In the history of this country, he displayed his uncommon industry in his numerous collection of manuscripts, in the great assemblage of historical works in his own library, and in his careful inspection of the various manuscripts dispersed over the kingdom, from which he generally extracted the substance, if he did not wholly transcribe them, forming a general index to such as were useful in Scottish history. He made several abridgments of the Registers of Scone, Cambuskenneth, and others, and from the works of Major, Boece, Leslie, and Buchanan, which, in proper order, formed parts of his chronological works, along with relations of important transactions throughout the world. Besides this, he wrote a remarkably concise yet comprehensive history of the kings of Scotland, from Fergus I. to Charles I. He also intended to have enlarged the annals of the Scottish kings from James I. to the beginning of Charles II., of which he had finished the two first James's, on a more diffuse and extensive scale. In other works, he wrote memoirs of James III., IV., V., of Queen Mary, and of James VI., and the transactions of Charles I., brought down to his death. In natural history, he wrote an alphabetical list of gems, with descriptions, their names and qualities, and the places where they are produced. Another work upon the same subject, written in Latin, exhibited from various authors, an account of ingenious inventions or frauds, practised in counterfeiting and imitating precious stones.
Sir James concluded an industrious, and, it would appear, a most blameless life, in February, 1657, when he must have been about sixty years of age. He had been four times married; 1st, to Anna Aiton, by whom he had three sons and six daughters, and who died August 26th, 1644; 2nd, to Jean Durham, daughter of the laird of Pitarrow, his own cousin, who died without issue only eleven months subsequent to the date of his first wife's death; 3d, to Margaret Arnot, only daughter of Sir James Arnot of Fernie, by whom he had three sons and three daughters; 4th, to Janet Auchinleck, daughter of Sir William Auchinleck of Balmanno, by whom he had two daughters. Yet his family is now extinct in the male line. The Annals and Short Passages of State, above alluded to, were, after nearly two centuries of manuscript obscurity, published, in 1824, in 4 volumes 8vo. by Mr James Haig of the Advocates' Library, in which receptacle nearly the whole of the collections of this great antiquary have found a secure resting-place.
BALFOUR, Robert, a distinguished philosopher of the seventeenth century, was principal of Guyenne college, Bourdeaux, and is mentioned by Morhof as a celebrated commentator on Aristotle. According to Dempster, he was "the Phœnix of his age; a philosopher profoundly skilled in the Greek and Latin languages; a mathematician worthy of being compared with the ancients: and to those qualifications he joined a wonderful suavity of manners, and the utmost warmth of affection towards his countrymen." This eminent personage appears to have been one of that numerous class of Scotsmen, who, having gained all their honours in climes more genial to science than Scotland was a few centuries ago, are to this day better known abroad than among their own countrymen. According to the fantastic Urquhart, who wrote in the reign of Charles I., "Most of the Scottish nation, never having astricted themselves so much to the proprieties of words as to the knowledge of things, where there was one preceptor of languages amongst them, there were above forty professors of philosophy: nay, to so high a pitch did the glory of the Scottish nation attain over all the parts of France, and for so long a time continue in that obtained height, by virtue of an ascendant the French conceived the Scots to have above all nations, in matter of their subtlety in philosophical disceptations, that there hath not been, till of late, for these several ages together, any lord, gentleman, or other, in all that
