Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 2.djvu/96

390 who was so sensible of the valuable services of the church in preserving public tranquillity, during his absence in Sweden on the occasion of his marriage, that in his letters to Bruce he declared that he was "worth the quarter of his kingdom."

The person of Robert Bruce was tall and dignified. His countenance was majestic, and his appearance in the pulpit grave, and expressive of much authority. His manner of delivery was, in the words of a presbyterian historian, 'an earthquake to his hearers, and he rarely preached but to a weeping auditory.' It is told, as an instance of the effect of his sermons, that a poor Highlander one day came to him after he had concluded, and offered to him his whole wealth (two cows), on condition that he would make God his friend. Accustomed to continual prayer and intense meditation on religious subjects, his ardent imagination at times appears to have lost itself in visions of the divine favour; a specious, but natural illusion, by which the most virtuous minds have been deceived and supported, when reason and philosophy have been summoned in vain. His knowledge of the Scriptures was extensive, and accurate beyond the attainment of his age. His skill in the languages, and the sciences of those times, not to mention his acquaintance with the laws and constitution of the kingdom, a branch of knowledge possessed by few of his brethren, was equal, if not superior, to that of any of the Scottish reformers. His sermons, of which sixteen were printed in his lifetime, display a boldness of expression, regularity of style, and force of argument, seldom to be found in the Scottish writers of the sixteenth century. A translation of their rich idiomatic Scottish into the English tongue was printed in 1617, and is that which is now most common in Scotland.

This great man was buried within the church of Larbert, in which he had often preached during the latter part of his life. People assembled from all quarters to attend his funeral; and, according to Calderwood, between four and five thousand persons followed his corpse to the grave. It is impossible to conclude this narrative of his life, without remarking how much of his person and character revived in the Abyssinian Bruce, his descendant in the sixth degree, whose person was also majestic, and whose mind, while diminished a little in utility by hasty passion and a want of accommodation to circumstances, was also of the most powerful cast, and calculated to produce a great impression upon those around it.

BRUNTON,, an eminent moral novelist of the present century, was born in the island of Burra, in Orkney, November 1, 1778. Her father was Colonel Thomas Balfour of Elwick, a cadet of one the most respectable families in the county of Orkney. Her mother was Frances Ligonier, only daughter of Colonel Ligonier of the 13th dragoons, and niece of the Earl of Ligonier, under whose care she was educated. Previous to her sixteenth year, Mary Balfour had received some instructions in music, and in French and Italian, from her mother; and her education was completed by a short residence at a boarding-school in Edinburgh. At the early age mentioned, she had to undertake the charge of her father's household, from which she was removed in her twentieth year, to be the wife of the Rev. Alexander Brunton, minister of the parish of Bolton in East Lothian. In the retirement, and moderate elegance of a Scottish manse, Mrs Brunton was only at first conspicuous for her attention to her household duties. Afterwards, however, the tastes of her husband led her gradually into habits of study, and she went, with his direction and assistance, through a course of reading, in history, philosophy, criticism, and the belles lettres. The promotion of her husband to a ministerial charge at Edinburgh, which took place six years after her marriage, was favourable to the expansion