was satisfied with the humble appointment of parish-clerk and
schoolmaster at the village of Fordoun, about six miles distant from
Laurencekirk. Here he attracted the notice of Mr. Garden, at that time
sheriff of the county, and afterwards one of the Scotch judges, with the
appellation of Lord Gardenstown. In a romantic glen near his house, he
chanced to find Beattie with pencil and paper in his hand; and, on
questioning him, discovered that he was engaged in the composition of a
poem. Mr. Garden desired to see some of his other poems; and doubting
whether they were his own productions, requested him to translate the
invocation to Venus at the opening of Lucretius, which Beattie did in
such a manner as to remove his incredulity. In this retirement, he also
became known to Lord Monboddo, whose family seat was in the parish; and
a friendly intercourse ensued, which did not terminate till the death of
that learned but visionary man. In 1758, he was removed from his
employment at Fordoun, to that of usher in the Grammar School at
Aberdeen, for which he had been an unsuccessful competitor in the
preceding year, but was now nominated without the form of a trial.
At Aberdeen, his heart seems to have taken up its rest; for no
temptations could afterwards seduce him for any length of time to quit
it. The professorship of Natural Philosophy in the Marischal College,
where he had lately been a student, being vacant in 1760, Mr. Arbuthnot,
one of his friends, exerted himself with so much zeal in the behalf of
Beattie, that he obtained that appointment; although the promotion was
such as his most sanguine wishes did not aspire to. Soon after he was
further gratified, by being permitted to exchange it for the
professorship of Moral Philosophy and Logic, for which he thought
himself better fitted. In discharge of the duties belonging to his new
function, he immediately entered on a course of lectures, which, as
appears from his diary in the possession of Sir William Forbes, he
repeated with much diligence for more than thirty years.
This occupation could not have been very favourable to his poetical
propensity. He had, since his twentieth year, been occasionally a
contributor of verse to the Scots Magazine; and in 1760, he published a
collection of poems, inscribed to the Earl of Erroll, to whose
intervention he had been partly indebted for the office he held in the
college. Though the number of these pieces was not considerable, he
omitted several of them in subsequent editions, and among others a
translation of Virgil's Eclogues, some specimens of which, adduced in a
letter written by Lord Woodhouselee, author of the Principles of
Translation, will stand a comparison with the parallel passages in
Dryden and Warton.
In the summer of 1763, his curiosity led him for the first time to
London, where Andrew Millar the bookseller, was almost his only
acquaintance. Of this journey no particular is recorded but that he
visited Pope's house at Twickenham.
In 1765, having sent a letter of compliment to Gray, then on a visit to
the Earl of Strathmore, he was invited to Glammis Castle, the residence
of that nobleman, to meet the English poet, in whom he found such a
combination of excellence as he had hitherto been a stranger to. This
appears from a letter written to Sir William Forbes, his faithful friend
and biographer, with whom his intimacy commenced about the same time.
I am sorry you did not see Mr. Gray on his return; you would have been
much pleased with him. Setting aside his merit as a poet, which,
however, in my opinion, is greater than any of his contemporaries can
boast, in this or in any other nation, I found him possessed of the
most exact taste, the soundest judgment, and the most extensive
learning. He is happy in a singular facility of expression. His
conversation abounds in original observations, delivered with no
appearance of sententious formality, and seeming to arise
spontaneously, without study or premeditation. I passed two very
agreeable days with him at Glammis, and found him as easy in his
manners, and as communicative and frank as I could have wished.
Gray could not have requited him with such excess of admiration; but
continued during the rest of his life to regard Beattie with affection
and esteem.
It was not till the spring of this year, when his Judgment of Paris was
printed, that he again appeared before the public as an author. This
piece he inserted in the next edition of his poems, in 1766, but his
more mature judgment afterwards induced him to reject it. Some satirical
verses on the death of Churchill, at first published without his name,
underwent the same fate. The Wolf and the Shepherds, a Fable, and an
Epistle to the Rev. Mr. Thomas Blacklock, which appeared in the second
edition, he also discarded from those subsequently published. He now
projected and began the Minstrel, the most popular of his poems. Had the
original plan been adhered to, it would have embraced a much wider
scope.
