On her return to Oxford Mrs Gregory put up a monument to her husband’s memory in the nave of St Mary’s Church. After Professor Gregory’s death, Colin Maclaurin published of Gregory’s work _A Treatise on Practical Geometry_. The first edition was sold out within a few years, and a second was called for, as this book was in its day used as a text-book in all the Scottish Universities.
Professor Gregory has been accused of spending too little of his time in the observatory, and he was undoubtedly greater as a mathematician than as an astronomer. It was as a pure mathematician that he held the high place which was his in the eighteenth century.
‘The picture of the ... Dean seems a true one.’
Of the four children who survived Professor David Gregory, there was only one who inherited his taste for learning. This was his name son David, the eldest of his children. The son’s gifts were not those of his father; he was poetical, artistic, a student of history, who never wrote upon the subject, a man in fact who had more of a woman’s cleverness than a man’s; and looking back on him, his greatest power seems to have been that faculty, which is not to be gained in any school—the monarchial gift of leading. Everything which his hand touched was blessed in his very touch, and through his life, as he passed along his way, adorning different offices and positions of growing importance, there was always some token left behind him that David Gregory’s order-loving eye had rested there—the gardens had fresh flowers, halls were beautified by statues, libraries became more spacious, and hospitals were renewed in the same spirit of devotion which had long before inspired the gracious givers.
David Gregory was born in Oxford on the 14th of July 1696. He was educated at Westminster School, of which he was a scholar, and there among the grey shadows of London this æsthetic little boy first learned the fascination of history. There too he may have learned another thing, his admiration for kings and queens, for he knew that the school owed its foundation to the most picturesque queen that has ever reigned over England, in whose day by the mercy of providence, more even than by the queen’s wisdom, England became the mistress of the seas.