MEMOIR OF DR WRIGHT. .9 



years older, was the captain-commandant. It is said, 

 that on one occasion, when the staff of the Royalists 

 was passing- the Earn, a salute was fired from some 

 tiny pieces of ordnance, which the lilliputian army 

 had erected on the parapet of the bridge, without 

 much regard, probably, to political preference, when 

 the Duke of Cumberland was heard to say to one 

 of his attendants, that, however hostile the adult po- 

 pulation had hitherto shewn themselves to the House 

 of Hanover, he regarded this \\tt\c feu dejoie as a 

 symptom of their winning the affections of the rising 

 generation. 



Having acquired the elementary part of his educa- 

 tion at the grammar school of Crieff, young Wright 

 was apprenticed, in his seventeenth year, to Mr 

 George Dennistoun, a surgeon in Falkirk, with 

 whom he remained till the year 1756. No record has 

 been preserved of the nature of his studies during the 

 period of his apprenticeship ; but, in a letter of Mr 

 Dennistoun to a friend of the family, dated the 

 31st of July 1756, he speaks of his young friend in 

 terms of strong attachment ; commends the earnest- 

 ness and diligence with which he had prosecuted his 

 studies, and expresses the strongest conviction of his 

 making a figure in the line of his profession. 



In the winter of 1756 we find him in Edinburgh, 

 residing in the house of an uncle, attending the medi- 

 cal classes, and admitted to the society of several of 

 the professors in the University, with one of whom, 

 Dr Whytt, he appears to have lived on habits of in- 

 timacy. 



A 2 



