both well, with the principal of whom Carstairs could not, in the circumstances in which he was placed, fail to become acquainted. Being well connected, and in no way obnoxious to the government, he seems to have been selected both by his expatriated countrymen and by the agents of the prince of Orange to visit Scotland on a mission of observation in the year 1682.

Nothing could be more hopeless than the condition of Scotland at this time.