Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 4.djvu/188

534 been peculiarly gratifying to the younger man, from the circumstance of his early displaying a determined opposition to the political measures of the lord advocate. Mr Grant was only twenty-eight years of age, when he took an active part in that memorable convention which sat in the earlier part of the year 1689, to decide on the claims of the prince of Orange; and when older politicians vacillated, and looked to accident for the direction of their future conduct, he boldly adopted his line of politics, and argued strongly, and it would appear not without effect, that the only fit course to pursue, was to bestow on the prince the full right of sovereignty, with those limitations only which a care for the integrity of the constitution might dictate, and without any insidious provisions which might afterwards distract the nation, by a recurrence of the claims of the house of Stuart His zeal for the cause he had adopted prompted him at that juncture to publish a small controversial work, which he called, " The Loyalist's Reasons for his giving obedience, and swearing allegiance to the present Government, as being obliged thereto, by (it being founded on) the Laws of God, Nature, and Nations, and Civil, by F. G." In the freedom of modern political discussion, the arguments which were produced as reasons for a change of government would appear a little singular; the whole is a point of law tightly argued, as if fitted to meet the eye of a cool and skilful judge, who has nothing to do but to discover its accordance or disagreement with the letter of the law. The ground, however, upon which he has met his adversaries is strictly of their own choosing, and the advocate for a revolution seems to have adhered with all due strictness to relevancy and sound law. He founds his arguments on certain postulates, from which, and the facts of the case, he deduces that king James had forfeited his superiority, by committing a grand feudal delict against his vassals ; and the throne being thus vacated, he shows, in several theses, that the prince of Orange had made a conquest of the same, and had relinquished its disposal to the country, and the country having thus the choice of a ruler, ought to bestow the government on the generous conqueror. The whole is wound up by several corollaries, in a strictly syllogistic form. The reasonings are those of an acute lawyer, well interspersed with authorities from the civil and feudal law ; and it may easily be presumed, that such reasoning, when applied judiciously and coolly to the subject, had more effect on the restricted intellect of the age, than the eloquence of Dalrymple, or the energy of Hamilton. Indeed the effect of the work in reconciling the feudalized minds of the Scottish gentry to the alteration, is said to have been practical and apparent; and while the author received honours and emoluments from the crown, his prudence and firmness made him respected by the party he had opposed.

The tide of Mr Grant's fortune continued to flow with steadiness from the period of this successful attempt in the political world, and he was constantly in the eye of government as a trustworthy person, whose services might be useful for furthering its measures in those precarious times. With such views, a baronetcy was bestowed on him, unexpectedly and without solicitation, in the year 1705, preparatory to the general discussion of the union of the kingdoms; and after the consummation of that measure, he was raised to the bench, where he took his seat as lord Cullen, in the year 1709. He is said to have added to the numberless controversial pamphlets on the union; and if certain pamphlets called "Essays on removing the National prejudices against a union," to which some one has attached his name, be really from his pen, (which, from the circumstance under which they bear to have been written, is rather doubtful,) they show him to have entered into the subject with a liberality of judgment, and an extent of information seldom exhibited in such controversies, and to have possessed a peculiarly acute foresight of the advantages of an interchange of com-