Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 4.djvu/320

62 pensive education of an English university, and an intuitive horror at a contact with the lower ranks, frequently induced them to reject the more simple system of education provided by the universities of Scotland. Whether from this or some other cause, young Home was denied a public education, and received instructions from a private tutor of the name of Wingate, of whose talents and temper he appears to have retained no happy recollection. The classical education which he received from this man appears to have been of a very imperfect description, and although on entering the study of his profession, he turned his attention for some length of time to that branch of study, he never acquired a knowledge of ancient languages sufficiently minute to balance his other varied and extensive acquirements. Mr Home was destined by his family to follow the profession of the law, the branch first assigned him being that of an agent He was in consequence apprenticed to a writer to the signet in the year 1712, and he continued for several years to perform the usual routine of drudgery, unpleasant to a cultivated and thinking mind, but one of the best introductions to the accurate practice of the more formal part of the duties of the bar. The ample biographer of Home has detailed in very pleasing terms the accident to which he dates his ambition to pursue a higher branch of the profession than that to which he was originally destined. The scene of action is represented as being the drawing room of Sir Hew Dalrymple, lord president of the court of session, where Home, on a message from his master, finds the veteran judge in the full enjoyment of elegant ease, with his daughter, a young beauty, performing some favourite tunes on the harpsichord. "Happy the man," the sentimental youth is made to say to himself, " whose old age, crowned with honour and dignity, can thus repose itself after the useful labours of the day, in the bosom of his family, amidst all the elegant enjoyments which affluence, justly earned, can command! such are the fruits of eminence in the profession of the law!" If Home ever dated his final choice of a profession from the occurrence of this incident, certain praises which the president chose to bestow on his acuteness and knowledge of Scottish law, may have been the part of the interview which chiefly influenced his determination.

Having settled the important matter of his future profession, Mr Home applied himself to the study of the laws, not through the lectureship which had just been established in Edinburgh for that purpose, but by means of private reading, and attendance at the courts. He seems indeed to have entertained an early objection to the discipline of a class-room, and to have shown an independence of thought, and repugnance to direction in his mental pursuits, which have been by some of his admirers laid down as the germs of that originality which his works have exhibited. Perhaps the same feeling of self-assurance prompted him in the year 1723, to address a long epistle to Dr Samuel Clarke, "from a young philosopher," debating some of that learned divine's opinions on the necessity, omnipotence, and omniscience of the Deity. A very concise and