Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 9.djvu/414

 IV

PEEFACE.

1834, while they were so numerous as well as distinguished, that nothing less than an entire volume seemed necessary for their memorial. If in this estimate it should be alleged that a mistake has been made that the worth which our own eyes have beheld, and over which the grave has so recently closed, has in some instances been rated higher than a future time, and the increasing experience of society will ratify still we trust, it is a mistake which the succeeding generation will be easily disposed to pardon. In this additional volume they will read the record of men whom their fathers delighted to honour, and by whom, in no small degree, their own characters have been moulded. In such an extended mode, also, of writing a national Biography, a mass of information is bequeathed to posterity, in which the excess can be easily reduced to those dimensions which it ought to occupy in future history. This is certainly a more venial error than that of a too compendious narrative, the defects or omissions of which, in the course of a few years, it might be difficult, or even impossible to rectify.

A few names, well worthy of being enshrined in a work like the pre- sent, having been overlooked, or otherwise omitted in the original edition, advantage has been taken of the opportunity presented by the publication of this supplemental volume, to supply the deficiency. Among them may be specified Malcolm Canmore, our earliest monarch worthy of the name; Randolph and the Douglases, coadjutors in the defence of Scottish independence ; the admirals Barton and Wood, who first unfurled the naval flag of Scotland; besides others whose names occupy a prominent place in the annals of our native land.

The author of this additional volume of the " LIVES OP ILLUSTRIOUS AND DISTINGUISHED SCOTSMEN" has only to add, that the following memoirs owe nothing more to him than the care of editorial revision : viz., those of Joanna Baillie, Rev. Dr. Robert Balfour, James Bell, John Burns, M.D., David Dale, Colonel John Fordyce, George Gardner, Charles Mackintosh, James Montgomery, and Thomas Thomson, M.D., F.R.S.

These were derived from sources of information to which he either had no ready access, or were connected with subjects to which he thought he could not render such ample justice as they merited. For the author- ship of the rest of the volume, whatever may be its merits or defects, he claims the entire responsibility.

THOMAS THOMSON.