Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 4.djvu/331

Rh when the danger approached in all its reality, melted almost into thin air: yet Home was one of a very small number who protested against the pusillanimous behaviour of the rest. Having reluctantly laid down his arms, he employed himself next day in taking observations of the strength of the Highland forces, which he appears to have communicated to Sir John Cope : while thus engaged, he was near enough to the prince to measure his stature against his own. In the early part of the succeeding year, he reappeared in arms as a volunteer, and was present at the disgraceful affair of Falkirk, where he was taken prisoner. Being conveyed to Doune castle, then under the keeping of a nephew of Rob Roy, he was confined for some days, along with several companions in misfortune; but the whole party at length escaped, by cutting their blankets into shreds, and letting themselves down upon the ground. He now took up his residence at Leith, and for some time prosecuted his professional studies, mixed, however, with a kind of reading to which his inclination led, that of the historians and classics of Greece and Rome.

" His temper," says his friendly biographer Mackenzie, "was of that warm susceptible kind, which is caught by the heroic and the tender, and which is more fitted to delight in the world of sentiment than to succeed in the bustle of ordinary life. His own favourite model of a character, and that on which his own was formed, was the ideal being Young Norval in his own play of Douglas, one endowed with chivalrous valour and romantic generosity, eager for glory beyond any other object, and, in the contemplation of future fame, entirely regardless of the present objects of interest and ambition. The same glowing complexion of mind, which gave birth to this creature of fancy, coloured the sentiments and descriptions of his ordinary discourse; he had a very retentive memory, and was fond of recalling the incidents of past times, and of dramatizing his stories by introducing the names and characters of the persons concerned in them. The same turn of mind threw a certain degree of elevation into his language, and heightened the narrative in which that language was employed; he spoke of himself with a frankness which a man of that disposition is apt to indulge, but with which he sometimes forgot that his audience was not always inclined to sympathize, and thence he was accused of more vanity than in truth belonged to his character. The same warm colouring was employed in the delineation of his friends, to whom he assigned a rank which others would not always allow. So far did he carry this propensity, that, as Dr Robertson used jokingly to say, he invested them with a sort of supernatural privilege above the ordinary humiliating circumstances of mortality. 'He never,' said the Doctor, * could allow that a friend was sick till he heard of his death.' To the same source were to be traced the warm eulogies which he was accustomed to bestow upon them. 'He delighted in bestowing as well as in receiving flattery,' said another of his intimates; 'but with him it had all the openness and warmth of truth. He flattered all of us, from whom his flattery could gain no favour, fully as much, or, indeed, more willingly, than he did those men of the first consequence and rank, with whom the circumstances of his future life associated him; and he received any praise from us with the same genuine feelings of friendship and attachment.' There was no false coinage in this currency which he used in his friendly intercourse; whether given or received, it had with him the stamp of perfect candour and sincerity."

Such was the enthusiastic young man who was destined for the strange glory of producing, in Scotland, a tragedy upon a Scottish story. In 1746, he was presented by Sir David Kinloch of Gilmerton, to the church and parish of Athelstaneford in East Lothian, then vacant by the death of the Rev. Robert Blair, the author of the Grave. Previous to this period, his passionate fondness