Poet, Presbyterian minister, playwright, and politician, John Home epitomizes the Scottish Enlightenment. Both in his own time and today, Home is best known for his famous friends and his fateful tragedy Douglas (1756): the friends made the play, and the play made the man. Backed by the Moderate party of the Scottish church, Douglas incited a pamphlet war which thrust Kirk officials out of religious seclusion and into the world of the Enlightenment. With the notoriety of the play fortune, sinecures, and power came to the romantic youth from the Lowlands.

Home, an instinctive flatterer in an age of flattery, rose like his hero in Douglas from humble origins. Born in Leith on 22 September 1722 of the town clerk, Alexander Home, and the daughter of a local writer, John attended Leith Grammar School and then the University of Edinburgh. Here he met the loyal friends who would protect and defend...