"As that gentleman (Dr. Hamilton) was sitting with the family in Mr. Waller's house, several shots were fired in upon them, the house was broken open, and Mrs. Waller, in endeavouring to protect her helpless husband by covering him with her body, was murdered. Mr. Hamilton, from the natural love of life, had taken refuge in the lower apartments. Thence they forced him, and as he endeavoured to hold the door they held fire under his hand until they made him quit his hold. They then dragged him a few yards from the house, and murdered him in the most inhuman and barbarous manner."[119]
From a letter written by Dr. Hall to the Gentleman's Magazine (March, 1797), we learn that the assassins retired unmolested and undiscovered. Nor were any of them ever brought to justice, although popular tradition, among both Catholics and Protestants, says that misfortune dogged their footsteps, and each one of them came to an untimely end. Dr. Hamilton's body remained exposed during the night, and was only removed the following morning, when it was taken to Londonderry and interred in the Cathedral graveyard. Here his name is recorded on the family tombstone; and in 1890 his descendants erected a tablet to his memory in the chancel of the Cathedral.
Hamilton obtained the degree of Doctor of Divinity in 1794, and shortly before his death he was elected a Corresponding Member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. We have seen how he was cut off in the full vigour of mind and body—his last memoir unprinted—and surely we may echo the lament of his contemporaries, and feel that he was one who had conferred honour on his native land. Yet, while they mourned his loss as a public calamity, his friends would recall his words, and remember that to him death was but the entrance to a new life—the casting away of a covering which formed no part of his true self.
FOOTNOTES:
[109] Reprinted from the Sun, May, 1891.
[110] See Letter I., part ii., edition 1822.
[111] Letter VI., part ii., pp. 183, 184. Compare with this passage the following enunciation of the results of modern geological investigation. "A marked feature of this period in Europe was the abundance and activity of its volcanoes.... From the south of Antrim, through the west coast of Scotland, the Faröe Islands and Iceland, even far into Arctic Greenland, a vast series of fissure eruptions poured forth successive floods of basalt, fragments of which now form the extensive volcanic plateaux of these
regions." (Sir A. Geikie, "Geological Sketches at Home and Abroad," pp. 347, 348).
[112] Hamilton uses this word in its old meaning of rock or stone. He expressly states that basalt does not contain the slightest trace of animal or vegetable remains.
[113] Letter VII., part ii., pp. 187, 188, 189.