Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 9.djvu/200

464 from Dickens, Warren, and Ferrier among our eminent writers of fiction, and their urgent request that these productions should be given to the world, was a call too powerful to be refused, and he published them accordingly in 1843, under the title of "Domestic Verses."

Moir, now at no more than the age of confirmed manhood, when health is strongest, and hope often at the brightest, bade fair, from his firm constitution and temperate habits, to be destined for a long life of usefulness, that to the eyes of his friends loomed in bright perspective. But even at this period a series of accidents commenced, by which his term was to be hastily drawn to a close. In 1844, from sitting in wet clothes a whole night by the bedside of a patient, he caught a severe internal inflammation, from the effects of which his constitution never fully recovered. Two years after, while visiting Borthwick Castle with a small party of friends in a phaeton, the horse took fright, ran off, and upset the carriage; the whole party, who were thrown out, escaped with little hurt, except Dr. Moir, whose hip-joint was so injured by the fall, that it made him lame for life. As his medical duties still continued, he was obliged on this account to remit his literary avocations, as the evening usually found him fit for nothing but his bed. And, truly, it was no wonder, for on an average he travelled about two hundred and twenty miles per week, independently of his numerous professional visits to short distances on foot. With all this, and diminished bodily powers, he was still able, however, to give attendance to those literary and scientific meetings at which his name was in high request; and his last exertion of this kind, in which he delivered six lectures at the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh in 1851, on the poetical literature of the past half century, will long be affectionately remembered by the lecture-loving inhabitants of our capital. These lectures, too, be it remembered, were composed after the hours of ten and eleven at night, when over-toiled mortals like himself had contentedly retired to rest. At length, on the 22d of June, 1851, while dismounting from his horse, a work of difficulty in his case, on account of his lameness, he sustained so severe a wrench, that pain and debility followed, so that on the 1st of July he set off on a jaunt to Dumfries, in the hope that change of scene and cessation from labour might restore him. It was a vain hope, for at Dumfries he rapidly sank, and expired on the morning of the 6th of July. His last hours were spent in Christian peace and hope, and he died in the assurance that his solemn petition was answered, "May the Lord my God not separate between my soul and my body, till he has made a final and eternal separation between my soul and sin."

In consequence of the request of the inhabitants of Musselburgh, the funeral of Dr. Moir, which took place on the 10th of July, was a public one; and it was attended not only by the provost, magistrates, and town council of the burgh, and the kirk session of Inveresk, but the chief professors, clergymen, and literati of Edinburgh and its neighbourhood. A subscription is now in progress for the erection of a public monument to his memory in the churchyard of Inveresk, where his ashes repose. His widow and eight children still survive.

 MONCREIFF,, of Tullibole.—This eminent judge, one of those distinguished ornaments of the Scottish bar and bench for which the present century has been so remarkable, but who have successively disappeared, and left a void which will not easily be filled, was the second son of the Rev. Sir Henry Moncrieff Wellwood, one of the ministers of St. Cuth-