xiv BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF HEW SCOTT, D.D.
consideration of his attainments as a student, and on the recommendation
of James Ferguson of Pitfour and John Buchan, W.S."
III.
Sometime in his Arts curriculum, Hew Scott became known to
Thomas Thomson, Deputy Clerk-Register of Scotland, most erudite of
legal antiquaries. Thomson had set out to reform the whole system of
public registries and the method of the custody of records in rendering
these records accessible to research, in rescuing and repairing old records,
in editing the Acts of the Scottish Parliament and other governmental
registers, under authority of a Record Commission. Scott became one
of Thomson's best helpers. The work was congenial, and it may have
inspired the idea of the Fasti, although the zealous researcher was
acquainted with Le Neve's Fasti Ecclesiai Anglicanm—a monumental
work like his own that was to be.
His divinity course completed, Scott was licensed by the Presbytery
of Haddington 24th October 1820. In 1829 he received ordination in
order to proceed to Canada—a step frustrated by the appeal of David
Laing, as has been already stated. Assistantships followed at Garvald,
Ladykirk, Cockpen, and Temple. The minister of Cockpen was his
college friend, James Grierson. " I was not a little encouraged by his
story," Scott used to say ; " like many of us, he had two strings to his
bow, and kept a drug shop for years in the North Bridge till he was
presented to a parish, Lord Dalhousie writing the preferment on the
field of Echlar."
Promotion came at long last to the indefatigable investigator. On
the death of Dr Carstairs, Sir Windham Carmichael Anstruther offered
Scott the parish of Anstruther Wester, and he was admitted 12th June
1839. The Rev. Jardine Wallace, of Traquair, used to relate how Hew
Scott arrived one evening at his father's manse of St Michael,
Dumfries. In the course of conversation he spoke somewhat sadly
of the changes which had taken place from the Secession of 1843.
Mrs Wallace said : "Mr Scott, were you not tempted to go out ?
"
"No ! no
!
" he naively replied, " I had too much difficulty to get in."
Scott's curious story about the actual genesis of the Secession may be
recalled : "In the arrangement of viands for a party at dinner, one of
the guests, wife of the schoolmaster, who was also assistant minister in
the parish [Marnoch], happened to make some observations about its