Excerpt from The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer: With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes
James Beattie, the author of the "Minstrel" was born at Laurencekirk, in the county of Kincardineshire - a village situated in that beautiful trough of land called the Howe of the Mearns, and surmounted by the ridge of the Garvock Hills, which divide it from the German Ocean on the 25th day of October 1735. His father, who was a small farmer and shopkeeper, and who is said to have possessed a turn for literature and versifying, died when James was only seven years old; but his brother David, the eldest of a family of six, undertook the superintendence of his education till he was fit to go to the parish school. That school which had been raised to celebrity by Thomas Euddiraan, the grammarian, was now taught by one Milne, whom his pupil describes as also a good grammarian and an excellent Latin scholar, but destitute of taste, and of all the other qualifications of a teacher. Milne preferred Ovid to Virgil; but Beattie's taste, already giving promise of its future classical bent, was attracted by the less meretricious beauties of Virgil and this author, in Dryden's translation, as well as Milton's "Paradise Lost," and Thomson's "Seasons," were devoured with eagerness, and copied with emulation, by him in the intervals of his school hours. He was assisted in his studies by Mr Thomson, minister of the parish.
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