and was so much a favourite with the public, as to become, a few years after, the occasion of a remarkable fraud. A Mr Eccles of Bath, observing the continued mystery as to the author, laid claim to the work as his own, and, in order to support 'his pretensions, transcribed the whole with his own hand, with an appropriate allowance of blottings, interlineations, and corrections. So plausibly was this claim put forward, and so pertinaciously was it adhered to, that Messrs Cadell and Strachan, the publishers, found it necessary to undeceive the public by a formal contradiction.
Though Mr Mackenzie preserved the anonymity of the Man of Feeling for some years, (probably from prudential motives with reference to his business,) he did not scruple to indulge, both before and after this period, in the literary society with which the Scottish capital abounded. He informs us in his Life of Home, that he was admitted in boyhood as a kind of page to the tea-drinkings which then constituted the principal festive entertainment of the more polished people in Edinburgh; and his early acquaintance with Hume, Smith, Robertson, Blair, and the rest of the literary galaxy, then in the ascendant, is evidenced from the same source. He was an early intimate of the ingenious blind poet, Dr Blacklock; and at the house of that gentleman, as we have been informed by a survivor of the party, then a youthful boarder in the house, met Dr Johnson and Boswell, when the former was passing through Edinburgh on his journey to the Hebrides. To quote the words of our informant—"Several strangers had been invited on the occasion, (it was to breakfast;) and, amongst others, Dr Mackenzie, and his son, the late Mr Henry Mackenzie. These gentlemen went away before Dr Johnson; and Mrs Blacklock took the opportunity of pronouncing a panegyric upon the father and son, which she concluded by saying, that though Dr Mackenzie had a large family, and was married to a lady who was his son's step-mother, nevertheless the son lived with his own wife and family in the same house,[1] and the greatest harmony obtained among all the parties. On this Dr Johnson said, 'That's wrong, madam;' and stated a reason, which it were as well to leave unchronicled. This settled Mrs Blacklock's opinion of the doctor. Several years ago, on calling to remembrance the particulars of this breakfast with Mr Henry Mackenzie, he said there was another reason for Mrs Blacklock's dislike: she had filled no less than twenty-two cups of tea to Dr Johnson at this breakfast; which, I told Mr M., was too many, for Mrs Blacklock had appointed me to number them, and I made them only nineteen!"[2]
Some years after the publication of the Man of Feeling, Mr Mackenzie published his Man of the World, which was intended as a counterpart to the other. In his former fiction, he imagined a hero constantly obedient to every
- ↑ Their residence was in one of the floors of a tall house at the junction of the Cowgate and Grassmarket, either above or below a floor occupied by Mrs Syme, the maternal grandmother of Lord Brougham.
- ↑ Our correspondent's introduction to this anecdote may be deemed worthy of the reader's notice. "I was twice in company with Dr Johnson, when he came to Edinburgh, on his journey to the Hebrides. Being then a boarder in Dr Blacklock's, my request to be present at the breakfast given to Dr Johnson was readily granted. The impression which I then received of him can never be effaced; but it was not of an unpleasant nature. He did not appear to me to be that savage which some of my college companions had described him: on the contrary, there was much suavity and kindness in his manner and address to Dr Blacklock. The blind poet generally stood in company, rocking from one side to mother; he had remarkably small white hands, which Dr Johnson held in his great paws during the most part of the time they conversed together, caressing and stroking them, as he might have done those of a pretty child." It is necessary to mention, that the great moralist was, by Boswell's showing, in one of his gentlest moods on this occasion.
something which he had observed in nature."—Sir Walter Scott, in Ballantytie's Novelists' Library.