In 1767, he married Mary, the daughter of Dr. Dun, rector of the Grammar
School at Aberdeen. This union was not productive of the happiness which
a long course of previous intimacy had entitled him to expect. The
object of his choice inherited from her mother a constitutional malady
which at first shewed itself in capricious waywardness, and at length
broke out into insanity.
From this misery he sought refuge in the exercise of his mind. His
residence at Aberdeen had brought him into the society of several among
his countrymen who were engaged in researches well suited to employ his
attention to its utmost stretch. Of these the names of Reid, author of
An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense--and
Campbell, Principal of Marischal College, author of An Essay on
Miracles, are the most distinguished. His own correspondence with his
friends about this time evinces deep concern at the progress of the
sceptical philosophy, diffused by the writings of Hobbes, Hume,
Mandeville, and even, in his opinion, of Locke and Berkeley. Conceiving
the study of metaphysics itself to be the origin of this mischief, in
order that the evil might be intercepted at its source, he proposed to
demonstrate the futility of that science, and to appeal to the common
sense and unsophisticated feelings of mankind, as the only infallible
criterion on subjects in which it had formerly been made the standard.
That his meaning was excellent, no one can doubt; whether he discovered
the right remedy for the harm which he was desirous of removing, is much
more questionable. To magnify any branch of human knowledge beyond its
just importance may, indeed, tend to weaken the force of religious
faith; but many acute metaphysicans have been good Christians; and
before the question thus agitated can be set at rest, we must suppose a
certain proficiency in those inquiries which he would proscribe as
dangerous. After all, we can discover no more reason why sciolists in
metaphysics should bring that study into discredit, than that religion
itself should be disparaged through the extravagance of fanaticism. To
have met the subject fully, he ought to have shewn that not only those
opinions which he controverts are erroneous, but that all the systems of
former metaphysicians were so likewise.
The Essay on Truth, in which he endeavoured to establish his own
hypothesis, being finished in 1769, he employed Sir William Forbes and
Mr. Arbuthnot to negotiate its sale with the booksellers. They, however,
refused to purchase it on any terms; and the work would have remained
unpublished, if his two friends, making use of a little pious fraud, had
not informed him that the manuscript was sold for fifty guineas, a sum
which they at the same time remitted him, and that they had stipulated
with the booksellers to be partakers in the profits. The book
accordingly appeared in the following year; and having gained many
admirers, was quickly followed by a second impression, which he revised
and corrected with much pains.
In the autumn of 1771, he again visited London, where the reputation
obtained by the Essay and by the first book of the Minstrel, then
recently published, opened for him an introduction into the circles most
respectable for rank and literature. Lord Lyttelton declared that it
seemed to him his once most beloved minstrel, Thomson, was come down
from Heaven refined by the converse of purer spirits than those he lived
with here, to let him hear him sing again the beauties of nature and the
finest feelings of virtue, not with human, but with angelic strains. He
added his wishes that it were in his power to do Beattie any service.
From Mrs. Montagu he on different occasions received more substantial
tokens of regard.
Except the trifling emolument derived from his writings, he had hitherto
been supported merely by the small income appended to his professorship.
But the Earl of Dartmouth, a nobleman to whom nothing that concerned the
interests of religion was indifferent, representing him as a fit object
of the royal bounty, a pension of two hundred pounds a year was now
granted him. Previously to his obtaining this favour, he was first
presented to the King, and was then honoured by an interview with both
their Majesties. The particulars of this visit were minutely recorded in
his diary. After much commendation of his Essay, the sovereign
pleasantly told him that he had never stolen but one book, and that was
his. "I stole it from the Queen," said his Majesty, "to give it to Lord
Hertford to read." In the course of the conversation, many questions
were put to him concerning the Scotch Universities, the revenues of the
Scotch clergy, and their mode of preaching and praying. When Beattie
replied, that their clergy sometimes prayed a quarter or even half an
hour without interruption, the King observed, that this practice must
lead into repetitions; and that even our own liturgy, excellent as it
is, is faulty in this respect. While the subject of his pension was
under consideration, the Queen made a tender of some present to him
through Dr. Majendie, but he declined to encroach on her Majesty's
munificence, unless the application made to the crown in his behalf
should prove unsuccessful. A mercenary spirit, indeed, was not one of
his weaknesses. Being on a visit at Bulstrode, his noble hostess the
Duchess of Portland, would have had him take a present of a hundred
pounds to defray the expenses of his journey into England; but he
excused himself, as well as he was able, for not accepting her Grace's
bounty.
