Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 2.djvu/260

554 Colonel Cleland was not destined long to enjoy his command in the Cameronian regiment, or the better times which the revolution had at length introduced. In August, 1689, the month after the battle of Killiecrankie, he was sent with his men to take post at Dunkeld, in order to prepare the way for a second invasion of the Highlands. The remains of that army which Dundee had led to victory, but without gaining its fruits, gathered suddenly into the neighbourhood, and, on the 21st of August, made a most determined attack upon the town. Cleland, though he had only eight hundred men to oppose to four thousand, resolved to fight it out to the last, telling his men, that, if they chose to desert him, he would stand out by himself, for the honour of the regiment, and the good cause in which he was engaged. The soldiers were animated so much by his eloquence and example, that they withstood the immense odds brought against them, and finally caused the Highlanders to retire discomfited, leaving about three hundred men behind them. Perhaps there was not a single skirmish or battle during the whole of the war of liberty, from 1639, to 1689, which conferred more honour on either party than this affair of Dunkeld. Cleland, to whom so much of the glory was due, unfortunately fell in the action, at the early age of twenty-eight. He was employed in encouraging his soldiers in front of Dunkeld house, when two bullets pierced his head, and one his liver, simultaneously. He turned about, and endeavoured to get back into the house, in order that his death might not discourage his men; but he fell before reaching the threshold.

It is stated by the editor of the Border Minstrelsy, but we know not with what authority, that this brave officer was the father of a second colonel Cleland, who flourished in the beau monde at London, in the reign of queen Anne, and George I., and who, besides enjoying the honour of having his character embalmed in the Spectator under the delightful fiction of Will. Honeycomb, was the author of a letter to Pope, prefixed to the Dunciad. The son of this latter gentleman was also a literary character, but one of no good fame. John Cleland, to whom we are alluding 1, was born in 1709, and received a good education at Westminster school, where he was the contemporary of Lord Mansfield. He went on some mercantile pursuit to Smyrna, where he perhaps imbibed those loose principles which afterwards tarnished his literary reputation. After his return from the Mediterranean, he went to the East Indies, but, quarrelling with some of the members of the Presidency of Bombay, he made a precipitate retreat from the east, with little or no advantage to his fortune. After living for some time in London, in a state little short of destitution, he was tempted by a bookseller, for the sum of twenty guineas, to write a novel of a singularly indecent character, which was published in 1749, in two volumes, and had so successful a run that the profits are said to have exceeded £10,000. It is related, that having been called before the privy council for this offence, he pleaded his destitute circumstances as his only excuse, which induced the president, Lord Granville, to buy the pen of the unfortunate author over to the side of virtue, by granting him a pension of £100 a year. He lived many years upon this income, which he aided by writing occasional pieces in the newspapers, and also by the publication of various works; but in none of these was he very success-