Sketches of the History of Man. Lord Kames (Henry Home)

      Henry Home was born at Kames in Berwickshire, not far from the English border, in 1696. The family was not wealthy, and Henry did not attend a university. Around 1712 he went to Edinburgh to train as a solicitor, but he soon directed his considerable energies instead toward being called to the Scottish bar and was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1723. His legal career seems to have begun slowly. However, by the mid-1730s his practice was flourishing, and political connections enabled him to rise in the profession to the rank of advocate deputy around 1738 and to the Court of Session, Scotland’s highest civil court, in 1752. Henry had inherited his father’s estate at Kames in 1741, and with his seat on the Court of Session came the title Lord Kames. When his wife’s estate at Blair Drummond in Stirlingshire came to him in 1766, Kames became a rich man. A year earlier, he had been elevated to the High Court of Justiciary, Scotland’s supreme criminal court, and appointed to the court’s Western Circuit. He remained active as a judge until shortly before his death on December 27, 1782. Kames played a central role in the efflorescence of work in letters and science that we now call the Scottish Enlightenment. He was a