threatened for the resistance of its inhabitants. After Richard's surrender Adam was appointed one of the commissioners for the deposition of the king; and he gives us an interesting account of a visit that he paid to him in the Tower. The immediate reward of his services was the living of Kemsing and Seal in Kent, together with a prebend in the collegiate church of Abergwili. He soon afterwards received another prebend in the church of Bangor. As a further proof of the value set by the new king on his ability as a lawyer, a case was submitted to him in the following year, 1400, whereby Henry sought to avoid restoration of the dower of Richard's young queen, Isabella of France.
But soon afterwards Adam forfeited the royal favour by the boldness with which he remonstrated with Henry on the faults of his government; and in 1402 he was sent in banishment to Rome, where, however, he was well received, and appointed papal chaplain and auditor of the Rota. He was not allowed to return to England for four years; and of his life after that date we have no information, as the latter part of his chronicle is lost.
While at Rome he states that he was nominated by the pope to the see of Hereford, which fell vacant in 1404, but that the intrigues of his enemies in England prevailed to his exclusion; and again that, with no better success, he was afterwards proposed for the see of St. David's.
Among the different cases in which he was engaged as a lawyer, he mentions that he drew up the petition of Sir Thomas Dymock for the championship at Henry's coronation, and that he was retained in the well-known suit of Lord Grey of Ruthin against Lord Edward Hastings.
[Chronicon Adæ de Usk, ed. E. M. Thompson (Royal Socety of Literature), 1876.]
ADAM, ALEXANDER, LL.D. (1741–1809), writer on Roman antiquities, was born on 24 June 1741, at a small farm near Forres, in Morayshire, of which his father was tenant. He learned what Latin the parish schoolmaster could teach him, and had read the whole of Livy before he was sixteen, chiefly in the early morning by the light of splinters of bogwood. In 1757 he competed unsuccessfully for a ‘bursary’ at Aberdeen University, and soon afterwards, on the invitation of a relation of his mother who was a clergyman in Edinburgh, he removed to that city, where he had free admission to the college lectures, and in the course of a year and a half he gained the head-mastership of Watson's Hospital. This for a boy of nineteen, who had struggled through his university career on four guineas a year, was comparative wealth. After about three years, however, he resigned the appointment, and became private tutor in the family of Mr. Kincaid, afterwards lord provost of Edinburgh. Through his influence Adam subsequently obtained in 1768 the rectorship of the High School, after having been for three years assistant to the retiring head master. Lord Cockburn says of him: ‘He was born to teach Latin, some Greek, and all virtue. … He had most of the usual peculiarities of a schoolmaster, but was so amiable and so artless that no sensible friend would have wished one of them to be even softened. His private industry was appalling. If one moment late at school, he would hurry in and explain that he had been detained “verifying a quotation;” and many a one did he verify at four in the morning’ (Cockburn, Memorials of his Time). He improved the school, and in the year of his death had 167 pupils in his class, a number equal to the whole attendance at the school when he first joined it. His introduction of the teaching of Greek was opposed by the university authorities as an infraction of the privileges of the professor of Greek. Much controversy was also excited by the publication, in 1772, of his ‘Latin Rudiments and Grammar,’ written in English instead of Latin, as in the old text-books. The town council in 1786 decided that the old grammar (Ruddiman's) was still to be used, and prohibited all others. But Adam's method was generally adopted before his death. In 1780 the degree of LL.D. was conferred on him by the university of Edinburgh, and in 1791 he published his best known work on ‘Roman Antiquities,’ for which he received 600l., and which has since gone through several editions. A ‘Summary of Geography and History’ appeared in 1794, expanded from a small text-book which he had printed for the use of his pupils ten years previously; a fifth edition appeared in 1816. His last work, published in 1805, was a ‘Latin Dictionary’ for the use of schools.
On 13 Dec. 1809, Dr. Adam was seized with a fit of apoplexy while teaching his class, and he died after an illness of five days. His last words were: ‘But it grows dark, boys—you may go; we must put off the rest till to-morrow.’
Dr. Adam married first, in 1775, Miss Munro, whose father was minister of Kinloss; and second, in 1780, Miss Cosser, a daughter of the controller of excise in Edinburgh.
Dr. Adam's other works are: ‘Geographical