With his pension, his wishes appear to have been bounded. Temptation to
enter into orders in our church was thrice offered him, and as often
rejected; once in the shape of a general promise of patronage from Dr.
Drummond, Archbishop of York; next, of a small living in Dorsetshire, in
the gift of Mr. John Pitt: and the third time, of a much more valuable
benefice, which was at the disposal of Dr. Thomas, Bishop of Winchester.
In answer to Dr. Porteus, through whom the last of these offers came,
and whose friendship he enjoyed during the remainder of his life, he
represented, in addition to other reasons for his refusal, that he was
apprehensive lest his acceptance of preferment might render the motives
for his writing the Essay on Truth suspected. He at the same time
avowed, that if "he were to have become a clergyman, the church of
England would certainly have been his choice; as he thought that in
regard to church-government and church-service, it had many great and
peculiar advantages." Unwillingness to part from Aberdeen was, perhaps,
at the bottom of these stout resolutions. It was confessedly one of the
reasons for which he declined a proposition made to him in the year
1773, to remove to the chair of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh; though he
was urged by his friends not to neglect this opportunity of extending
the sphere of his usefulness, and the change would have brought him much
pecuniary advantage. His reluctance to comply was increased by the
belief that there were certain persons at Edinburgh to whom his
principles had given offence, and in whose neighbourhood he did not
expect to live so quietly as he wished. In the same year, he was
complimented with the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws, by the
University of Oxford, at the installation of Lord North in the
Chancellorship.
He now, therefore, lived on at Aberdeen, making occasionally brief
visits to England, where he was always welcome, both at the court and by
those many individuals of eminence to whom his talents and virtues had
recommended him. In the summers he usually indulged himself with passing
some time at Peterhead, a town situated on the most easterly promontory
of Scotland, and resorted to for its medicinal waters, which he thought
beneficial to his health; for he had early in life been subject to a
vertiginous disorder, the recurrence of which at times incapacitated him
for any serious application.
The second book of the Minstrel appeared in 1774. In 1776 he was
prevailed on to publish, by subscription, in a more splendid form, his
Essay on Truth, which was now accompanied by two other essays, on Poetry
and Music, and on Laughter and Ludicrous Composition; and by Remarks on
the Utility of Classical Learning. This was succeeded in 1783, by
dissertations moral and critical, on Memory and Imagination, on
Dreaming, on the Theory of Language, on Fable and Romance, on the
Attachments of Kindred, and on Illustrations of Sublimity; being, as he
states in the preface, "part of a course of prelections read to those
young gentlemen whom it was his business to initiate in the elements of
moral science." In 1786, he published a small treatise, entitled
Evidences of the Christian Religion, at the suggestion of Porteus, who
was now a bishop; and in 1790 and 1793 two volumes of Elements of Moral
Science, containing an abridgment of his public lectures on moral
philosophy and logic.
His only remaining publication was an edition of the juvenile works of
the elder of his two sons, who was taken off by a consumption (November
1790), at the age of twenty-two. To the education of this boy he had
attended with such care and discernment as the anxiety of a parent only
could dictate, and had watched his unfolding excellence with fondness
such as none but a parent could feel. At the risque of telling my reader
what he may, perhaps, well remember, I cannot but relate the method
which he had taken to impress on his mind, when a child, the sense of
his dependence on a Supreme Being; of which Porteus well observed, that
it had all the imagination of Rousseau, without his folly and
extravagance.
