Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 6.djvu/144

511 emotion of his moral sense. In the Man of the World, he exhibited, on the contrary, a person rushing headlong into misery and ruin, and spreading misery all around him, by pursuing a happiness which he expected to obtain in defiance of the moral sense. His next production was Julia de Roubigné, a novel in a series of letters, designed, in its turn, as a counterpart to the Man of the World. " A friend of the author," says Sir Walter Scott, "the celebrated Lord Kames, we believe, had represented to Mr Mackenzie, in how many poems, plays, and novels, the distress of the piece is made to turn upon the designing villany of some one of the dramatis personæ. On considering his observations, the author undertook, as a task fit for his genius, the composition of a story, in which the characters should be all naturally virtuous, and where the calamities of the catastrophe should arise, as frequently happens in actual life, not out of schemes of premeditated villany, but from the excess and over-indulgence of passions and feelings in themselves blameless, nay, praiseworthy, but which, encouraged to a morbid excess, and coming into fatal and fortuitous concourse with each other, lead to the most disastrous consequences. Mr Mackenzie executed his purpose; and as the plan fell in most happily with the views of a writer, whose object was less to describe external objects, than to read a lesson to the human heart, he has produced one of the most heart-wringing histories which has ever been written. The very circumstances which palliate the errors of the sufferers, in whose distress we interest ourselves, point out to the reader that there is neither hope, remedy, nor revenge."

In 1777 or 1778, a number of young men of literary taste, chiefly connected with the Scottish bar, formed themselves into an association for the prosecution of their favourite studies, which came to bear the name of the Mirror Club. An account of this fraternity, of its members, and of the way in which they conducted their meetings, has already been given under the article "," being derived from the oral information of Sir William Macleod Bannatyne, the latest survivor of the society. Of the Mirror Club, Mr Mackenzie was readily acknowledged chief; and, accordingly, when it was resolved to issue their literary essays in a small weekly paper, resembling the Spectator, he was appointed to undertake the duties connected with the publication. The Mirror was commenced on the 23d of January, 1779, in the shape of a small folio sheet, price three halfpence, and terminated on the 27th of May, 1780; having latterly been issued twice a-week. Of the one hundred and ten papers to which the Mirror extended, forty-two were contributed by Mr Mackenzie, including La Roche, and several others of the most admired of his minor pieces. The sale, during the progress of the publication, never ex-