Of the first Baronet’s eldest son, Sir John Clerk, second Baronet, and one of the Barons of Exchequer, several portraits are preserved at Penicuik; but even a more complete picture of this stout old gentleman, perhaps the most potent and memorable figure that appears in this family history, may be gathered from the voluminous diaries in his hand that are preserved in the Charter-room, and from that “History of my Life,” which he himself compiled from these, and which the present Baronet has placed at the disposal of the Scottish History Society for publication; a manuscript affording a clear narrative of the events of the Baron’s life, and throwing curious and valuable side-lights upon the manners and public occurrences of the time, while, in almost every line of its pages, it gives a vivid, if unconscious, picture of the quaint, masterful personality of its writer. He was born, as he tells us, on the 8th of February 1676—not in 1684, as stated by his biographers; studied at Penicuik School and Glasgow University; and, at the age of nineteen, went to Leyden to be instructed in law by “a very learned man, Philippus Bernardus Vitrianus.” Here he boarded with a German who taught mathematics, philosophy, and music, and he applied himself to all of these studies as well as to law, having previously, as he remarks with proper pride, “played tolerably on the harpsicord, and since I was 7 I touched the violin a little.” Nor do these exhaust the list of his pursuits, for “among other things I learned to draw from Francis Miers, a very great painter; this proceeded partly from inclination, and partly from the advice I had from some of my Dutch friends, for all their young Folks learn to draw from their being 7 years of Age, and find it vastly useful in most Stations of Life.” His great friend at Leyden was Herman Boerhaave, then a man of twenty-six, afterwards world-famous as a physician, and he gives a curious account of his being treated by the young doctor with a “chymecal medicine he had discovered which would carry off the smallpox before they came any length,” and which was successful at the time, though the malady returned in full force three months afterwards, when Clerk had gone to Rome. “We not only lived like brothers while I studied in Leyden, but continued a correspondence together while he lived”; and forty-four years afterwards Boerhaave bequeathed to the Baron a collection of his books, which still forms part of the Library at Penicuik House.