308 ROBERTSON. 



arice of the judgment by these vile, unworthy passions.* 

 The same hostility towards the person of the Princi- 

 pal even involved this reckless man in a quarrel with 

 his eldest son ; it led to a duel, in which neither party 

 was hurt. An accommodation having taken place on 

 the field, I have heard Stuart's second say that he was 

 obliged, knowing his friend's intemperate habits, to 

 oppose the proposal which he made with his usual 

 want of conduct, and indeed of right feeling, that all 

 the parties should dine together on quitting the field. 

 That second, an able and an honourable man, always 

 admitted Stuart's unjustifiable conduct towards the 

 historian, one of whose nieces he (the second) after- 

 wards married. Stuart's dissipation continued un- 

 broken, excepting by his occasional literary work, and 

 he died of a dropsy, in 1786, at the early age of forty. 

 Others, far more deserving of attention, have raised 

 an objection to the ' History of America,' from which 

 it is difficult to defend it. There is induced by the 

 narrative, in the mind of the reader, far too great 

 sympathy with the conquerors of the New World. 



* Next to the Principal no one was more bitterly assailed than my 

 late venerated friend and master, Dr. Adam, rector of the High 

 School. His admirable ' Grammar' was received universally by the 

 literary and didactic world (by the scholar as well as the teacher) 

 with the approbation which it so well deserved. But it had one 

 iault it was on a subject on which Stuart's cousin, Ruddirnan, had 

 published a book. This was enough to enlist Stuart's ferocity against 

 both the work and the writer. He published anonymous reviews 

 without end, and he also published, under the name of Busby, a 

 bitter attack upon the personal peculiarities of Dr. Adam. Every 

 one felt unmingled disgust at such base and unprincipled proceed- 

 ings, and the Rector, like the Principal, gave the unworthy author 

 the mortification of leaving his assaults unanswered. 



