[196:1] So much had it been considered a legitimate object of the education of a young gentleman to bring him up to the expectation of a government office, that in the "Institute of the Law of Scotland," the posthumous work of John Erskine, who had been appointed professor of Scots law in the university of Edinburgh in 1737, it is mentioned as one of the duties of the guardian of a young man of good family with a small patrimony, to "advance a yearly sum, far beyond the interest of his patrimony, that he may appear suitably to his quality, while he is unprovided of any office under the government by which he can live decently." B. i. Tit. 7. § 25.
[197:1] Walpole gives a curious illustration of the poverty of the Scottish nobility, before "the forty-five," saying of Lord Kilmarnock, "I don't know whether I told you that the man at the tennis court protests that he has known him dine with the man that sells pamphlets at Storey's gate, and says he would have often been glad if I would have taken him home to dinner. He was certainly so poor that in one of his wife's intercepted letters, she tells him she has plagued their steward for a fortnight for money, and can only get three shillings. Can any one help pitying such distress?" Walpole's Letters, ii. 144.
Goldsmith found the holder of a Scottish Peerage keeping a glove shop, and in the case of Lord Mordington, who had been arrested for debt, and claimed his privilege in the Common Pleas, "the bailiff made affidavit, that when he arrested the said lord, he was so mean in his apparel, as having a worn out suit of clothes and a dirty shirt on, and but sixpence in his pocket, he could not suppose him to be a peer of Great Britain, and of inadvertency arrested him." Fortescue's Reports, 165. This family was peculiarly celebrated, Lady Mordington having raised the question, whether a Scottish peeress who kept a tavern was protected by privilege of peerage from being amenable to the laws against keeping disorderly houses.
[198:1] He had an example connected with his own neighbourhood, if not with his own family, of the practice of the gentry following handicraft trades. George Hume, son of the minister of his native parish, Chirnside, who was connected with his own family, followed the humble occupation of a baker in the Canongate, and rose to the dignity of deacon of his trade. Ill-natured tradition says, that the philosopher disliked the vicinity to himself of this living illustration of the depression of the Scottish aristocracy, and occasionally put himself to some trouble to avoid meeting him on the street; but this tradition is not consistent with Hume's manly character.
[208:1] My own Life.
[209:1] MS. R.S.E.
[209:2] Tytler's Life of Kames, i. 123.
[210:1] Douglas's Peerage, ii. 501-502.
[211:1] Campbell's Naval History, iv. 324. Appendix, A. It appears that Rodney commanded one of the ships, the Eagle.