Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 6.djvu/143

Rh 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, 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!"

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