THE MAN OF FEELING




EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION



Henry Mackenzie, the son of an Edinburgh physician, was born in
August, 1745. After education in the University of Edinburgh he
went to London in 1765, at the age of twenty, for law studies,
returned to Edinburgh, and became Crown Attorney in the Scottish
Court of Exchequer. When Mackenzie was in London, Sterne's
"Tristram Shandy" was in course of publication. The first two
volumes had appeared in 1759, and the ninth appeared in 1767,
followed in 1768, the year of Sterne's death, by "The Sentimental
Journey." Young Mackenzie had a strong bent towards literature, and
while studying law in London, he read Sterne, and falling in with
the tone of sentiment which Sterne himself caught from the spirit of
the time and the example of Rousseau, he wrote "The Man of Feeling."
This book was published, without author's name, in 1771. It was so
popular that a young clergyman made a copy of it popular with
imagined passages of erasure and correction, on the strength of
which he claimed to be its author, and obliged Henry Mackenzie to
declare himself. In 1773 Mackenzie published a second novel, "The
Man of the World," and in 1777 a third, "Julia de Roubigne." An
essay-reading society in Edinburgh, of which he was a leader,
started in January, 1779, a weekly paper called The Mirror, which he
edited until May, 1780. Its writers afterwards joined in producing