beast;" and it is not supposed that he ever profited in any manner by his son's abilities.
The principal works of the chevalier Ramsay not yet alluded to, are A Discourse on the Epic Poem," in French, generally prefixed to the later editions of Telemachus, "An Essay on Civil Government;" "Remarks on lord Shaftesbury's Characteristics n (French); a few English poems of no value; and two letters in French to Racine the younger, upon the true sentiments of Pope in the Essay on Man.
REID, (Dr) Thomas, an eminent metaphysician and moral philosopher, and professor of the latter science in the universities of Aberdeen and Glasgow successively, was born at Strachan, in Kincardineshire, in the neighbourhood of Aberdeen, on the 26th of April, 1710, as shown by the minute researches of professor Dugald Stewart, who affectionately wrote the life of his eminent friend. The family of Reid had been ornamented by producing different authors of considerable eminence in their age.[1] One of his ancestors, James Reid, was the first minister of Banchory-Ternan (a parish in the neighbourhood of Strachan) after the Reformation. His son Thomas has been commemorated by Dempster, (whose praises of a protestant clergyman's son may be deemed worthy of credit,) as a man of great eminence. He collected in a volume the Theses he had defended at foreign universities; and some of his Latin poems were inserted in the Deliticæ Poetarum Scatorum. He was Greek and Latin secretary to James I., and bequeathed to Marischal college a sum for the support of a librarian, which has since disappeared, or been directed to other purposes. Alexander, a brother of Thomas, was physician to king Charles I., and published some forgotten works on medicine and surgery. Another brother translated Buchanan's History of Scotland into English. The father of the subject of our memoir was the reverend Lewis Reid, for fifty years minister of the parish of Strachan; and his mother was daughter to David Gregory of Kinnairdie, elder brother of James Gregory, the inventor of the reflecting telescope.
After spending two years at the parish school of Kincardine O'Neil, Thomas Reid was sent, for the farther prosecution of his studies, to Aberdeen, where, at the age of twelve or thirteen, he was entered as a student of Marischal college. Little is known of his early studies or qualifications, with the exception of the not very flattering remark of his master, " That he would turn out to be a man of good and well-wearing parts." In a letter to a friend, written late in life, he has stated some circumstances connected with his habits of body in youth, which he appears to have recollected merely as the data of some of his philosophical speculations. They are perhaps not the least interesting, as showing that the physical state of the body produces effects in the procedure of the mind, different from what might be presumed as the mental characteristics of the individual, as derivable from his opinions. "About the age of fourteen," he says, "I was almost every night unhappy in my sleep from frightful dreams, sometimes hanging over a dreadful precipice, and just ready to drop down; sometimes pursued for my life, and stopped by a wall, or by a sudden loss of all strength; sometimes ready to be devoured by a wild beast How long I was plagued with such dreams, I do not recollect I believe it was for a year or two at least; and I think they had quite left me before I was sixteen. In those days, I was much given to what Mr Addison, in one of his Spectators, calls castle-building : and in my evening solitary walk, which was generally all the exercise I took, my thoughts would hurry me into some active scene, where I generally acquitted myself much to my own satisfaction; and in these scenes of imagination, I performed many a gallant exploit At the same time, in my
- ↑ Stewart's Biographical Memoirs, p. 400.
