, a young man of Scotland whose genius and learning have been most
, a young man of Scotland whose genius and learning have been most injudiciously heightened, was born at Carnwarth, in Lanarkshire, in 1748. He was the youngest of the four sons of a poor farmer, and having discovered an uncommon proficiency in the learning taught at the school of the village, it was resolved to educate him for the church. At the age of fourteen he was placed at the school of Lanark, where his progress in grammatical learning is said to have been rapid, and, considering his early disadvantages, incredible. In 1766 he was removed to the university of Edinburgh, where, we are likewise told that in classical learning he surpassed the most industrious and accomplished students of his standing, and spoke and composed in Latin with a fluency and elegance that had few examples. And, of mathematics, natural philosophy, and metaphysics, his knowledge was considerable. To this was owing a certain proneness to disputation and metaphysical refinement, for which he was remarkable, and which he often indulged to a degree that subjected him to the imputation of imprudence, and of free-thinking. His turn for elegant composition first appeared in the solution of a philosophic question, proposed as a college-exercise, which he chose to exemplify in the form of a tale, conceived and executed with all the fire and invention of eastern imagination. This happened in 1769; and his first attempts in poetry are of no earlier date.