Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 6.djvu/123

Rh composition is everywhere excellent—its leading characteristics being strength, elegance, and simplicity. The formation of his sentences appears the most inartificial; though at the same time, it will be found, strictly correct. But the manner, amidst all its beauties, is, on the first perusal, lost in the enjoyment the reader feels from the sentiment. Devotional and solemn subjects peculiarly accord with his feelings and genius. In exhibiting deep and solemn views of human life, his sentiments are bold and varied, and his imagination teems with the most soothing and elevated figures. It appears to have been no part of his plan to seek out for new subjects of preaching, or to exert his ingenuity in exhibiting new views of moral and religious topics. To embellish the most common subjects, which are certainly the most proper and useful, with new ornaments; to persuade by more forcible and captivating illustration; to unite the beauties of elegant diction, and the splendour of fine imagery; in this lay his chief exertions, and here rests his chief praise." LOTHIAN, (, F.R.S.E., author of a History of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, was born at Edinburgh in 1740, being the son of Mr George Lothian, a respectable surgeon in that city. Having passed through the various stages of his education with some eclat, he was licensed as a preacher of the gospel in 1762, and appointed, in 1764, one of the ministers of the Canongate. As a preacher his method of instruction was simple and perspicuous, his sentiments rational and manly, and his manner unaffected and persuasive. For many years before his death he was afflicted with a very painful disease ; yet he not only performed his professional duties with unabated zeal, but found energy and spirit to compose the work above-mentioned, which appeared in 1780. Previously to this publication he had been honoured by the Edinburgh university with the degree of doctor of divinity. He died December 17, 1783, having only completed the forty-third year of his age. Two sermons by him are published in the Scotch Preacher, 4 vols. 12mo, 1776. For a more copious notice of this respectable divine, reference may be made to the first volume of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

LOVE,, a controversial critic of celebrity, was born at Dumbarton in 1695. He was the son of John Love, a bookseller, who, as Chalmers indisputably remarks, "like greater dealers in greater towns, supplied his customers with such books as their taste required." The son was educated at the grammar school of Dumbarton, and the university of Glasgow. Having finished his studies, he became assistant or usher to his old master Mr David M'Alpine, and in 1720, succeeded him in his humble duty. On the 17th October, 1721, he married Elizabeth, daughter of Mr Archibald Campbell, a surgeon of Glasgow, who had been one of the baillies of that city. By her he had thirteen children, two of whom, a clergyman and an officer in the navy, were alive when Chalmers wrote his Life of Kuddiman. In 1733, Mr Love entered the field of controversy by publishing "Animadversions on the Latin Grammar lately published by Mr Robert Trotter, schoolmaster of Dumfries," a production chiefly designed for the purpose of defending Kuddiman, whose grammar had been reflected on by Trotter. "Like Ruddiman," says Chalmers very aptly, "Love seems to have delighted in marriage, or like him, to have been driven to connubial connexions, by his scholastic business, which required female superintendence." Accordingly, in pursuance of the disposition so aptly associated with his name, he married in 1741, for his second wife, Giles, the youngest daughter of the reverend Mr James Elphinston, minister of Dalkeith, who had died in 1710. Love was subjected, it would appear, at one period of his life to a species of religious prosecution, on an accusation of brewing on Sunday,