Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 4.djvu/79

Rh a translation, which he had set up to outrage alike the faith of Jews and Christians, to make his triumph perfect and his happiness complete. The vain man had by his "Idea," his " Prospectus," his "Appendix," and his "Answer to counsels and queries," secured, as he supposed, the concurrence of mankind, while he had in fact only excited expectations which, though his talents had been increased a hundred fold, he would have found himself unable to satisfy. What must he have felt or thought when he found that the book, instead of pleasing all the world, as he had vainly hoped, pleased nobody. Christians of every description considered it an insidious attack upon the foundations of their faith, and the Catholics, for whose benefit it was stated to have been mainly intended, were by a pastoral letter from their vicars apostolic forbidden to read it. Geddes, in an address to the public the following year, defended himself with great boldness, laying claim, like every other infidel, to the most fearless honesty and the strictest impartiality. The failure of his hopes, however, affected him so deeply that his biblical studies were for a time nearly suspended, and it required all the attentions of his friends to prevent him from sinking into the deepest despondency. In the meantime, he soothed, or attempted to soothe his chagrin by writing two Latin odes in praise of the French revolution, but which, on the representations of his friends, he allowed to lie unpublished till the period of the peace in the year 1801. He also wrote and published at this time a translation of Gresset's Ver Vert, or the Parrot of Nevers, which did him no honour, the poem having been only a short while before translated more happily by John Gilbert Couper. In the year 1795, he published an Ode to the honourable Thomas Pelham, occasioned by his speech on the Catholic question in the Irish house of commons, which was followed, in 1796, by a Hudibrastic paraphrase of a sermon which had been preached by a Dr Coulthurst on the anniversary of his majesty's accession, before the university of Cambridge. In 1797, he published "The battle of B * ng * r, or the Church's Triumph, a comic heroic poem in nine cantoes." The subject of this poem was suggested by the notable contest between bishop Warren and Mr Grindly, and it is unquestionably the most finished of all his English poems, The same year he published the second volume of his translation of the Bible, which brought it to the end of the Book of Ruth, beyond which it was not destined to advance in its regular form.

During the two succeeding years he published two burlesque sermons, ridiculing the fast-day sermons of the established clergy, and in the year 1800, his Critical Remarks on the Hebrew Scriptures, corresponding with a new translation of the Bible, vol. I., containing remarks on the Pentateuch. If there had been any doubt on the public mind respecting the principles of Dr Geddes, this volume must have removed it These remarks are less scurrilous perhaps, but not less impious than those of Thomas Paine, and, professing to be the result of laborious learning, sound philosophy, and a most enlarged and enlightened Christianity, are to weak minds much more dangerous, and to the well informed more offensively disgusting, than even the flippancies of that celebrated unbeliever. They had not, however, the merit of meeting the general ideas of mankind, and we believe are already nearly forgotten. The encouragement with which he commenced his publication was greatly inadequate to meet the expense; and this encouragement, instead of increasing, had greatly fallen off; the work being printed, too, solely at his own expense, he soon found himself involved in pecuniary difficulties, from which he had not the means of extricating himself. Never had a reckless man, however, such a singularly good fortune. We have already seen him twice rescued from ruin in a way, on both occasions, which no one less fortunate than himself could have hoped for, and on