yourself. John Hossack will help you in your affairs in the north. My heart bleeds for poor John Steel; I recommended him to you. When I was in the north I paid some considerably large sums that I never dreamed of before, towards defraying the charges occasioned by the rebellion. There is but one thing I repent me of in my whole life,—not to have taken better care of you. May the great God of heaven and earth bless and preserve you! I trust in the blood of Christ. Be always religious, fear and love God. You may go, you can be of no service to me here." This shows how deeply this first of patriots felt the unrequited sacrifices he had made for his country, though he had never allowed these feelings to interfere with the discharge of his public duties. His fears were certainly not without foundation, for his estate, in consequence of the sacrifices he had made, was encumbered with debts to the amount of thirty thousand pounds sterling; and for several years after his death, there did not appear to be any possibility of going on with it, but by selling the one half to preserve the other. Matters, however, proceeded at Culloden much better than was expected. In 1749, the government bestowed a" pension of four
hundred pounds sterling a-year upon John Forbes, the lord president's son, a worthy man, but possessed of no great talents for public business ; and warned by the example, and profiting by the prudent advice of his father, he spent his days in retirement, probably with a higher enjoyment of life than if he had been surrounded with all the splendours of the most exalted station, and in less than thirty years, had not only cleared his estate of all encumbrances, but added to it considerably, by the purchase of contiguous lands, and thus, in his case, were verified the words of inspiration, "The good man is merciful and lendeth, and his seed is blessed."
Though the signal services of the lord president Forbes were overlooked by those who ought most highly to have esteemed them, and whose proper province it was to have rewarded them, they were not lost sight of by his grateful countrymen, all of whom seem to have regarded his death as a national calamity. He had been a public character upwards of thirty years, during which, scarcely one motion had been made for the public benefit but what had originated with, or had received its most powerful support from him. In the infant manufactures of his country he took unceasing interest, and his upright and pure spirit breathed into her tribunals of justice an order and an equitable impartiality to which they were before total strangers, and which to this day happily never has forsaken them. Besides the new order of court, as to the hearing of causes, which he had the merit of introducing, and which has been already alluded to, he wrought great and happy changes in the manner of the judges. Before his time, the senators often delivered their opinions with a warmth that was highly indecorous, detracting greatly from the dignity of the court and the weight and authority of its decisions: this, by the candour, the strict integrity, and the nice discernment, combined with that admirable command of temper, which marked his character, he was enabled completely to overcome, and to introduce in its place a dignified urbanity and a gentlemanly deference among the members of court to the opinions of each other, which succeeding lords president have found no difficulty to sustain.
The following character has been drawn of him by a late historian, with which we shall conclude this memoir. "In person, the lord president Forbes was elegant and well formed, his countenance open and animated, his manner dignified, but easy and prepossessing. His natural talents were of the very first order, enlarged by an excellent education, completely disciplined and fully matured by habits of intense study, and of minute, and at the same time extensive observation; and they were all employed most honourably and con-
