he thought that in
regard to church-government and church-service, it had many great and
peculiar advantages." Unwillingness to part from Aberdeen was, perhaps,
at the bottom of these stout resolutions. It was confessedly one of the
reasons for which he declined a proposition made to him in the year
1773, to remove to the chair of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh; though he
was urged by his friends not to neglect this opportunity of extending
the sphere of his usefulness, and the change would have brought him much
pecuniary advantage. His reluctance to comply was increased by the
belief that there were certain persons at Edinburgh to whom his
principles had given offence, and in whose neighbourhood he did not
expect to live so quietly as he wished. In the same year, he was
complimented with the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws, by the
University of Oxford, at the installation of Lord North in the
Chancellorship.

He now, therefore, lived on at Aberdeen, making occasionally brief
visits to England, where he was always welcome, both at the court and by
those many individuals of eminence to whom his talents and virtues had
recommended him. In the summers he usually indulged himself with passing
some time at Peterhead, a town situated on the most easterly promontory
of Scotland, and resorted to for its medicinal waters, which he thought
beneficial to his health; for he had early in life been subject to a
vertiginous disorder, the recurrence of which at times incapacitated him
for any serious application.

The second book of the Minstrel appeared in 1774. In 1776 he was
prevailed on to publish, by subscription, in a more splendid form, his
Essay on Truth, which was now accompanied by two other essays, on Poetry
and Music, and on Laughter and Ludicrous Composition; and by Remarks on
the Utility of Classical Learning. This was succeeded in 1783, by
dissertations moral and critical, on Memory and Imagination, on
Dreaming, on the Theory of Language, on Fable and Romance, on the
Attachments of Kindred, and on Illustrations of Sublimity; being, as he
states in the preface, "part of a course of prelections read to those
young gentlemen whom it was his business to initiate in the elements of
moral science." In 1786, he published a small treatise, entitled
Evidences of the Christian Religion, at the suggestion of Porteus, who
was now a bishop; and in 1790 and 1793 two volumes of Elements of Moral
Science, containing an abridgment of