B E A T T I E 



Besuie. which were paid to him during this year, made it, at 

 v least in his own opinion, the most distinguishing era of 

 his life. He was courted by peers and bishops as the 

 most able champion of truth. The English church- 

 men and the orthodox gentry had been long indignant 

 at the writings of Hume and the Scottish sceptics, 

 and zealously applauded an antagonist who had un- 

 derstood or answered Hume no better than them- 

 selves. It did not occur to those pious people, that 

 the scepticism which Beattie had answered by abuse 

 and apostrophes, related to abstract questions wholly 

 inapplicable to practical virtue or vice; and they for- 

 got that Berkeley, at least as good a Christian as any 

 of themselves, had gone half way in the very scepti- 

 cism which Hume inculcated. Dr Reid, who has 

 combated Hume with the hard sinews of argument 

 and metaphysics, was not half so popular a champion 

 to the church and lay alarmists at infidelity. He was 

 not pathetic, outrageous, or abusive, and he required 

 the trouble of thinking and study to follow him ; a 

 pain which is ..holly spared to the readers of Beattic's 

 EfSau on Truth. At this flattered period of his life, 

 Beattie was introduced to their majesties at Kew, and 

 spent an hour iu familiar conversation with them. 

 The king congratulated him on having refuted Hume, 

 aod ruined the sale of his book. In the aristocracy 

 of literature, however, kings themselves have no pow- 

 er of conferring rank ; and while we admire a vener- 

 able sovereign encouraging and communing with an 

 amiable man of letters, yet when we hear it announced 

 in the royal closet, that Mr Hume's publishers had 

 been hurt by the writings of* Beattie, we are apt to 

 call to mind how seldom kings are told the truth. 

 To have sunk the poet in the philosopher in com- 

 mending him, seems to be absolute satire. Yet though 

 much of Beattie's splendid reception among the peers 

 and bishops, was owing to his over-rated merits as a 

 .metaphysician, there was much of it also due to his 

 amiable manners and his genius. 



At the end ot the year 1773, there was a proposal for 

 tranferring him to a professorship in the university of 

 Edinburgh, which he declined. The reason which he 

 assigns in one of his letters, was the fear of hostility from 

 his infidel enemies; a reason which has been exposed ve- 

 ry severely in a harsh review of his life. There may be 

 something in this declaration of the soreness respect- 

 ing his literary opponents, which was certainly a weak- 

 ness in Beattie ; but there is nothing in it worthy of 

 serious reproach. The disciples of the sceptical phi- 

 losophy are not entirely exempt from the human 

 weakness of hating their literary antagonists ; and if 

 Beattie dreaded to encounter that spirit in Edinburgh, 

 we need not wonder at his preferring to remain amidst 

 the congenial orthodoxy of Aberdeen, rather than to 

 trust himself among strangers, nor at his giving the 

 reason for it in a confidential letter. His refusal of 

 a living in the church of England, proffered to him 

 by Dr Porteous in 1774, was dictated by disinterest- 

 ed motives, which have never been called in question. 

 After this, there is little incident in his life. He pub- 

 lished one volume of Essays in 1776, and another in 

 1783 ; alittle treatise on the Evidences of Christianity, 

 in 1786; and the outline of his Academical Lectures 

 in 1790. In the same year he edited at Edinburgh 

 Addison's papers, and wrote a preface. . He was very 



373 



unfortunate in his family. The situation of his wife Beattie. 

 precluded him from the enjoyment of visitors in his 

 house at the time when his increased circumstances 

 would have allowed him to exercise a limited hospi- 

 tality. The loss of his son, James Hay Beattie, a 

 young man of highly promising talents, and who had 

 been actually conjoined with him in the professorship, 

 was the greatest, though not the last, calamity of his 

 life. He made an effort to relieve his spirits by an- 

 other journey to England, and some of his letters 

 from thence bespeak a temporary composure and 

 cheerfulness; but the wound was never healed. Music 

 was one of the great solaces of his leisure hours; but 

 from that solace he was cut off by the overwhelming 

 associations which were excited by the amusement 

 which his son and he had shared in common. At the 

 end of six years, his second son, Montague Beattie, was 

 also snatched from him in the flower of manhood. 

 This crowning misfortune appears to have wholly 

 crushed his spirits. With his wife in a mad-house, 

 his sons dead, and his health broken, he might be par- 

 doned for saying, whilst he looked upon the corpse 

 of his youngest child, " I have done with this world." 

 He acted indeed as if he had felt so ; for although 

 he performed the duties of his professorship till with- 

 in a short time of his death, he applied to no study, 

 enjoyed no society or amusement, and answered but 

 few letters of his friends. " Yet amidst the deptli 

 of his regret, he would sometimes express an acquies- 

 cence in his childless fate." How could I have borne," 

 he would say, " to see their elegant minds mangled 

 with madness !" A palsy, which struck him in 1799, 

 terminated his sufferings, after repeated attacks, in 

 1803. " His person," says a writer of his life in the 

 Annual Register for 1805, " was of the middle size, 

 of a broad square make, which seemed to indicate. a 

 more robust constitution than he really had. He was 

 all his life subject to headaches, which, on many oc- 

 casions, interrupted his studies. His features were 

 exceedingly regular; his complexion somewhat dark j 

 his eyes had more expression than those of any person 

 I ever remember to have seen." 

 . Beattie's Philological and Critical Essays are the 

 most pleasing of his prose works. As a critic, he has 

 been preferred to Blair, by the poet Cowper. With- 

 out the severe and chaste dignity of Blair's prose, he 

 is more animated, more diffusive and unequal, more il- 

 lustrative and more entertaining. His constitution as a 

 poet spoilt him for a metaphysician, and his moral phi- 

 losophy did no good to his poetry. In his Essay on 

 Truth, he rails at the sceptics in rhapsodies and apos- 

 trophes, as if he could exorcise the hard-hearted spirits 

 of metaphysics by anathemas, or untie the knot of para- 

 doxes by cursing the hand which had tied them. Qn 

 the other hand, he loads the beautiful poem of The 

 Minstrel, with explanations on free will and providence. 

 A shepherd's son, and a mountain minstrel, listens to the 

 hermit's discourses, as if he were training for a chair 

 of. moral philosophy ; and comes to have his doubts 

 cleared up, upon the moral disorder of the world, at 

 a time of. life when the genuine minatrel is more apt 

 to be troubled with doubts about the fidelity of his 

 mistress. If the character of Edwin was too refined 

 and elevated to be displayed in the tender passion, he 

 might have discoursed with the hermit on subjects 