"The doctrines of religion," said Beattie, "I had wished to impress on
his mind, as soon as it might be prepared to receive them; but I did not
see the propriety of making him commit to memory theological sentences,
or any sentences which it was not possible for him to understand. And I
was desirous to make a trial how far his own reason could go in tracing
out, with a little direction, the great and first principle of all
religion, the being of God. The following fact is mentioned, not as a
proof of superior sagacity in him (for I have no doubt that most
children would, in like circumstances, think as he did), but merely as a
moral or logical experiment. He had reached his fifth or sixth year,
knew the alphabet, and could read a little; but had received no
particular information with respect to the Author of his being: because
I thought he could not yet understand such information; and because I
had learned, from my own experience, that to be made to repeat words not
understood, is extremely detrimental to the faculties of a young mind.
In a corner of a little garden, without informing any person of the
circumstance, I wrote in the mould, with my finger, the three initial
letters of his name; and sowing garden cresses in the furrows, covered
up the seed, and smoothed the ground. Ten days after, he came running to
me, and with astonishment in his countenance told me, that his name was
growing in the garden. I smiled at the report, and seemed inclined to
disregard it; but he insisted on my going to see what had happened.
'Yes,' said I, carelessly, on coming to the place, 'I see it is so; but
there is nothing in this worth notice; it is mere chance;' and I went
away. He followed me, and taking hold of my coat, said with some
earnestness, 'It could not be mere chance, for that somebody must have
contrived matters so as to produce it.' I pretend not to give his words,
or my own, for I have forgotten both; but I give the substance of what
passed between us in such language as we both understood.--'So you
think,' I said, 'that what appears so regular as the letters of your
name cannot be by chance.' 'Yes,' said he, with firmness, 'I think so.'
'Look at yourself,' I replied, 'and consider your hands and fingers,
your legs and feet, and other limbs; are they not regular in their
appearance, and useful to you?' He said, 'they were.' 'Came you then
hither,' said I, 'by chance?' 'No,' he answered, 'that cannot be;
something must have made me.' 'And who is that something?' I asked. He
said, 'he did not know.' (I took particular notice, that he did not say,
as Rousseau fancies a child in like circumstances would say, that his
parents made him.) I had now gained the point I aimed at; and saw, that
his reason taught him (though he could not so express it) that what
begins to be must have an intelligent cause, I therefore told him the
name of the Great Being who made him and all the world; concerning whose
adorable nature I gave him such information as I thought he could, in
some measure, comprehend. The lesson affected him greatly, and he never
forgot either it or the circumstance that introduced it."
So great was the docility of this boy, that before he had reached his
twentieth year, he had been thought capable of succeeding his father in
his office of public professor. When death had extinguished those hopes,
the comfort and expectation of the parent were directed to his only
surviving child, who, with less application and patience, had yet a
quickness of perception that promised to supply the place of those
qualities. But this prospect did not continue to cheer him long. In
March 1796, the youth was attacked by a fever, which, in seven days,
laid him by the side of his brother. He was in his eighteenth year. The
sole consolation, with which this world could now supply Beattie, was,
that if his sons had lived, he might have seen them a prey to that
miserable distemper under which their mother, whose state had rendered a
separation from her family unavoidable, was still labouring. From this
total bereavement he sometimes found a short relief in the estrangement
of his own mind, which refused to support the recollection of such a
load of sorrow. "Many times," says Sir William Forbes, "he could not
recollect what had become of his son; and after searching in every room
of the house, he would say to his niece, 'Mrs. Glennie, you may think it
strange, but I must ask you, if I have a son, and where he is?'" That
man must be a stern moralist who would censure him very severely for
having sought, as he sometimes did, a renewal of this oblivion in his
cups.
He was unable any longer to apply himself to study, and left most of the
letters he received from his friends unanswered. Music, in which he had
formerly delighted, he could not endure to hear from others, after the
loss of his first son; though a few months before the death of the
second, he had begun to accompany him when he sang, on his own favourite
instrument, which was the violoncello. Afterwards, as may be supposed,
the sound of it was painful to him. He still took some pleasure in
books, and in the company of a very few amongst his oldest friends. This
was his condition till the beginning of April 1799, when he was seized
with a paralytic stroke, which rendered his speech imperfect for several
days. During the rest of his life he had repeated attacks of the same
malady: the last, which happened on the 5th of October, 1802, entirely
deprived him of motion. He languished, however, till the 18th of August
in the following year, when nature being exhausted, he expired without a
struggle.
