Scottish Authors > Henry Mackenzie Novelist & Essayist 1745-1831

Son of a doctor, Mackenzie was born in Edinburgh on 26th July 1745. He was educated at the High School of Edinburgh and the University there. His legal apprenticeship began in 1761 and in 1765 he was admitted Attorney in the Court of Exchequer in Scotland. As a leading taxation attorney he regularly visited London, becoming a close friend to many prominent lawyers and politicians of the day.

Mackenzie first achieved publication in 1763 with a poem in the Scots magazine. A number of verses and romantic ballads followed, including Kenneth and Duncan, both later included in Herd's Ancient and modern Scottish songs, heroic ballads, etc. (1776):

For I have stuid whar honour bade,

Though death trade on his heel:

Mean is the crest that stoops to fear;

Nae sic may Duncan feel.

Mackenzie's biographer, H.W. Thompson, wrote:

Here, if we had known the young poet had his feet on the pathway of Romance; before him was the lordly road which Walter Scott was to tread, but he chose to turn aside into the little lane of Sensibility.

In 1771, he published the novel for which he is best known. The Man of feeling is a sentimental story; its hero, Hartley, possesses an ideal sensitivity, displayed as feelings of virtue, pity, sympathy and benevolence. As innocence and weakness are deceived and exploited, the hero's response, and the intended response in the reader, is copious shedding of tears of sympathy and charity.

The Man of feeling was an immediate success, and the title came to be attached to the author himself. Burns wore out two copies and called it "a book I prize next to the Bible". Mackenzie published two other novels in the same sentimental vein: The Man of the world (1773) and Julia de Rubigne (1777). Through these novels, his plays and editorship of the journals The Mirror and The Lounger, Mackenzie established himself as a leading member of Edinburgh's literary society.

The issue of The Lounger of 9th December 1786 contained his paper discussing Burns' Kilmarnock edition. In this first important criticism of Burns, Mackenzie praised "this heaven-taught ploughman", and assured his success in Edinburgh. Significantly, it was Burns' English language poems which attracted his particular favour.

He was instrumental in founding the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1783) and the Highland Society of Scotland (1784). Mackenzie chaired a committee of the latter which investigated the authenticity of the Ossian poems "translated" by James Macpherson. As a man of letters Mackenzie aspired to improve Scottish literary taste. In dedicating Waverley to Mackenzie, Scott describes him as "our Scottish Addison".

He died on 14th January 1831 and was buried in Greyfriars Churchyard, Edinburgh.

Alan Reid

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