Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 4.djvu/95

Rh lie left as a donation to the Radcliffe Library. After five years of suffering from a lingering and painful complaint, this able, persevering, and upright ruan died in London, in 1754, having continued in the faith of his ancestors, and unmarried. He made several bequests, some to public charities, others to individuals, one of which in particular must not be passed over. Remembering the benefactor who had assisted him in the days of his labour and adversity, he left £1000, the whole of his plate, and an estate of £280 a year to the only son of the earl of Marr; an uncommon act of gratitude, which, however party feeling may regret the circumstances which caused it, will in the minds of good and generous men, exceed in merit all that the intellect of the artist ever achieved.

GIBSON,, lord Durie, an eminent lawyer and judge, was the son of George Gibson of Goldingstones, one of the clerks of session. The period of his birth we have been unable to discover; but as we find him admitted a clerk of session in 1594, we may conclude that he was born considerably more than twenty years previous to that period. It appears that the appointment of Gibson to this duty created a new clerkship, and as the addition in number would reduce the arbitrary sources of emolument of the other two clerks, it was naturally apprehended that the interloper would be received with the usual jealousy of those whose interests are unduly interfered with. King James the sixth, who had generally some deep and mysteriously wise purpose in all he did, chose to be personally present at the appointment of his nominee, in order that the royal choice might meet with no marks of contempt. The mindful sovereign was on this occasion pleased to be so highly delighted with the disinterested conduct of his obedient clerks, who had so willingly received a partner "at his Highness's wish and special desire," that he promised in presence of the court, to remunerate them with "ane sufficient casualty for said consents." The chamber in the Register house instituted by this appointment still retains the denomination of "Durie's Office." At that period the duties of a principal clerk of session were of a more politically important nature than they have been since the union : these officers had to register the decrees and acts of parliament, in addition to their present duties. The only remnant of their former occupations, is their acting as clerks at the elections of the Scottish representative peers. Gibson continued in his clerkship for all the remainder of his life, notwithstanding the higher offices to which he was afterwards promoted. In 1621, he was appointed a lord of session, and as the duties of judge and clerk were rather anomalous, we find by the books of sederunt, that the prudent clerk had procured in the previous month his son to be installed in the office. Mr Alexander Gibson, junior, being appointed conjunct clerk with Mr Alexander Gibson, senior, during the life of the longest liver, the senior, it may be presumed, continued to draw the salivy, without being 1 much troubled with the duties. Seven years after his appointment to the bench, we find him accepting a baronetcy of Nova Scotia, with a grant of some few square miles of land in that district. In 1633, he was appointed a member of one of the committees for the revision of the laws and customs of the country. In 1640, he appears to have been elected a member of the committee of estates, and his appointment as judge was continued under a new commission to the court in 1641. From the period of his elevation to the bench in 1621, till the year 1642, this laborious lawyer preserved notes of such decisions of the court as he considered worthy of being recorded as precedents, a task for which a previously extensive practice had fitted him. These were published by his son in one volume folio, in 1688, and are valuable as the earliest digested collection of decisions in Scottish law. Their chief peculiarities are their brevity, and, what would not