Note 230 — Chapter XII

Mr., afterwards Sir Gilbert, Elliot, father of the late Earl of Minto. His connection with Lord Bute does credit to that nobleman’s discernment, for he was a most useful coadjutor; and Professor Stewart says of him, that he “seems to have united with his other well-known talents and accomplishments, a taste for abstract disquisitions which rarely occurs in men of the world, accompanied with that soundness and temperance of judgment which in such researches are so indispensably necessary to guard the mind against the illusions engendered by its own subtility.”—Philosophy of the Human Mind, vol. ii. p. 530.—E.