Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 2.djvu/261

Rh ful. He published a novel called the Man of Honour, as an amende honorable for his flagitious work, and also a work entitled the Memoirs of a Coxcomb. His political essays, which appeared in the public prints under the signatures, Modestus, a Briton, &c. are said to have been somewhat heavy and dull. He wrote some philological tracts, chiefly relating to the Celtic language. But it was in songs and novels that he chiefly shone; and yet not one of these compositions has continued popular to the present day. In the latter part of his life, he lived in a retired manner in Petty France, Westminster, where he had a good library; in which hung a portrait of his father, indicating all the manners and d'abord of the fashionable town-rake at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Though obliged to live frugally, in order that he might not exceed his narrow income, Mr Cleland occasionally received visits from his friends, to whom his conversation, enriched by many observations of foreign travel, and all the literary anecdote of the past century, strongly recommended him. He spoke with fluency the languages of Italy and France, through which countries, as well as Spain and Portugal, he had travelled on his return from the East Indies. He died in his house in Little France, January 23, 1789, at the age of eighty.

CLERK,, of Eldin, inventor of some invaluable improvements in the modern system of naval tactics, was the sixth son of Sir John Clerk of Pennycuick, baronet, who filled the situation of a baron in his majesty's Scottish exchequer between the years 1707 and 1755, and was one of the most enlightened men of his age and country. The mother of John Clerk was Janet Inglis, daughter of Sir John Inglis of Cramond. He appears at an early period of his life to have inherited from his father the estate of Eldin, in the neighbourhood of Pennycuick, and southern part of the county of Edinburgh, and to have married Miss Susanna Adam, sister of the celebrated architects, by whom he had several children. The private life of Mr Clerk of Eldin presents as few incidents as that of most country gentlemen. He was distinguished chiefly by his extraordinary conceptions on the subject of naval tactics; and it is to those that we are to direct our chief attention.

In a fragment of an intended life of Mr Clerk, written by the late professor Play fair, and published in the transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, that eminent man begins by remarking that the author of the Naval Tactics was one of those men,w r ho by the force of their own genius, have carried great improvements into professions which were not properly their own. The learned professor shows how in many professions, and as particularly in the naval as in any, the individual regularly bred to it is apt to become blindly habituated to particular modes of procedure, and thus is unfitted for suggesting any improvement in it, while a man of talent, not belonging to it, may see possibilities of improvement, and instruct those who are apt to think themselves beyond instruction. "Mr Clerk," he says, "was precisely the kind of man by whom a successful inroad into a foreign territory was likely to be made. He possessed a strong and inventive mind, to which the love of knowledge and the pleasure derived from the acquisition of it, were always sufficient motives for application. He had naturally no great respect for authority, or for opinions, either speculative or practical, which rested only on fashion or custom. He had never circumscribed his studies by the circle of things immediately useful to himself; and I may say of him, that he was more guided in his pursuits, by the inclinations and capacities of his own mind, and less by circumstances and situation than any man I have ever known. Thus it was that he studied the surface of the land as if he had been a general, and the surface of the sea as an admiral, though he had no direct connection with the profession either of the one or of the other.