Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 8.djvu/298

246 affections were so completely occupied and his home endeared, that he had reached his forty-second year, with the character of an amiable country gentleman, whose highest object was the welfare of his tenants and the happiness of all around him. But all at once this tranquil happiness was brought to a close by the death of Mrs. Graham in 1792, after she had been married eighteen years; and her husband, who loved her with a surpassing affection, was inconsolable at her death. The bereavement was also still farther imbittered by the circumstance of their marriage having been without offspring, so that no child was left behind to cheer the solitude of his dwelling, and restore to him the look and accents of the departed. He felt as if he had sustained a loss for which nothing could compensate ; but instead of having recourse to the miserable remedy of the suicide, he resolved at the age of forty-three to devote himself to a military life, where he might find, not a soldier's glory, for which at this time he cared not, but a soldier's early grave, the refuge best fitted for a weary and broken heart. Who would have thought that a feeling so tender and domestic was to produce the victor of Barossa? It is to this commencement of his military life that Sir Walter Scott so touchingly alludes, while describing the chief heroes of the peninsular war, in his "Vision of Don Roderick": —

This choice of a military life was made after the consolations of travel had been tried and found ineffectual. The bereaved man had wandered through France; but neither its beautiful scenery, nor gay society, nor even the wild events of its Revolution, could abstract his mind from its own sorrows. He then became a pilgrim on the shores of the Mediterranean, and passed over to Gibraltar; and it was in the society of the officers there that his choice appears to have been first adopted. He offered himself as a volunteer to Lord Hood, then about to sail to the south of France, and by the latter he was received with welcome. At the commencement of the revolutionary war in 1793, Graham landed with the British troops at Toulon, and officiated there as extra aide-de-camp to Lord Mulgrave, the general in command. In the numerous encounters with the enemy that distinguished this memorable siege, the new volunteer threw himself among the foremost ; and on one occasion, when a British soldier fell at the head of the attacking column, Mr. Graham snatched up the musket of the dead man, and took his place. When Toulon was evacuated by the British and Spanish troops, Graham, now a pledged soldier, returned to Scotland, and raised the first battalion of the 90th regiment, in which he was appointed lieutenant-colonel. With this corps he passed the summer of 1795, and was afterward transferred to Gibraltar, where he received the rank of full colonel in the army. The dulness of garrison duty, however, within a sphere so limited as the rock of Gibraltar, was only fitted to aggravate the disease for which Graham was seeking relief, and therefore he sought and easily obtained permission to join the Austrian army, at that time employed against the French on the Rhine. Here