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 ARBUCKLE AND THE MOLESWORTH-SHAFTESBURY SCHOOL. 195 commercial expression " Philosophy made in Germany," to say that the so-called Scottish Philosophy was made in Ireland might occasion something of a mental shock ! The full discussion of the influences to which Hutcheson was subjected in Dublin would be somewhat lengthy, owing to the number of events in his life that are difficult to determine, and also to the fact that his friends are singularly elusive to a biographer ; for, while all of them were men of mark and importance, they seem to have been unanimous in leaving few traces of their thought behind them. It is for this reason that the history of Hutcheson's early develop- ment may be said to be almost, if not quite, a lost chapter in the History of Philosophy, and, therefore, the few pages of it that can be recovered, which deal with his friend Arbuckle, gain a reflected interest to which they would scarcely be entitled upon their intrinsic merits. The earliest account of Arbuckle is contained, in MS., in a copy of his poem Glotta, which is preserved in the Library of the British Museum. It runs as follows : "James Arbuckle was a native of Ireland, and, after going through his University course, at Glasgow College, he settled, as a schoolmaster, in the north of Ireland. He possessed genius, as his poems show. He was the author of Snuff a Poem by Mr. James Arbuckle, printed at Glasgow in 1717. 8vo. He addressed laudatory verses to Allan Eamsay, who, in January, 1719, wrote an Epistle, in verse, to Mr. James Arbuckle. (See Ramsay's Poems, 1800, 8vo., vol. i., p. clxxxiii., and vol. ii., p. 359). Arbuckle projected a transla- tion of Virgil but did not finish it. " He died in 1734, aged 34." Notwithstanding the meagreness of this brief sketch, it is incorrect in several particulars, more especially in the date of Arbuckle's death, which, as will be seen below, is ante- dated by some dozen years. This being so, it is doubtful whether any reliance can be placed upon the statement that in 1734 he was thirty-four years of age, but this is the only clue to the date of his birth, which would thus be assigned to the year 1730. Failing such untrustworthy evidence, approximate dates might be mentioned as between 1697 and 1705. From other sources one gathers that James Arbuckle was the son of a Presbyterian minister of the well-known Dublin Congregation of Usher's Quay. 1 Like most of the Presby- terian clergy in Ireland, he was of Scotch extraction, and 1 Sermons of John Abernethy. London, 1748, i., p. 39.