James Beattie, born on 25 October 1735 and dead on 18 August 1803, occupied an unusual and revealing place in eighteenth-century British culture. He was at once a Scottish professor, a poet of landscape and sensibility, a popular moral philosopher, a Christian apologist, a music lover, a man of sociable ambition, and a bereaved father whose final years were darkened by illness and loss. In his own lifetime he was fam…
“Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.”
Neighbourhood:
Enlightenment Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Spirituality
John Gibson Lockhart was born on 12 June 1794 at the manse of Cambusnethan, Lanarkshire, into a world in which Scottish religious discipline, intellectual ambition, and political controversy were closely entwined. His father, the Reverend Dr John Lockhart, was minister of Cambusnethan parish, and his mother, Elizabeth Gibson, came from a family whose name Lockhart later adopted as his middle name. The future writer g…
“Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?”
Neighbourhood:
Romantic Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Spirituality, Longing
