In 1715 comes another turmoil, a flitting, almost a flight across the North Sea to Holland, to be out of the difficulties of conflicting hopes and fears, to be out of the country, to take at least no part against the Stuarts, whom we suspect Kinairdy of loving in his secret heart. Likely enough they may have offered him bribes, and a title in the coming kingdom, but there was another counsellor nearer and dearer to him, and with her and his children he sought the shelter of a foreign land. Two or three years passed before they returned to Scotland. They were content to wait till the storm was past. When they came back Gregorie’s life was nearly over. He died in 1720, an old man of ninety-five.
‘And in his story still remains
A distant memory of life’s loss and gains,
A starlit picture of his joy and pains.’
A visit to his widow, who was Thomas Reid’s grandmother was described by her grandson in after years in a letter to James Gregory, Professor of Medicine in Edinburgh. ‘I found her,’ he says, ‘old and bedridden, but I never saw a more ladylike woman. I was now and then called into her room, when she sat upon her bed, or entertained me to sweetmeats and grave advices. Her daughters, who visited her, as well as one who lived with her, treated her as if she had been of superior rank, and indeed her appearance and manner commanded respect. She and all her children were zealous presbyterians, the first wife’s children were Tories and Episcopalians.’
But to return to what interests us about David Gregorie of Kinairdy, in connection with his many professorial sons and other kindred, he was a great lover of science, and a worker to whom all scientific matter came home to stay. His mathematical and mechanical gifts, great as they were—and we know he was far advanced in meteorological studies—were not to be compared with the power which he had, and which now appears for the first time in the Gregorie family—the inborn gift of doctoring. He had no training except what he gave himself, but he could no more help being a physician, than his brother Professor James could help his incessant work at mathematics. David and James Gregorie were the children of their mother far more than of their father; who, good as he probably was, is, we must confess, just a little dull. Yes, Janet Anderson, you have lived again for us in your sons!
CHAPTER III
JAMES GREGORIE, 1638–1675
‘He learned the art
In Padua far beyond the sea.’
—Scott, Lay 1, xi.