then flourished in Edinburgh, called the Oyster Club. Of this, Dr Black, Dr
Hutton, and Mr Smith were the founders. When time and opportunity admitted,
these distinguished men could unbend one to the other, and on such occasions
Dr Hutton delighted in blending the witty and ludicrous in his conversation.
Round them soon formed a circle of choice spirits, who knew how to value their
familiar and social converse; and it would be vain to look for a company more
sincerely united, where every thing favourable to good society was more perfectly cultivated, and every thing opposite more strictly excluded.
Dr Hutton was never married, but lived with his sisters, three amiable women, who managed his domestic affairs. Though he cared little for money, he had accumulated considerable wealth, owing to his moderation and unassuming manner of life, as well as from the great ability with which his long- tried friend, Mr Davie, conducted their joint concern. Miss Isabella Hutton remained to lament her brother's loss, and by her his collection of fossils were given to Dr Black, who presented them to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, under the condition that they should be completely arranged, and kept for ever apart, for the purpose of illustrating the Huttonian Theory of the Earth.
I
INGLIS, or ENGLISH, (Sir) James, an ingenious writer of the early part of the sixteenth century, is chiefly known as the supposed author of the "Complaynt of Scotland," a very curious political and fanciful work, published originally at St Andrews in 1548 or 1549, and the earliest Scottish prose work in existence.
Of this learned person, Mackenzie has given an account in his Lives of Scottish Writers; but it is so obviously made up of a series of mere conjectures stated as facts, that we must reject it entirely. According to more respectable authority, Inglis was a dignified priest (which accounts for the Sir attached to his name), and appears from authentic documents to have been, in 1515, secretary to queen Margaret, widow of James IV. Care must be taken to distinguish him from his contemporary John Inglis, who served James IV. as a manager of plays and entertainments, and who is stated to have been present with Sir David Lindsay in the church of Linlithgow, when that sovereign was warned by a supposed apparition against his expedition into England. Sir James Inglis was, nevertheless, a writer of plays, being the subject of the following allusion in Sir David Lindsay's Testament of the Papingo:
"And in the court bin present in thir dayis,
That ballattis brevis lustely, and layis,
Quhilkis to our prince daily thay do present,
Quho can say more than Schir James English says,
In ballattis, farcis, and in pleasaunt plaies;
Redd in cunnyng, in practyck rycht prudent;
But Culross hath made his pen impotent."
It will be observed that Inglis is here indirectly spoken of as one of the poets who haunted the court of James V. Even in the preceding reign, however, he appears to have been on an intimate footing at court, as a man of learning. James IV., whose devotion to alchymy is well known, writes a letter (extant in the "Epistolæ Regum Scotorum") to Mr James Inglis, to the follow-
