Life
Born on 24 July 1798, he was descended from the Napiers of Merchiston. His great-grandfather Francis Napier, 6th Lord Napier had five sons, of whom the youngest, Mark, a major-general in the army, was the grandfather of the biographer. His father was Francis Napier, a writer to the signet in Edinburgh, and his mother was Mary Elizabeth Jane Douglas, eldest daughter of Colonel Archibald Hamilton of Innerwick, Haddingtonshire. He was educated at Edinburgh High School and the university of Edinburgh, and passed advocate at the Scottish bar in 1820.
In 1844 Napier was appointed sheriff-depute of Dumfriesshire, to which Galloway was subsequently added, and he held office for the rest his life. He died at his residence at Ainslie Place, Edinburgh, on 23 November 1879, as the oldest member of the Faculty of Advocates then discharging legal duties.
Read more about this topic: Mark Napier (historian)
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Not less are summer-mornings dear
To every child they wake,
And each with novel life his sphere
Fills for his proper sake.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn’t matter so much as it seemed to do—it’s not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn’t matter so much.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“We have had many harbingers and forerunners; but of a purely spiritual life, history has afforded no example. I mean we have yet no man who has leaned entirely on his character, and eaten angels’ food; who, trusting to his sentiments, found life made of miracles; who, working for universal aims, found himself fed, he knew not how; clothed, sheltered, and weaponed, he knew not how, and yet it was done by his own hands.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)