Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 4.djvu/133

Rh and from parental care, admonition, and example. Under such circumstances, it need not excite wonder that boys in hospitals, even under the best management and tuition, should be found to be listless and indifferent in regard to learning and improvement; that their moral feelings should be blunted, and their natural affections weakened; and that their intellectual faculties should be less developed than those of other boys of the same age, placed in ordinary circumstances. It may be laid down as the result of the united experience of Gordon's and Heriot's hospitals in Scotland, and of similar institutions in England, that no amount of intellectual instruction can make up for the loss of parental and family influence in the formation of character.

GORDON,, an eminent party writer, and translator of Tacitus, is supposed to have been born in the parish of Kells, in the stewartry of Kirkcudbright, about the end of the seventeenth century. His father, the representative of an ancient family, descended from the Gordons of Kenmuir, was proprietor of Gairloch in that parish. Thomas Gordon is said to have received a university education in his own country, and then to have gone to London as a literary adventurer: joining these circumstances with his avowed infidelity, it is probable that he was a renegade student of divinity, or licentiate—almost always an unprincipled and odious character. In London, he supported himself at first as a teacher of languages, and gradually became an author by profession. He is said to have been employed as a political writer by the earl of Oxford, in the support of the tory ministry of which that nobleman was the head; but this hardly corresponds with the other dates of his literary exertions, for Mi-Gordon appears to have written nothing of which the title has been commemorated, till he formed an intimacy with Mr Trenchard; and, on the 20th of January, 1720, commenced in conjunction with that individual, a weekly political sheet called "the Independent Whig." If Gordon wrote in the reign of queen Anne, what was he doing in the course of the six intervening years? Nor is it of small importance to his reputation that this point should be settled, as he be- came a distinguished patriot, and a supporter of Sir Robert Walpole—the very reverse, in every respect, of what he is said to have been in the days, of queen Anne's tory ministry. It is our own opinion that the latter allegation is not well founded; it does not appear in the original memoir of Gordon in the Biographia Britannica, 1766, an article evidently written by a person that must have known him personally, or at least his surviving family; that sketch represents him in the more probable character of a young man taken into employment by Mr Trenchard as an amanuensis, and subsequently so much improved by the conversation and instructions of his employer, as to be fitted to enter into a literary partnership with him as an independent patriotic writer. Thus we see much cause to relieve the memory of this clever person from no small share of the odium which has been cast upon it by subsequent biographical writers.

Trenchard, the partner of Gordon, was a political writer of some standing, and no small influence. It was in consequence of a pamphlet from his pen, that the parliament obliged king William to send home his Dutch guards; a proceeding which is said to have moved that grave monarch to tears, and almost induced him to go back to Holland himself. Mr Trenchard was the author of a work which appeared in 1709, under the title of "the Natural History of Superstition," and held the office of commissioner of the forfeited estates in Ireland. His acquaintance with Gordon appears to have been commenced without the formality of an introduction. "From a perfect stranger to him," says the latter, "and without any other recommendation than a casual coffee-house acquaintance, and his own good opinion, he took me into his favour and care, and into as high a degree of intimacy as ever was shown by one man to another.