Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 6.djvu/148

518 commission for several years in Campbell's Highlanders, and was wounded in the Seven Years' War in Germany. He was afterwards a captain in the 68th regiment, and served with this corps for a considerable time in Gibraltar, and other places abroad. He was a man of amiable manners and disposition, and much esteemed by all who knew him, amongst the most remarkable of whom was major Mercer, the author of a volume of pleasing poetry, who thus speaks of him, sixteen years after his death, in a letter to lord Glenbervie: "We lived together," says this gentleman, " for two years in the same tent, without one unkind word or look. John Mackintosh was one of the liveliest, most good-humoured, gallant lads I ever knew."

Sir James's mother, Marjory Macgilivray, who died at Gibraltar, while he was yet a child, was a daughter of Alexander Macgilivray, Esq. of the state of Carolina.

From a very early period of life the subject of this memoir discovered a singular propensity to reading; a passion which his father, who had been himself accustomed to an active life, and who desired that his son's pursuits should be of a more stirring kind, endeavoured, but in vain, to subdue. Little foreseeing the eminence to which this studious disposition was one day to raise him, he twitted the boy with his sedentary and monotonous life; telling him, with the view of rousing him to an interest in what was passing around him, and of directing his inclinations into a livelier channel, that he would become a mere pedant. His attachment to books, however, was too deeply seated in his nature to be removed by such sarcasms, and his father's opposition had the effect only of driving him to do that by stealth and in secret which he had done before openly. He rose at midnight when the family had retired to rest, lighted his candle, and pursued his solitary studies unmolested till the approach of morning.

In consequence of his father's being much abroad, the care of young Mackintosh devolved chiefly upon his grandmother, a woman of superior endowments, and to whom he was in a great measure indebted for the early discipline which his mind received. When of sufficient age to leave home, the future historian and statesman was sent to the academy of Fortrose, then the most distinguished seminary in that part of Scotland, and placed under the tuition of 'Mr Stalker, one of the masters. Here young Mackintosh rapidly acquired, and continued to maintain, a marked superiority over all his schoolfellows for ability and application. In this remote corner of the world, and at the early period of his life, his future fame was shadowed forth in a local reputation which gave to "Jamie Mackintosh" the character of a prodigy of learning and talent. His master entertained a similar opinion of him, and, as a proof of his confidence in his acquirements and abilities, devolved upon him, while yet a mere boy, nearly the entire management of the classical department of the school. At this period, too, he began to discover that talent for oratory and declamation by which he so eminently distinguished himself in after life. The eloquence, however, on which latterly "listening senates hung" was at this period poured out from the top of the grave stones in the churchyard of Fort-rose, on which the young orator used to mount in moments of enthusiasm, and declaim from Shakspeare and Milton to a wondering, gaping, and admiring audience of his schoolfellows. The political opinions which distinguished Mr Mackintosh throughout his life were also very early formed. He was said by a lady, a relative of his own, to have been " boni a whig," but he certainly was not this by inheritance, for his friends and connexions were all staunch tories and Jacobites, and they did not view without regret and sorrow the apostasy of this scion of the house of Killochy. The youthful fancy, however, of the young