Francis Pelsart, with which the histories in this volume begin.

John Pinkerton was born at Edinburgh in February, 1758, and died in Paris
in March, 1826, aged sixty-eight. He was the best classical scholar at
the Lanark grammar school; but his father, refusing to send him to a
university, bound him to Scottish law. He had a strong will, fortified
in some respects by a weak judgment. He wrote clever verse; at the age
of twenty-two he went to London to support himself by literature, began
by publishing "Rimes" of his own, and then Scottish Ballads, all issued
as ancient, but of which he afterwards admitted that fourteen out of the
seventy-three were wholly written by himself. John Pinkerton, whom Sir
Walter Scott described as "a man of considerable learning, and some
severity as well as acuteness of disposition," made clear conscience on
the matter in 1786, when he published two volumes of genuine old Scottish
Poems from the MS. collections of Sir Richard Maitland. He had added to
his credit as an antiquary by an Essay on Medals, and then applied his
studies to ancient Scottish History, producing learned books, in which he
bitterly abused the Celts. It was in 1802 that Pinkerton left England
for Paris, where he supported himself by indefatigable industry as a
writer during the last twenty-four years of his life. One of the most
useful of his many works was that _General Collection of the best and
most interesting Voyages and Travels of the World_, which appeared in
seventeen quarto volumes, with maps and engravings, in the years 1808-
1814. Pinkerton abridged and digested most of the travellers' records
given in this series, but always studied to retain the travellers' own
words, and his occasional comments have a value of their own.

H. M.