BURNET, the Honourable James, Lord Monboddo, a senator of the college of justice in Scotland, was born about the year 1714. He was the son of Mr Burnet of Monboddo in Kincardineshire. After passing through the usual course of school education, he prosecuted his studies at the universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and Leyden, with distinguished reputation. He was admitted an advocate in 1737, and on the 12th of February 1767, he was raised to the bench by the title of Lord Monboddo, in the room of Lord Milton, appointed a judge the 4th of June 1742, and who had succeeded Sir John Lauder of Fountainhall, admitted November 1689; being the third on the bench in succession since the Revolution.
He married Miss Farquharson, a very amiable woman, by whom he had a son and two daughters.
His private life was spent in the practice of all the social virtues, and in the enjoyment of much domestic felicity. Although rigidly temperate in his habits of life, he, however, delighted much in the convivial society of his friends, and among these he could number almost all the most eminent of those who were distinguished in Scotland for virtue, literature, or genuine elegance of conversation and manners. One of those who esteemed him the most was the late Lord Gardenstone, a man who possessed no mean portion of the same overflowing benignity of disposition, the same unimpeachable integrity as a judge, the same partial fondness for literature and the fine arts. His son, a very promising boy, in whose education he took great delight, was, indeed, snatched away from his affections by a premature death. But, when it was too late for sorrow and anxiety to avail, the afflicted father stifled the emotions of nature in his breast, and wound up the energies of his soul to the firmest tone of stoical fortitude. He was, in like manner, bereaved of his excellent lady, the object of his dearest tenderness; and he endured the loss with a similar firmness, fitted to do
Burnet. honour either to philosophy or to religion. In addition to his office as a judge in the court of session, an offer was made to him of a seat in the court of justice. But, though the emoluments of this would have made a convenient addition to his income, he refused to accept it, lest its business should too much detach him from the pursuit of his favourite studies. To these studies he continued through the whole of a long life to be greatly devoted. His admiration of the manners, literature, and philosophy of the ancients, was unbounded. Thus strongly prepossessed, it is not to be wondered at, that the comparison which he made between the ancients and moderns was little favourable to the latter. For among the former he supposed that he saw all that was elegant, manly, and virtuous, all that was praiseworthy and excellent; while the degenerate race of the moderns exhibited nothing but effeminacy and corruption.
The vacation of the court of session afforded him sufficient leisure to retire every year, in spring and in autumn, to the country; and he used then to dress in a style of simplicity, as if he had been only a plain farmer; and to live among the people upon his estate, with all the kind familiarity and attention of an aged father among his grown-up children. Although his estate, from the old leases, afforded comparatively but a moderate income, he would never raise the rents or displace an old tenant to make room for a new one who offered a higher rent. In imitation of the rural economy of some of the ancients, whom he chiefly admired, he accounted population the true wealth of an estate, and was desirous of no improvement so much as of increasing the number of souls upon his lands, so as to make it greater, in proportion to the extent, than that of those upon the estate of any neighbouring landholder. It was there he had the pleasure of receiving Dr Samuel Johnson, with his friend James Boswell, at the time when these two gentlemen were upon their well-known tour through the Highlands of Scotland. Johnson admired nothing in literature so much as the display of a keen discrimination of human character, a just apprehension of the principles of moral action, and that vigorous common sense which is the most happily applicable to the ordinary conduct of life. Monboddo delighted in the refinements, the subtleties, the abstractions, the affectations of literature; and in comparison with these, despised the grossness of modern taste and of common affairs. Johnson thought learning and science to be little valuable, except so far as they could be made subservient to the purposes of living usefully and happily with the world, upon his own terms. Monboddo's favourite science taught him to look down with contempt upon all sublimary, and especially upon all modern things; and to fit life to literature and philosophy, not literature and philosophy to life. James Boswell, therefore, in carrying Johnson to visit Monboddo, probably thought of pitting them one against another, as two game cocks, and promised himself much sport from the colloquial contest which he expected to ensue between them. But Monboddo was too hospitable and courteous to enter into keen contention with a stranger in his own house. There was much talk between them, but no angry controversy, no exasperation of that dislike for each other's well-known peculiarities with which they had met. Johnson it is
true, still continued to think Lord Monboddo what he called a prig in literature.
Burnet. Lord Monboddo used frequently to visit London, to which he was allured by the opportunity that great metropolis affords of enjoying the conversation of a vast number of men of profound erudition. A journey to the capital became a favourite amusement of his periods of vacation from the business of the court to which he belonged; and, for a time, he made this journey once a year. A carriage, a vehicle that was not in common use among the ancients, he considered as an engine of effeminacy and sloth, which it was disgraceful for a man to make use of in travelling. To be dragged at the tail of a horse, instead of mounting upon his back, seemed, in his eyes, to be a truly ludicrous degradation of the genuine dignity of human nature. In all his journeys, therefore, between Edinburgh and London, he was wont to ride on horseback, with a single servant attending him. He continued this practice, without finding it too fatiguing for his strength, till he was upwards of eighty years of age. Within these few years, on his return from a last visit, which he made on purpose to take leave, before his death, of all his old friends in London, he became exceedingly ill upon the road, and was unable to proceed; and had he not been overtaken by a Scotch friend, who prevailed upon him to travel the remainder of the way in a carriage, he might, perhaps, have actually perished by the way side, or breathed his last in some dirty inn. Since that time, he did not again attempt an equestrian journey to London.
