admitted into the university as lecturer on anatomy. From this period till his death in December 1789, Dr Cleghorn lived in the enjoyment of a high and lucrative practice, the duties of which he varied and relieved by a taste for farming and horticulture, and by attentions to the family of a deceased brother, which he undertook to support. In private life, Dr Cleghorn is said to have been as amiable and worthy, as in his professional life he was great. He was enabled before his death to acquire considerable estates in the county of Meath, of which his nephew, George Cleghorn of Kilcarty, was High Sheriff in the year 1794.
CLELAND, William, the troubadour, as he may be called, of the covenanters, was born about the year 1671, having been just twenty-eight years of age at his death, in 1689. When only eighteen, he held command as a captain in the covenanting army at Drumclog and Bothwell Bridge. It would thus appear likely, that he was born in a respectable grade of society. He seems to have stepped directly from the university into the field of arms; for it is known that he was at college just before completing his eighteenth year; at which age he enjoyed the rank above-mentioned in the whig army. Although Cleland probably left the country after the affair at Bothwell, he is found spending the summer of 1685, in hiding, among the wilds of Clydesdale and Ayrshire, having, perhaps, returned in the unfortunate expedition of the earl of Argyle. Whether he again retired to the continent is not known; but, after the revolution, he re-appears on the stage of public life, in the character of lieutenant-colonel of the earl of Angus' regiment, called the Cameronian regiment, in consequence of its having been raised out of that body of men, for the purpose of protecting the convention parliament. That Cleland had now seen a little of the world, appears from a poem entitled, some Lines made by him upon the observation of the vanity of worldly honours, after he had been at several princes' courts.[1]
It is a strong mark of the early popularity of Hudibras, that, embodying though it did the sarcasms of a cavalier against the friends of civil and religious liberty, it nevertheless travelled into Scotland, and inspired with the principle of imitation a poet of the entirely opposite party. Cleland, who, before he left college, had written some highly fanciful verses, of which we have preserved a copy below,[2] composed a poem in the Hudibrastic style, upon the celebrated
- ↑ We also observe, in Watt's Bibliotheca Britannica, that he published "Disputatio Juridica de Probationibus," at Utrecht, in 1684; which would imply that he studied civil law at that celebrated seminary.
- ↑ These form part of a poem entitled, " Hollo, my Fancy," which was printed in Watson's Collection of Scottish Poems, at the beginning of the last century:
In conceit like Phaeton,
I'll mount Phoebus' chair,
Having ne'er a hat on,
All my hair a-burning,
In my journeying,
Hurrying through the air.
Fain would I hear his fiery horses neighing!
And see how they on foamy bits are playing!
All the stars and planets I will be surveying
Hollo, my fancy, whither wilt thou go?
O, from what ground of nature
Doth the pelican,
That self-devouring creature,
Prove so froward
And untoward
Her vitals for to strain!
And why the subtle fox, while in death's wounds lying,
Doth not lament his wounds by howling and by crying!
And why the milk-white swan doth sing when she's a-dying!
Hollo, my fancy, whither wilt thou go?
&c.&c.&c.
