possessed of a most imperturbable suavity of temper. His conversation
was of a playful cast, interspersed with anecdote, and free from every
affectation of learning. As a clergyman, Mr Skinner enjoyed the esteem
and veneration of his flock. Besides efficiently discharging his
ministerial duties, he practised gratuitously as a physician, having
qualified himself, by acquiring a competent acquaintance with the
healing art at the medical classes in Marischal College. His pulpit
duties were widely acceptable; but his discourses, though edifying and
instructive, were more the result of the promptitude of the preacher
than the effects of a painstaking preparation. He abandoned the aid of
the manuscript in the pulpit, on account of the untoward occurrence of
his notes being scattered by a startled fowl, in the early part of his
ministry, while he was addressing his people from the door of his house,
after the wanton destruction of his chapel.

In a scene less calculated to invite poetic inspiration no votary of the
muse had ever resided. On every side of his lonely dwelling extended a
wild uncultivated plain; nor for miles around did any other human
habitation relieve the monotony of this cheerless solitude. In her
gayest moods, Nature never wore a pleasing aspect in _Long-gate_, nor
did the distant prospect compensate for the dreary gloominess of the
surrounding landscape. For his poetic suggestions Mr Skinner was wholly
dependent on the singular activity of his fancy; as he derived his chief
happiness in his communings with an attached flock, and in the endearing
intercourse of his family. Of his children, who were somewhat numerous
he contrived to afford the whole, both sons and daughters, a superior
education; and he had the satisfaction, for a long period of years, to
address one of his sons as the bishop of his diocese.

The death of Mr Skinner's wife, in the year 1799, fifty-eight years