Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 4.djvu/321

Rh polite answer was returned, for the brevity of which the writer excuses himself, "as it is according to his custom, and the time allowed him for such matters." No encouragement was given to continue the correspondence, and the application was not repeated. He appears at the same time to have maintained a conference with Mr Andrew Baxter, on certain points of natural philosophy; but that gentleman finding it impossible to bend the young philosopher's mind to the conviction, that motion was not the effect of repeated impulses, but of one impulse, the effect of which continues till counteracted, (the doctrine generally received by the learned world,) seems to have lost all proper philosophical patience, and given up the controversy in a fit of anger.

Mr Home put on the gown of an advocate in the year 1723, when there were, as there. ever will be in such institutions, many eminent men at the Scottish bar; but although many were respectable both for their talents and integrity, it could not be said that more than one revered individual, Forbes of Culloden, was justly illustrious, for a distinguished display of the former, or an uncompromising and undeviating maintenance of the latter quality. The baneful corruptions of family and ministerial influence, which had long affected the court, ceased to characterize it: but their shadows still hovered around their former dwelling-place, and many curious little private documents on which the world has accidentally stumbled, have shown that the most respectable guardians of justice, have not administered the law uninfluenced by some of those little worldly motives which affect a man in the management of his own affairs. From the period when Mr Home commenced his practice at the bar, he seems to have for a time forgot his metaphysics, and turned the whole of his discriminating and naturally vigorous intellect to the study of the law; in 1728 he published the first of his numerous works, a collection of the "Remarkable Decisions of the Court of Session," from 1716 to 1728, a work purely professional, which from the species of technical study being seldom embodied by an author so comparatively youthful, seems to have attracted much attention from the court and the leading lawyers of the time. It is probable that the hue and arrangement given to the pleadings, now the chief defect of that compilation, may have rendered it at the time it was published attractive from the originality of the method. A small volume of essays " upon several subjects in Scots Law," which he published four years afterwards, afforded more scope for ingenuity and refinement of reasoning than could possibly be infused into other men's arguments; and in the choice of the subjects, and the method of treating them, full advantage has been taken of the license. Such of the arguments and observations as stood the test of more mature consideration, were afterwards embodied by the author in one of his more extensive popular law books. Mr Home seems to have been one of those gifted individuals who could enjoy hilarity without dissipation, and gayety without frivolity. In early life he gathered round him a knot of familiar and congenial spirits, with whom he enjoyed the fashionable and literary society of Edinburgh, then by no means despicable as a school of politeness, and just dawning into a high literary celebrity. Hamilton of Bangour, Oswald, and lord Binning, were among his early and familiaf friends, and though he soon extended to more gifted minds the circle of his philosophical orrespondence, an early intercourse with men so refined and learned must have left a lasting impression on his susceptible intellect.

In 1741, at the prudent age of forty-seven, Mr Home married Miss Agatha Drummond, a younger daughter of Mr Drummond of Blair, in Perthshire, a lady of whom we hear little, except that she had a turn for quiet humour, and that she perplexed her husband's economical principles by an inordinate affection for old china, being in other respects generally reported to have been a prudent and