He was interred, according to his own desire, by the side of his two
sons, in the churchyard of St. Nicholas, at Aberdeen, with the following
inscription from the pen of Dr. James Gregory, Professor of Physic, at
Edinburgh.
Memoriae. Sacrum.
JACOBI. BEATTIE. LL.D.
Ethices.
In. Academia. Marescallana. hujus. Urbis.
Per. XLIII. Annos.
Professoris. Meritissimi.
Viri.
Pietate. Probitate. Ingenio. atque. Doctrina.
Praestantis.
Scriptoris. Elegantissimi. Poetae. Suavissimi.
Philosophi. Vere. Christiani.
Natus. est. V. Nov. Anno. MDCCXXXV.
Obiit. XVIII. Aug. MDCCCIII.
Omnibus. Liberis. Orbus.
Quorum. Natu. Maximus. JACOBUS. HAY.
BEATTIE.
Vel. a. Puerilibus. Annis.
Patrio. Vigens. Ingenio.
Novumque. Decus. Jam. Addens. Paterno.
Suis. Carissimus. Patriae. Flebilis.
Lenta. Tabe. Consumptus. Periit.
Anno. Aetatis. XXIII.
GEO. ET. MAR. GLENNIE.
H.M.P.
"In his person," says Sir William Forbes, "Doctor Beattie was of the
middle size, though not elegantly yet not awkwardly formed, but with
something of a slouch in his gait. His eyes were black and piercing,
with an expression of sensibility somewhat bordering on melancholy;
except when engaged in cheerful and social intercourse with his friends,
when they were exceedingly animated." In a portrait of him, taken in
middle life by Reynolds, and given to him as a mark of his regard by the
painter, he is represented with his Essay on Truth under his arm. At a
little distance is introduced the allegorical figure of Truth as an
angel, holding in one hand a balance, and with the other thrusting back
the visages of Prejudice, Scepticism, and Folly.
He is, I believe, the solitary instance of a poet, having received so
much countenance at the Court of George the Third; and this favour he
owed less to any other cause than to the zeal and ability with which he
had been thought to oppose the enemies of religion. The respect with
which he was treated, both at home and abroad, was no more than a just
tribute to those merits and the excellence of his private character. His
probity and disinterestedness, the extreme tenderness with which he
acquitted himself of all his domestic duties, his attention to the
improvement of his pupils, for whose welfare his solicitude did not
cease with their removal from the college; his unassuming deportment,
which had not been altered by prosperity or by the caresses of the
learned and the powerful, his gratitude to those from whom he had
received favours, his beneficence to the poor, the ardour of his
devotion, are dwelt on by his biographer with an earnestness which
leaves us no room to doubt the sincerity of the encomium. His chief
defect was an irritability of temper in the latter part of his life,
which shewed itself principally towards those who differed from him on
speculative questions.
In his writings, he is to be considered as a philosopher, a critic, and
a poet. His pretensions in philosophy are founded on his Essay on Truth.
This book was of much use at its first appearance, as it contained a
popular answer to some of the infidel writers, who were then in better
odour among the more educated classes of society than happily they now
are. If (as I suspect to have been the case) it has prevented men, whose
rank and influence make it most desirable that their minds should be
raised above the common pitch, from pursuing those studies by which they
were most likely so to raise them, the good which it may have done has
been balanced by no inconsiderable evil. One can scarcely examine it
with much attention, and not perceive that the writer had not ascended
to the sources of that science, which notwithstanding any thing he may
say to the contrary, it was evidently his aim to depreciate. Through
great part of it he has the appearance of one who is struggling with
some unknown power, which he would fain comprehend, and at which, in the
failure to comprehend it, his terror is changed into anger. The word
metaphysics, or, as he oftener terms it, metaphysic, crosses him like a
ghost. Call it pneumatology, the philosophy of the mind, the philosophy
of human nature, or what you will, and he can bear it.
Take any shape but that, and his firm nerves
Shall never tremble.