HOME, Jourr, a clergyman of the church of Scotland, but best known to the public as author of one of the most classical tragedies in the English language, was a descend ant of one of the ancestors of the Earl of Home. It was Once reported, that he had some pretensions to the title of the Earl of Dunbar, but upon what grounds we have never been able to learn. His father was clerk, or, as it might be termed in England, recorder of the town of Leith.* Our poet was born at Leith in September 1722. He re ceived the elementary part of his education at the parish school of his native place ; after which he went to the university of Edinburgh, and there went through the customary course of the languages and philosophy, with the reputation of a respectable and diligent student. At the university lie was the intimate companion of several of those eminent men, who, like himself, afterwards con tributed so highly to raise the literary reputation of Scot land about the middle of the eighteenth century. Among these were, Drs Robertson and Blair, and Professor Adam Ferguson. The circle of his intimate friendship afterwards included David Hume and Lord Karnes. Be ing educated for the church, he had passed through the divinity-hall, and was about to enter upon the duties of the clerical profession, when he was suddenly called to forsake his studies by the rebellion that broke out in Scotland in the year 1745. On the approach of the rebels, the citizens of Edinburgh assembled, and formed themselves into an association for the support of their sovereign, and the de fence of the city ; and in this association Mr Home was ap pointed to be lieutenant of a company of volunteers. In the first crisis of alarm, it became a question among those who had taken up arms, whether they should wait for the approach of the rebels within their walls, or march out to meet them, and act with the king's army. Mr Home, with the more active spirits, was in Favour of the latter plan ; and while the bulk of the volunteers remained in:the Scot tish capital, he was one of a much smaller ntimber, who solicited and obtained permission to follow the army of Hawley into the field. At the unfortunate battle of Fal kirk, he was taken prisoner by a party of Prince Charles's troops, and was for some time confined a prisoner in the castle of Downe. From thence, however, he soon after wards contrived to effect his escape; and public tranquil lity having been restored by the victory of Culloden, be re sumed his studies, and was licensed to preach. In the same year, 1746, he was presented to the living of Athol staneford, in the county of East Lothian. It gives a poeti cal interest to the name of this parish, that it had succes sively for clergymen two poets of respectable names, Alr Home having succeeded in that living to Blair, the author of The Grave. In this retired situation, however, we can not suppose the dramatic muse of Mr Home to have found herself so rongenially situated as the more sombrous genius of his predecessor. Accustomed to the sweets of literary society, and elegant in his pursuits, he probably felt the life and duties of a country parish priest far from being delightful. To a mind teeming with dramatic con ceptions, the offices of visiting, catechising, and spiritual rebuking, must have been somewhat irksome. He peals, however, to have sometimes taken the recreation of a visit to England ; and on one of those occasions he met with Collins the poet, whose mind immediately felt a pleasing congeniality with that of Home. In his Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands, we have almost the on ly record that Collins has lett of his personal friendship, when he says, Go not regardless, while these numbers boast My stiort-Iiir'd bliss ; forget my social name, But think tar oll; how, on the southern coast, I met thy friendship with an equal flame.
