Excerpt from The History of the Discovery and Settlement of America
William Robertson, the eldest son of the Reverend William Robertson, was born on the 8th of September, 1721, at Borthwick, in the shire of Mid Lothian, of which parish his father was the minister. By the paternal line he descended from a respectable family in the county of Fife, a branch of that which, for many generations, possessed the estate of Struan, in Perthshire. His mother was the daughter of David Pitcairn, esq. of Dreghorn. He had one brother and six sisters; all of whom were well settled in life, and most of whom lived to an advanced age.
It was at the parochial school of Borthwick that Robertson received the initiatory part of his education; but as soon as he was sufficiently forward to enter on the study of the learned languages, he was removed to the school of Dalkeith. The latter seminary was then under the superintendence of Mr. Leslie, whose eminence as a teacher was such as to attract pupils from all parts of Scotland; and the father of Robertson was consequently induced to send him to Dalkeith rather than to the Scottish metropolis.
When the future historian was twelve years old, his father was transferred from Borthwick to one of the churches of Edinburgh. In the autumn of 1733 he joined his parents; and, in October, he was admitted into the college and university of the northern capital.
Whatever were his first attempts at composition, and it is probable they were many, nothing has been preserved to show how early he began to exercise his talents, or with what degree of rapidity those talents were expanded. It is certain, however, that in the pursuit of knowledge he displayed that ardour and perseverance without which nothing great will ever be accomplished. A strong proof of this is afforded by some of his early commonplace books, which bear the dates of 1735, 1736, and 1737.The motto, vita sine literis mors est, which he prefixed to these books, sufficiently indicates by what an honourable ambition and love of literature he was inspired at a very tender and generally thoughtless age. The boy of fourteen, who can cherish the feeling which is implied by this motto, gives promise that his manhood will reflect lustre on himself and on the country of his birth.
Among the men of eminence, by whose instructions he profited at the university, were sir John Pringle, afterwards president of the Royal Society, but then professor of moral philosophy; Maclaurin, justly celebrated for the extent of his mathematical skill and the purity of his style and Dr. Stevenson, the learned and indefatigable professor of logic. To the masterly prelections of the latter, especially to his illustrations of the poetics of Aristotle, and of Longinus on the Sublime, Robertson often declared that he considered himself to be more deeply indebted than to any circumstance in the course of his academical career. It was indeed not towards the abstract sciences that the bent of his genius was directed. To mathematical and mechanical speculations he seems to have been at least cold, perhaps averse. Neither was he remarkable for metaphysical acuteness.
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