Transcribed from the 1886 Cassell & Company edition byDavid Price,
CASSELL’S NATIONALLIBRARY
THE
Man Of Feeling
BY
HENRY MACKENZIE.
CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited:
LONDON,PARIS, NEW YORK& MELBOURNE.
1886.
p.iiiEDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
Henry Mackenzie, the son of anEdinburgh physician, was born in August, 1745. Aftereducation in the University of Edinburgh he went to London in1765, at the age of twenty, for law studies, returned toEdinburgh, and became Crown Attorney in the Scottish Court ofExchequer. When Mackenzie was in London, Sterne’s“Tristram Shandy” was in course of publication. The first two volumes had appeared in 1759, and the ninthappeared in 1767, followed in 1768, the year of Sterne’sdeath, by “The Sentimental Journey.” YoungMackenzie had a strong bent towards literature, and whilestudying law in London, he read Sterne, and falling in with thetone of sentiment which Sterne himself caught from the spirit ofthe time and the example of Rousseau, he wrote “The Man ofFeeling.” This book was published, withoutauthor’s name, in 1771. It was so p. ivpopular thata young clergyman made a copy of it popular with imaginedpassages of erasure and correction, on the strength of which heclaimed to be its author, and obliged Henry Mackenzie to declarehimself. In 1773 Mackenzie published a second novel,“The Man of the World,” and in 1777 a third,“Julia de Roubigné.” An essay-readingsociety in Edinburgh, of which he was a leader, started inJanuary, 1779, a weekly paper called The Mirror, which heedited until May, 1780. Its writers afterwards joined inproducing The Lounger, which lasted from February, 1785,to January, 1787. Henry Mackenzie contributed forty-twopapers to The Mirror and fifty-seven to TheLounger. When the Royal Society of Edinburgh wasfounded Henry Mackenzie was active as one of its firstmembers. He was also one of the founders of the HighlandSociety.
Although his “Man of Feeling” was a seriousreflection of the false sentiment of the Revolution, Mackenziejoined afterwards in writing tracts to dissuade the people fromfaith in the doctrines of the Revolutionists. Mackenziewrote also a tragedy, “The Prince of Tunis,” whichwas acted with success at Edinburgh, and a comedy, “The p. vWhiteHypocrite,” which was acted once only at Coventgarden. He died at the age of eighty-six, on the 13th June,1831, having for many years been regarded as an elder friend oftheir own craft by the men of le