Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 19.djvu/302

 and with this incident he disappeared from public life. What is known of his subsequent career entitles him to a place among the early improvers of Scotch agriculture. In Holland he had been struck by the efficacy of the mill-machinery used there for removing the husk of barley and converting it into ‘pot’ barley, and of the fanners for winnowing corn. In 1710 he engaged James Meikle, an ingenious millwright in the neighbourhood of Salton, father of the better known Andrew Meikle, to go to Amsterdam and, under his direction, to see to the construction of such portions of the ironwork of the barley-mills as could not easily be made in Scotland. Meikle took them to Salton and there erected a barley-mill, which found constant employment (cf., ii. 70, where the Salton mill is said to have been erected upon a plan made from memory by ‘William Adam, the architect,’ doubtless the father of the three brothers Adam). ‘Salton barley’ became conspicuous on the signboard of almost every Scotch retailer of such articles, yet for more than forty years that barley-mill remained the only one in Great Britain, Ireland, or America. Fanners also were erected at Salton, but apparently not until a few years after Fletcher's death (, pp. 145–6;, p. 198). Fletcher died in London in September 1716, and his remains were taken to Salton, where they were deposited, and rest in the family burial-vault.

Fletcher's ardent, courageous, and disinterested patriotism raise him far above the Scotch politicians of his time. Historians from Wodrow to Macaulay unite in bearing testimony to his worth. Hume calls him ‘a man of signal probity and fine genius’ (History of England, ed. 1854, vi. 396). The Jacobite Lockhart of Carnwath, who sat with him in the Scotch parliament of 1703–7, declared him (p. 75) to be ‘so steadfast to what he thought right that no hazard nor advantage, no, not the universal empire, nor the gold of America, could tempt him to yield or desert it.’ The strict Wodrow (iv. 227), after speaking of him as ‘one of the brightest of our gentry, remarkable for his fine taste in all manner of polite learning, his curious library, his indefatigable diligence in every thing he thought might benefit and improve his country,’ praises the ‘sobriety, temperance, and good management’ which he exhibited in private life. As a writer he is superior to any Scotchman of his age, and his oratory, nervous and incisive, is made eloquent by his sincerity and earnestness. His chief fault was his irritability of temper. The story retailed to Mrs. Calderwood during her journey in Holland (Coltness Papers, pp. 166–7, and reproduced in, iii. 319 n.) of a Dutch skipper deliberately sent out of the world by ‘old Fletcher of Salton’ from a dislike of his tobacco-smoking, may have been meant to refer to the patriot, though this is by no means certain, since the date of her narrative is 1756, forty years after his death. If told of him it is probably apocryphal. Macky (p. 223) describes him as ‘a low,’ i.e. short, ‘thin man, brown complexion, full of fire, with a stern, sour look.’ He died unmarried.

All the writings of Fletcher previously mentioned are contained in the first collection of his ‘Political Works,’ London, 1737; the ‘Character of the Author, from a MS. in the Library of the late Thomas Rawlinson,’ prefixed to it, and often reprinted subsequently with the same account of its source, being simply that given by Macky in the volume already quoted from. In the next edition of the ‘Political Works,’ Glasgow, 1747, the ‘Discorso delle cose di Spagna’ appears in an English translation solely. The volume, London, 1798, professing to contain the ‘Political Works,’ gives only Fletcher's ‘Discourse on Militias’ and the ‘Account of a Conversation,’ ‘with notes, &c., to which is prefixed a sketch of his life, with observations, moral, philosophical, and political, by R. Watson, M.D.’ The life is valueless. To Lord Buchan's ‘Memoir’ are appended Fletcher's parliamentary speeches of 1703. ‘An Historical Account of the Ancient Rights and Power of the Parliament of Scotland,’ &c., published anonymously at Edinburgh in 1703, and reprinted at Aberdeen in 1823 as ‘undoubtedly’ written by Fletcher, may be pronounced to have been undoubtedly not written by him were it only because a very complimentary reference is made in it to the author of the ‘Discourse of Government with relation to Militias.’ The catalogue of the Edinburgh Advocates' Library attributes to Fletcher two pamphlets, nowhere else referred to, in connection with him: 1. ‘Scotland's Interest, or the great Benefit and Necessity of a Communication of Trade with England,’ &c., 1704. 2. ‘State of the Controversy betwixt United and Separate Parliaments,’ &c. Neither of these pamphlets is in the Library of the British Museum. Fletcher left behind him a manuscript ‘Treatise on Education,’ of which nothing seems now to be known. The library which he formed is still preserved at Salton Hall, in a room built expressly for it in 1775 by his grand-nephew, also an Andrew Fletcher.

[Fletcher's writings; Earl of Buchan's Essays on the Lives and Writings of Fletcher of Saltoun and the Poet Thomson (1792): Biographical,