Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 3.djvu/328

356 tiniate with the best society in Scotland, lived in privacy, and what would now be deemed poverty, solely engaged in the care of their children, and the discharge of their social and religious duties. Many persons are still alive, who recollect with gratitude and veneration these remnants of the olden times; and in the incessant care which they devoted to the moral and religious education of their offspring, is to be found the pure and sacred fountain from which all the prosperity and virtue of Scotland has flowed.

Both Sir William's father and his mother were members of the Scottish episcopal church; a religious body which, although exposed to many vexations and disabilities since the Revolution in 1688, continued to number among its members many of the most respectable and conscientious inhabitants of the country. To this communion Sir William continued ever after to belong, and to his humane and beneficent exertions, its present comparatively prosperous and enlarged state may be in a great measure ascribed. It is to the credit of that church, that it formed the character, and trained the virtues, of one of the most distinguished and useful men to whom the Scottish metropolis has given birth.

As soon as the education of her son was so far advanced as to permit of his entering upon some profession, his mother, lady Forbes, removed to Edinburgh in October, 1753, where an esteemed and excellent friend, Mr Farquharson of Haughton, prevailed on the Messrs Coutts soon after to receive him as an apprentice into their highly respectable banking house—among the earliest establishments of the kind in Edinburgh, and which has for above a century conferred such incalculable benefit on all classes, both in the metropolis and the neighbouring country. The mother and son did not in the first instance keep house for themselves, but boarded with a respectable widow lady; and it is worthy of being recorded, as a proof of the difference in the style of living, and the value of money between that time and the present, that the sum paid for the board of the two was only forty pounds a year.

At Whitsunday, 1754, as Sir William was bound an apprentice to the banking house, she removed to a small house in Forrester's Wynd, consisting only of a single floor. From such small beginnings did the fortune of this distinguished man, who afterwards attained so eminent a station among his fellow citizens, originally spring. Even in these humble premises, this exemplary lady not only preserved a dignified and respectable independence, but properly supported the character of his father's widow. She was visited by persons of the very first distinction in Scotland, and frequently entertained them at tea parties in the afternoon; a mode of seeing society which, although almost gone into disuse with the increasing wealth and luxury of modern manners, was then very prevalent, and where incomparably better conversation prevailed, than in the larger assemblies which have succeeded. At that period also, when dinner or supper parties were given by ladies of rank or opulence, which was sometimes, though seldom the case, their drawing rooms were frequented in the afternoon by the young and the old of both sexes; and opportunities afforded for the acquisition of elegance of manner, and a taste for polite and superior conversation, of which Sir William did not fail to profit in the very highest degree.

It was an early impression of Sir William's, that one of his principal duties in life consisted in restoring his ancient, but now dilapidated family; and it was under this feeling of duty, that he engaged in the mercantile profession. The following memorandum, which was found among his earliest papers, shows how soon this idea had taken possession of his mind:—"The slender provision which my father has left me, although he had, by great attention to business and frugality, been enabled in the course of that life, to double the pittance