In London, his visits were exceedingly acceptable to all his friends, whether of the literary or fashionable world. He delighted to shew himself at court; and the king is said to have taken a pleasure in conversing with the old man, with a distinguishing notice that could not but be very flattering to him.
A constitution of body, naturally framed to wear well and last long, was strengthened to Lord Monboddo by exercise, guarded by temperance, and by a tenor of mind too firm to be deeply broken in upon by those passions which consume the principles of life. In the country he always used much the exercises of walking in the open air, and of riding. The cold bath was a means of preserving the health, to which he had recourse in all seasons, amidst every severity of the weather, under every inconvenience of indisposition or business, with a perseverance invincible. He was accustomed, alike in winter and in summer, to rise at a very early hour in the morning, and, without loss of time, to betake himself to study or wholesome exercise. It is said, that he even found the use of what he called the air bath, or the practice of occasionally walking about, for some minutes, naked, in a room filled with fresh and cool air, to be highly salutary.
Lord Monboddo is well known to the world as a man of letters. His first publication was "a Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of Language," in 2 vols. 8vo. 1773; which were followed by four more vols. the last published not long before his death. In this work, intended chiefly to vindicate the honours of Grecian literature, he ascribes the origin of alphabetical writing to the Egyptians; and strenuously maintains, that the ouran-outang is a class of the human species, and that his want of speech is merely accidental. He al-
so endeavours to establish the reality of the existence of mermaids, and other fictitious animals. He was induced to undertake another work, for the purpose of defending the cause of Grecian philosophy; and published, in five vols. 4to. a work entitled, "Ancient Metaphysics," which, like the other, is remarkable for a surprising mixture of erudition and genius, with the most absurd whim and conceit.
As a judge, his decisions were sound, upright, and learned, and marked with acute discrimination; and free from those paradoxes and partialities which appear in his writings. He attended his judicial duty with indefatigable diligence till within a few days of his death, which happened at his house in Edinburgh, May 26. 1799, at the advanced age of 85.
His eldest daughter married some years before his death. His second daughter, in personal loveliness one of the finest women of the age, was beheld in every public place with general admiration, and was sought in marriage by many suitors. Her mind was endowed with all her father's benevolence of temper, and with all his taste for elegant literature, without any portion of his whim and caprice. It was her chief delight to be the nurse and the companion of his declining age. Her presence contributed to draw around him, in his house, and at his table, all that was truly respectable among the youth of his country. She mingled in the world of fashion, without sharing its follies; and heard those flatteries which are addressed to youth and beauty, without being betrayed to that light and selfish vanity which is often the only sentiment that fills the heart of the high-praised beauty. She delighted in reading, in literary conversation, in poetry, and in the fine arts, without contracting from this taste, any of that pedantic self-conceit and affectation which usually characterize literary ladies, and whose presence often frightens away the domestic virtues, the graces, the delicacies, and all the more interesting charms of the sex. When Burus, the well-known Scottish poet, first arrived from the plough in Ayrshire to publish his poems in Edinburgh, there was none by whom he was more zealously patronized than by Lord Monboddo and his lovely daughter. No man's feelings were ever more powerfully or exquisitely alive than those of the rustic bard, to the emotions of gratitude, or to the admiration of the good and fair. In a poem which he at that time wrote, as a panegyric address to Edinburgh, he took occasion to celebrate the beauty and excellence of Miss Burnet, in perhaps the finest stanza of the whole:
"Thy daughters bright thy walks adorn,
"Gay as the gilded summer sky,
"Sweet as the dewy milk-white thorn,
"Dear as the raptur'd thrill of joy!
"Fair Burnet strikes th' adoring eye:
"Heav'n's beauties on my fancy shine,
"I see the Sire of Love on high,
"And own his work, indeed, divine."
She was the ornament of the elegant society of the city in which she resided, her father's pride, and the comfort of his domestic life in his declining years. Every amiable and noble sentiment was familiar to her heart, every female virtue was exemplified in her life. Yet, this woman, thus lovely, thus elegant, thus wise and virtuous, was cut off in the flower of her age, and
left her father bereft of the last tender tie which bound him to society and to life. She died about six years before him, of a consumption; a disease that, in Scotland, proves too often fatal to the loveliest and most promising among the fair and the young. Neither his philosophy, nor the necessary torpor of the feelings of extreme old age, were capable of preventing Lord Monboddo from being very deeply affected by so grievous a loss; and from that time he began to droop exceedingly in his health and spirits. Edin. Mag.