was tinged with the enthusiastic melancholy of the Wartons, followed the
landscape manner of Thomson, had elegiac echoes of Gray, and was perhaps
not unaffected, in its love of mountain scenery, by MacPherson's
"Ossian." But it took its title and its theme from a hint in Percy's
"Essay on the Ancient Minstrels."[52] Beattie was Professor of Moral
Philosophy in the University of Aberdeen. He was an amiable, sensitive,
deeply religious man. He was fond of music and of nature, and was easily
moved to rears; had "a young girl's nerves," says Taine, "and an old
maid's hobbies." Gray, who met him in 1765, when on a visit to the Earl
of Strathmore at Glammis Castle, esteemed him highly. So did Dr.
Johnson, partly because of his "Essay on Truth" (1770), a shallow
invective against Hume, which gained its author an interview with George
III. and a pension of two hundred pounds a year. Beattie visited London
in 1771, and figured there as a champion of orthodoxy and a
heaven-inspired bard. Mrs. Montagu patronized him extensively. Sir
Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait, with his "Essay on Truth" under his
arm, and Truth itself in the background, an allegoric angel holding the
balances in one hand, and thrusting away with the other the figures of
Prejudice, Skepticism, and Folly. Old Lord Lyttelton had the poet out to
Hagley, and declared that he was Thomson come back to earth, to sing of
virtue and of the beauties of nature. Oxford made him an LL.D.: he was
urged to take orders in the Church of England; and Edinburgh offered him
the chair of Moral Philosophy. Beattie's head was slightly turned by all
this success, and he became something of a tuft-hunter. But he stuck
faithfully to Aberdeen, whose romantic neighborhood had first inspired
his muse. The biographers tell a pretty story of his teaching his little
boy to look for the hand of God in the universe, by sowing cress in a
garden plot in the shape of the child's initials and leading him by this
gently persuasive analogy to read design in the works of nature.

The design of "The Minstrel" is to "trace the progress of a Poetical
Genius, born in a rude age," a youthful shepherd who "lived in Gothic
days." But nothing less truly Gothic or medieval could easily be
imagined than the actual process of this young poet's education. Instead
of being taught to carve and ride and play the flute, like Chaucer's
squire who

"Cowde songes make and wel endite,
Just