According to Dr. Robert Chambers “a story was told of his once making a serious objection to a law-paper, and in consequence to the whole suit, on account of the word _justice_ being thus spelt.”[820] Lord Braxfield, one of the ruffian judges, but a man of strong mind, “hearing him praised as a good judge, said, in his vulgar way, ‘Him! he knows nothing but the nooks of a cause.’ He was not without his crotchets. One day when he sat as President, he reprimanded a lawyer very sharply for making a ludicrous application of some text in the Gospels or Epistles. ‘Sir,’ said he, ‘you may take liberties with the Old Testament, but I will not suffer you to meddle with the New.’”[821]
As an historian he had considerable merits. Johnson revised the proof-sheets of his _Annals of Scotland_, and found them “a new mode of history in our language.” “They are very exact,” he added, “but they contain mere dry particulars. They are to be considered as a Dictionary. You know such things are there, and may be looked at when you please.”[822] Gibbon praised him as “a diligent collector, and an accurate critic;” but he complained that when he came to criticise “the two invidious chapters” in the _Decline and Fall_, “he scrutinized each separate passage with the dry minuteness of a special pleader; and as he was always solicitous to make, he may have succeeded sometimes in finding a flaw.”[823] Hume spoke of him with contempt. “He is a godly man; feareth the Lord and escheweth evil, and works out his salvation with fear and trembling. None of the books he publishes are of his writing; they are all historical manuscripts, of little or no consequence.”[824] “Nothing delighted him more,” writes Ramsay of Ochtertyre, “than to demolish some historical fabric which length of time had rendered venerable. I lent an old lady the first volume of his _Annals_. She was so ill-pleased with the rejection of some popular stories of Wallace, that she said she would drive the powder out of his lordship’s wig if she were by him.”[825] With all his critical power he was a believer in Ossian. Burke, who once met him at dinner, “found him a clever man, and generally knowing.”[826]
He had been educated at Eton, and there one day had noticed a little black-looking boy, who had come up “_to show for college_, _i.e._, to stand for a scholarship on the foundation.”