The tragedy of Douglas, though the first play of Mr Home's that was brought upon the stage, was not the first of his composition. He had before written ?Igis, a trage dy, of which we shall have occasion to speak hereafter. The plot of the tragedy of Douglas, as few will probably need to be told, was suggested by the ancient ballad of Gill or Child Morrice. Hearing a part of that beautiful old song sung by a lady one evening after a supper party in Edinburgh, Mr Home remarked, that he thought it con tained the germs of a tragedy ; and very soon made good his opinion, by commencing to dramatise the story. Dou glas made its first appearance on the Edinburgh theatre, which was then in no unflourishing condition, in the year 1756. When the managers received the MS. they readily accepted it, put it into rehearsal, and prepared for giving it a magnificent representation. The transaction, however, coming to the knowledge of the elders of the kirk, they, in their great zeal, first remonstrated with the author on the heinous sin he was committing. Failing in this remon
strance, they endeavoured to terrify the performers from representing it ; but with no better success. Author and actors remained equally incorrigible, and nothing remain ed for the incensed elders to do, but threaten to expel, and for ever disqualify for the ministry, not only their dis obedient poet, but even such of his clerical friends as had been wicked enough to go to see his piece performed at the theatre. In pamphlets and advertisements, they thun dered their anathemas against those implements of Satan, the actors, who had led aside, or at least abetted in his wan dering, the lost sheep of their flock. The presbytery of Edinburgh published an admonition and exhortation against stage-plays, which was ordered to be read in all the pulpits within their bounds, on a Sunday appointed. In this pro clamation, there was no mention of Mr Home or his play, though it was evidently against him that this spiritual ar tillery of obsolete laws and fanatical prejudices were level led. To avoid a formal expulsion from the church, Mr Home, in 1757, resigned his living, and with it the ecclesi astical profession, and wore for ever after a lay habit. Simi lar as the Puritans of England and the Scottish Calvinists might have been half a century before, this ejection of an amiable and accomplished clergyman from the Scottish Kirk, for the crime of writing a tragedy, which did honour to the genius of the nation, excited among the more liberal part of the Scotch, and much more generally in England, a sense of indignation at the injustice, and ridicule at the absurdity of the procedure. That leaven of bigotry hap pily is now far extinct ; we believe the last mark of it is to be found in the article HOME, in the Biographical Diction ary of Mr A. Chalmers, the writer of which article gravely denies the treatment of Mr Home to have been unjust, since the constitutional laws of the Kirk of Scotland de nounced stage-plays. If the writer of this luminous opi nion were at present flourishing in Spain, he might argue with equal justice in favour of the burning of heretics, on the grounds of the ancient laws of the Catholic Church— as if an enlightened age were for ever bound to follow the dead letter of primitive barbarism. Happily, in Protest ant communities, such an example of clerical hostility to the cause of literature stands alone: for parallels to it we must go back to times of Paganism and Popery. It may remind us of the persecution of .Eschylus, in conse quence of the clamour of the Athenian priests, or of the influence of the monks in Spain, when neither the patron age even of Philip IV. nor the orthodoxy of Lope de Ve ga's works, were sufficient to screen him from the person al virulence of the ecclesiastics. At no very distant pe riod, indeed, during an epidemical disorder, the inhabitants of Seville renounced the amusement of the theatre, as the surest mode of averting Divine vengeance. To return, however, to our author. His tragedy of Douglas was ex tolled, on its first appearance, by the literary circles of the North, in terms that were perhaps rather unqualified. Da vid Hume gave it as his opinion, that it was one of the most interesting and pathetic pieces ever exhibited on any theatre ; he even gave it a preference to the Meropc of Maffei, and that of Voltaire. The rest of the philosopher's panegyric on our author, in 'which he alluded to Shak speare, may, for the credit of his taste, be left unquoted. The poet Gray, in one of his letters to a friend, renders an homage to the play of Douglas, that is perhaps not much lessened by his fastidious allusion to its defects. " I am greatly struck," he says, " with the tragedy of Douglas, though it has infinite faults. The author seems to me to have retrieved the true language of the stage, which had been lost for these hundred years ; and there is one scene between Matilda ane the old peasant, that strikes me blind to all its defects." Jackson, in his History of the Scottish Stage, informs us, that when this tragedy was ori ginally produced in Edinburgh, the title of the heroine was Lady 13.irnard. The alteration to Lady Randolph was made on its being transplanted to London. Its success at the Edinburgh theatre induced Mr Home to offer it to the London managers, where, notwithstanding its rising cele brity, and all the influence used in its favour, it was refused by Mr Garrick. Mr Rich, however, accepted it, and it was acted for the first time at Covent Garden, March 14, 1757, with some applause, but by no means such as indi cated the future celebrity which it was to obtain.