JAMES CLARKE.

WITHIN the parish of Closeburn, Dumfriesshire, is situated the Academy of Wallacehall, founded and endowed in 1723 by John Wallace, a native of the locality. At this institution natives of the district are privileged to receive a classical education; and several of the pupils have attained a scholastic eminence. Among these was the celebrated Latinist, Dr. John Hunter, latterly Principal of the United College, St. Andrews. College, St. Andrews. Another alumnus of the institution was James Clarke, the subject of our present sketch. From the inscription on his tombstone, we learn that he died in 1825, at the age of sixty-four, which implies that he was born in 1761. But the date of his birth cannot be verified. The Births' Register of Closeburn Parish is extant only from the year 1765, a circumstance which is probably to be accounted for by the strange fact that up to the year 1777 the register was kept, not, according to the usual practice, by the session-clerk, but by the parochial sexton. In hands so entirely incompetent, the register, it might have been anticipated, would be alike unsafe and imperfectly kept. From the early portion of the existing register, we learn that one William Clark, who resided at Dalgarnock Gate, within the bounds of the parish, was husband of Agnes Milligan; and that the spouses had baptized in 1768 a daughter, Jane, and in November 1770 a daughter, Agnes. Before her marriage Agnes Milligan had borne an illegitimate child, of which Sir James Kirkpatrick, third baronet of Closeburn, then a youth, acknowledged himself the father. Sir James succeeded to the estate of Closeburn in 1771, and died in 1804; it is uncertain whether his son was ever indebted to his benignity.

In the autumn of 1786 Mr. Clarke was appointed master of the

grammar school of Moffat by the patrons, the magistrates, town council, and ministers of Edinburgh. Two years later-that is, in 1788--we learn that he enjoyed the general confidence to the extent that he was appointed librarian of the Subscription Library at Moffat, which then took origin.1

Subsequently he was accused of cruelty to his pupils, a charge which, in the summer of 1791, led to legal proceedings being instituted for his extrusion from office. By the Poet, who had formed his intimacy, his cause was upheld warmly. In the first instance, he framed to Mr. Clarke, for transmission to the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, the following letter: 2-.

MY LORD, -It may be deemed presumption in a man, obscure and unknown as I am, and an entire stranger to your lordship, to trouble you in this manner; but when I inform you that the subject on which I address you is of the last importance to me, and is so far connected with you, that on your determination, in a great measure, my fate must depend, I rely on your lordship's goodness that you will think any further apology unnecessary.

I have been for nearly five years schoolmaster in Moffat, an appointment of which your lordship will know, you, with the rest of the Magistracy and Town Council, together with the clergy of Edinburgh, have the patronage. The trust with which these, my highly respectable patrons, had honored me, I have endeavoured to discharge with the utmost fidelity, and, I hope, with a good degree of success; but of late one or two powerful individuals of my employers have been pleased to attack my reputation as a teacher, have threatened no less than to expel me from the school, and are taking every method, some of them, I will say it, insidious and unfair to the last degree, to put their threats in execution. The fault of which I am accused is some instances of severity to the children under my care. Were I to tell your lordship that I am innocent of

1 Moffat Past and Present, by John Brown, pp. 71, 72. According to Mr. Brown, Clarke retained his librarianship till he left the place in 1794. He had as librarian no emolument, other than the privilege of supplying, on a payment of half-a-crown, each of the members with a MS. copy of the catalogue.

2 This letter is inserted in the volume of the Glenriddell MS. at Liverpool, with a heading by the Poet in these words: "The following letter, which was sent by Mr. Clarke to the Provost of Edinburgh, was of my writing."

the charge-that any shade of cruelty, particularly that very black one of cruelty to tender infancy, will be allowed by every unbiassed person who knows anything of me to be tints unknown to my disposition; you would certainly look on all this from me as words of course; so I shall trouble you with nothing on the merits of my cause, until I have a fair hearing before my right honourable patrons. A fair hearing, my lord, is what, above all things, I want; and what I greatly fear will be attempted to be denied me. It is to be insinuated that I have vacated my place, that I never was legally appointed, with I know not how many pretences more, to hinder the business from coming properly before your lordship and the other patrons of the school-all which I deny; and will insist on holding my appointment until the dignified characters who gave it me shall find me unworthy of it.

In your lordship's great acquaintance with human life, you must have known and seen many instances of innocence, nay, of merit, disguised and obscured, and sometimes for ever buried, by the dark machinations of unprincipled malevolence, and envious craft; and until the contrary be made to appear, 'tis at least equally probable that my case is in that unfortunate and undeserved predicament. I have the honor to be, etc.

