Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 3.djvu/333

Rh ren waste, a thriving population of three hundred souls, and several thousand acres smiling with cultivation Avhich were formerly the abode only of the moor-fowl or the curlew.

In order to encourage industry on his estate, he established a spinning school at New Pitsligo, introduced the linen manufacture and erected a bleachfield: undertakings which have since been attended with the greatest success. At the same time, to promote the education of the young, he built a school house, where the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge established a teacher ; and in order to afford to persons of all persuasions the means of attending that species of worship to which they were inclined, he built and endowed not only a Chapel of Ease, with a manse for the minister, connected with the established church, but a chapel, with a dwelling house for an episcopal clergyman, for the benefit of those who belonged to that persuasion. Admirable arts of beneficence, hardly credible in one who resided above two hundred miles from this scene of "his bounty, and was incessantly occupied in projects of improvements or charity in his own city.

To most men it would appear, that this support and attention to these multifarious objects of benevolence, both in Edinburgh and on his Aberdeenshire estates, would have absorbed the whole of both his fortune and his time, which could be devoted to objects of beneficence. But that was not Sir William Forbes's character. Indefatigable in activity, unwearied in doing good, he was not less strenuous in private than in public charity; and no human eye will ever know, no human ear ever learn, the extensive and invaluable deeds of kindness and benevolence which he performed, not merely to all the unfortunate who fell within his own observation, but all who were led by his character for beneficence to apply to him for relief. Perhaps no person ever combined to so great a degree the most unbounded pecuniary generosity with delicacy in the bestowal of the gift, and discrimination in the mode in which it was applied. Without giving way to the weakness of indiscriminately relieving all who apply for charity, which so soon surrounds those who indulge in it with a mass of idle or profligate indigence, he made it a rule to inquire personally, or by means of those he could trust, into the character and circumstances of those who were partakers of his bounty : and when he found that it was really deserved, that virtue had been reduced by suffering, or industry blasted by misfortune, he put no bounds to the splendid extent of his benefactions. To one class in particular, in whom the sufferings of poverty is perhaps more severely felt than by any other in society, the remnants of old and respectable families, who had survived their relations, or been broken down by misfortune, his charity was in a most signal manner exerted ; and numerous aged and respectable individuals, who had once known better days, would have been reduced by his death to absolute ruin, if they had not been fortunate enough to find in his descendents, the heirs not only of his fortune but of his virtue and generosity.

Both Sir William's father and mother were of episcopalian families, as most of those of the higher class in Aberdeenshire at that period were; and he was early and strictly educated in the tenets of that persuasion. He attended chief baron Smith's chapel in Blackfriars' Wynd, of which he was one of the vestry, along with the esteemed Sir Adolphus Oughton, then commander-in-chief in Scotland. In 1771, it was resolved to join this congregation with that of two other chapels in Carrubber's Close and Skinner's Close, and build a more spacious and commodious place of worship for them all united. In this undertaking, as in most others of the sort, the labouring oar fell on Sir William Forbes; and by his personal exertions, and the liberal subscriptions of himself and his friends, the Cowgate chapel was at length completed, afterwards so well