SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR'S LIFE. 3 



opportunities of being abroad, and obtaining for his 

 natural acuteness of observation the extended range 

 of objects that is essential to enlarged mental culture, 

 the conviction is forced upon the observer who offers 

 an estimate of him, that, falling in at his proper 

 place he was one of these men of mother wit, original 

 ideas, and marked capacity, who, in Scotland, are 

 represented by Robert Burns, and Hugh Miller, John 

 Leyden, and The Ettrick Shepherd. 



As a follower of the somewhat lightly esteemed, 

 but essential avocation of shoemaker, he belongs to 

 the illustrious craft from among whose awls and 

 lasts have come, according to Coleridge (in defiance 

 of the stale Latinism), some patriots of large soul, 

 theologians with pale faces, and hair crisp with study, 

 missionaries of world-embracing Christian zeal, critics, 

 and their victims the builders of the lofty rhyme. 



As we find from the autobiography, which during 

 a course of many years he had prepared, " he was 

 the child of honest parents, the youngest of a family 

 of six, was born at Langnewton, in the parish of 

 Ancrum, on the 5th of July, 1785." Langnewton 

 standing on the high banks of the Ale, at that 

 time had pretentious to rank as a Scottish village, 

 from which, by the rural changes, it has passed into 

 a seldom seen, tin visited hamlet. It had the usual 