This missive, adopted by Mr. Clarke, was, early in June 1791, borne by him to Edinburgh, whither he also carried a letter of introduction from the Poet to his friend, Mr. Alexander Cunningham. That letter, dated 11th June 1791, thus proceeds :

Let me interest you, my dear Cunningham, in behalf of the gentleman who gives you this. He is a Mr. Clarke of Moffat, principal schoolmaster there, and is at present suffering severely under the persecution of one or two powerful individuals of his employers. He is accused of harshness to some perverse dunces that were placed under his care. God help the teacher, if a man of genius and sensibility,-for such is my friend Clarke,-when a blockhead father presents him with his booby son, and insists on having the rays of science lighted up in a fellow's head whose skull is impervious and inaccessible by any other way than a positive fracture with a cudgel; a fellow whom, in fact, it savours of impiety to attempt making a scholar of, as he has been marked a blockhead in the book of fate at the almighty fiat of his Creator.

The patrons of Moffat school are the ministers, magistrates, and town council of Edinburgh; and as the business comes now before them, let me beg my

dearest friend to do everything in his power to serve the interests of a man of genius, a man of worth, and a man whom I particularly respect and esteem. You know some good fellows among the magistrates and council; but particularly you have much to say with a reverend gentleman to whom you have the honor of being very nearly related, and whom this country and age have had the honor to produce. I need not name the historian of Charles V.1 I tell him, through the medium of his nephew's influence, that Mr. Clarke is a gentleman who will not disgrace even his patronage. I know the merits of the cause thoroughly, and I say it that my friend is falling a sacrifice to prejudiced ignorance, and . .

God help the children of dependence! Hated and persecuted by their enemies, and too often, alas! almost unexceptionally received by their friends with disrespect and reproach, under the thin disguise of cold civility and humiliating advice. O to be a sturdy savage, stalking in the pride of his independence amid the solitary wilds of his deserts, rather than in civilized life helplessly to tremble for a subsistence, precarious as the caprice of a fellowcreature! Every man has his virtues, and no man is without his failings; and curse on that privileged plain-dealing of friendship, which, in the hour of my calamity, cannot reach forth the helping hand without at the same time pointing out those failings, and assigning their share in my present distress. My friends, - for such the world calls you, and such ye think yourselves to be,-pass by my virtues if you please, but do also spare my follies; the first will witness in my breast for themselves, and the last will give pain enough to the ingenuous mind without you. And since deviating more or less from the paths of propriety and rectitude must be incident to human nature, do thou, Fortune, put it in my power, always from my own pocket to pay the penalty of those errors! I do not want to be independent that I may sin, but I want to be independent in my sinning.

To return in this rambling letter to the subject I set out with, let me recommend my friend Clarke to your acquaintance and good offices; his worth entitles him to the one, and his gratitude will merit the other.

Mr. Clarke's most powerful opponent at Moffat was Mr. Williamson, factor for the Earl of Hopetoun, the principal landowner of the parish. As superior of the soil on which stood the Moffat schoolroom, Lord Hopetoun had invoked the legal 1 Mr. Cunningham was nephew of Principal Robertson.

authorities to interdict Mr. Clarke from reopening the school after the summer holidays. Under the circumstances, Mr. Clarke, on the Poet's dictation, thus addressed himself to his lordship's factor :

SIR,-Most sincerely do I regret that concurrence of accident, prejudice, and mistake, which, most unfortunately for me, has subjected me, as master of Moffat Grammar School, to the displeasure of the Earl of Hopetoun and those in whom he places confidence. Protestations of my innocence will, from me, be thought words of course. But I hope, and I think I have some well-grounded reasons for that hope, that the gentlemen in whose hands I immediately am, the right honourable patrons of the school, will find the charge against me groundless, and my claims just; and will not allow me to fall a sacrifice to the insidious designs of some, and the well-meant though misinformed zeal of others. However, as disputes and litigations must be of great hurt, both to the school and me, I most ardently wish that it would suggest itself to Mr. Williamson's good sense and wish for the welfare of the country, the propriety of dropping all disputes, and allowing me peaceable admission to my school, and the exercise of my function. This, sir, I am persuaded, will be serving all parties; and will lay me under particular and lasting obligations to your goodness. I propose opening school to-morrow; and the quiet possession of my schoolhouse is what I have to request of you-a request which, if refused, I must be under the very disagreeable necessity of asking in the way pointed out by the laws of the country. Whatever you, sir, may think of other parts of my conduct, you will at least grant the propriety of a man's straining every nerve in a contest where not only ruin, but infamy, must attend his defeat.-I am, etc.

This letter was despatched to Mr. Williamson in the month of September 1791, but, whatever ensued with reference to the use of the schoolroom, the appeal did not allay, on the part of Lord Hopetoun or his adviser, the feeling of resentment, or tend to the cessation of hostilities. Mr. Clarke was subjected to a legal prosecution. Against parochial schoolmasters complaints for malversation were usually presented to the local Presbytery. But the records of the Presbytery of Lockerbie, within whose bounds Moffat