Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 4.djvu/80

426 this occasion his situation was no sooner disclosed than a plan was devised for his relief, and executed almost without his knowledge. "It is to the credit of the age in which we live," says his biographer, "that, without any further application on his own part, persons of every rank and religious persuasion, protestants and catholics, clergy and laity, nobility and gentry, several of whom had never known him but by name, and many of whom had professed a dislike of his favourite tenets, united in one charitable effort to rescue him from anxiety and distress ; nor should it be forgotten that some part at least of the amount subscribed proceeded from the right reverend bench itself. The sum thus collected and expended for him, from the year 1798 to the middle of the year 1800, independent of his annuity from lord Petre, amounted to nine hundred pounds sterling. . Nor was this all : measures were taken at the same time to prevent any such disagreeable occurrence in future. In the buoyancy of spirit which this great deliverance excited, he published a modest apology for the Catholics of Great Britain, addressed to all moderate Protestants, particularly to the members of both houses of parliament. This work was published anonymously; but it had been written twenty years before, and from the style and the whispers of his friends, was soon known to be his. It was translated into the French and German languages, and, considered as the work of a man who professed himself to be a catholic, is certainly a most singular performance. It was about this time the famous rencounter between William Gifford, author of the Baviad, and Dr Wolcott, better known by the name of Peter Pindar, took place in the shop of Mr Wright, bookseller in Piccadilly, on which Dr Geddes published "Bardomachia, or the Battle of the Bards." This he was at the trouble of composing first in Latin and afterwards translating into English, so that it was published in both languages. In the following year, 1801, Dr Geddes sustained an irreparable loss in the death of his noble patron, lord Petre. His lordship died of an attack of the gout in July 1801, in the sixty-eighth year of his age. By his latter will he bequeathed to Dr Geddes an annuity of one hundred pounds ; and his son, the heir of his virtues as well as of his honours, when he intimated the circumstance to the Doctor, politely proposed to add a yearly salary of the same amount Nor ought it to be suppressed on this occasion, that Mr Timothy Brown of Chiswell street, before Dr Geddes was apprised of lord Petre's generous intentions, had engaged that the two hundred pounds a year which he was likely to lose by the death of his patron, should be supplied by the voluntary contributions of those friends who had so generously come forward on the late occasion, or in case of their declining it, by an equal salary to be annually paid by himself. Though he was thus no loser in a pecuniary point of view, he felt the void hereby produced in his happiness, and almost in his existence, to be irreparable; and it was long before his mind recovered so much calmness as to reason on the subject, or to admit the sympathies of surviving friends. His grief, however, began to assume a milder character, and he attempted to soothe his feelings by composing for his departed friend a Latin Elegy, and he gave successive proofs that the embers of his habitual hilarity still glowed with a few vital sparks. He did not, however, feel himself at any period sufficiently collected for a regular prosecution of his favourite undertaking. At the pressing request of his friends, he began to prepare for the press the Psalms, to be printed in a separate volume. With the translation he did not get further than the one hundred and eighteenth. A trifling Ode on the restoration of peace, written in Latin, was one of his amusements at this time, and a Latin Elegy on the death of Gilbert Wakefield was the last of his compositions. Mr Wakefield died in the month of September, 1801, when Dr Geddes was already deeply affected with