life-sized portraits of the ‘Very Rev. George H. Baird, D.D.,’ the ‘Rev. Thomas Chalmers, D.D.,’ and ‘William Anderson.’ The list of Geddes's engraved works given by Laing may be supplemented by a few minor portrait book-plates and by the important mezzotint of ‘Sir John Marjoribanks, bart., of Lees,’ executed in 1835 by C. Turner. His copies from the old masters were highly valued, and have brought large prices. One of them, a full-sized transcript of Titian's ‘Sacred and Profane Love,’ hangs in the schools of the Royal Academy, London.
As an etcher Geddes ranks even higher than as a painter; his plates may be regarded as among the very earliest examples in modern English art of the brilliancy, concentration, and spirited selection of line proper to a ‘painter's-etching.’ His dry-points and etchings include portraits, landscapes, and a few copies from the old masters. Ten of them he himself published in 1826; forty-three are catalogued in Laing's volume, and there printed from the original coppers (much worn), or given in reproduction in cases when these no longer existed. Some six other uncatalogued subjects are to be found in the British Museum and in private collections.
There exist three oil-portraits of Geddes painted by himself: 1. Life-sized bust, in seventeenth-century costume, in the possession of Andrew Geddes Scott, Edinburgh. 2. Life-sized, to waist, unfinished (about 1826), in National Gallery of Scotland. 3. Cabinet-sized, to waist, in seventeenth-century costume (1812), in Scottish National Portrait Gallery (engraved, by J. Le Coute, in Laing's volume).
[David Laing's Etchings by Wilkie and Geddes, Edinburgh, 1875; Memoir by his Widow, London, 1844; Catalogue of his Exhibition in Edinburgh, 1821; Catalogues of National Gallery of Scotland and of Scottish National Portrait Gallery; P. G. Hamerton's Etchings and Etchers, 1880.]
GEDDES, JAMES (d. 1748?), author, was born in the county of Tweeddale. He was educated at home and at the university of Edinburgh, where he distinguished himself in mathematics. He afterwards practised with success as an advocate, but died of consumption in or before 1748. In that year was published at Glasgow his ‘Essay on the Composition and Manner of Writing of the Antients, particularly Plato.’ A German translation appeared in vols. iii. and iv. of ‘Sammlung vermischter Schriften zur Beförderung der schönen Wissenschaften,’ 1759, &c.
[Preface to Essay.]
GEDDES, JENNY (fl. 1637?), is popularly supposed to have been the name of the woman who inaugurated the riot in St. Giles's Church, Edinburgh, when an attempt was made to read Laud's service-book on Sunday, 23 July 1637, by flinging a stool at the head of David Lindsay, bishop of Edinburgh. In ‘A New Litany’ (c. 1640), a contemporary ballad on Scottish affairs, reference is made to ‘Gutter Jennie’ as a leader of the affray (cf. Scotish Pasquils, 1868, p. 57). A herb-woman, also of the same names, gave her stall to be burnt in a bonfire at the coronation rejoicings at Edinburgh, 23 July 1661 (Edinburgh's Joy for his Majesty's Coronation in England, p. 6). Nearly thirty years later a pamphleteer attributes the throwing of the first stool to an old ‘herb-woman,’ but does not give her name (Notes upon the Phœnix edition of the Pastoral Letter; Works of the Rev. Samuel Johnson, p. 320). Edward Phillipps, in his continuation of Sir Richard Baker's ‘Chronicle’ (1670), writes, ‘Jane or Janot Gaddis (yet living at the writing of this relation) flung a little folding stool.’ Kirkton, writing in 1679, says the woman's name was not known. Wodrow, on the authority of Robert Stewart, a son of the lord advocate of the revolution, asserts that it was ‘Mrs. Mean, wife to John Mean, merchant in Edinburgh, who cast the first stool’ (Analecta, Maitland Club, i. 64). Kincaid, in his ‘History of Scotland,’ 1787, says the woman's name was Hamilton, and she was ‘grandmother to Robert Mein, late Dean of Guild Officer in Edinburgh.’ The conflict among the early writers on the topic leaves the woman's name a very open question. The name ‘Jenny Geddes’ is said to have been applied indiscriminately at a later date to any woman who made herself conspicuous in times of public excitement at Edinburgh. A stool in the Edinburgh Antiquarian Museum, said to be the stool thrown in the cathedral, is of doubtful authenticity.
[Burton's Hist. of Scotland, 2nd edit., vi. 150–152; Notes and Queries, 4th ser. iv. 135, 207, v. 367, 7th ser. i. 467; Scottish Leader, November 1889.]
GEDDES, JOHN (1735–1799), Scottish catholic prelate, elder brother of Alexander Geddes [q. v.], born at the Mains of Curridoun, in the Enzie of Banffshire, on 9 Sept. 1735, entered the Scots College at Rome in 1750, and after being ordained priest in 1759 returned to the mission in Scotland. He was superior of the seminary at Scalan from 1762 till 1767, when he was appointed to the mission of Preshome in succession to Bishop Hay. In 1770 he was sent to take charge of the college which Colonel Semple had founded in Madrid in 1627, and which had been under
