MACKAY, CHARLES (1814-1889).—­Poet and journalist, s. of a naval officer, was b. at Perth, and ed. at the Royal Caledonian Asylum, London, and at Brussels, but much of his early life was spent in France.  Coming to London in 1834, he engaged in journalism, pub. Songs and Poems (1834), wrote a History of London, Popular Delusions, and a romance, Longbeard.  His fame, however, chiefly rests upon his songs, some of which, including Cheer, Boys, Cheer, were in 1846 set to music by Henry Russell, and had an astonishing popularity.  In 1852 he became ed. of the Illustrated London News, in the musical supplement to which other songs by him were set to old English music by Sir H.R.  Bishop.  M. acted as Times correspondent during the American Civil War, and in that capacity discovered and disclosed the Fenian conspiracy.  He had the degree of LL.D. from Glasgow in 1846.

MACKENZIE, SIR GEORGE (1636-1691).—­Lawyer and miscellaneous writer, s. of Sir Simon M., of Lochslin, a brother of the Earl of Seaforth, was ed. at St. Andrews, Aberdeen, and Bourges, called to the Bar in 1659, in 1677 became Lord Advocate, in which capacity he was the subservient minister of the persecuting policy of Charles II. in Scotland, and the inhumanity and relentlessness of his persecution of the Covenanters gained for him the name of “Bloody Mackenzie.”  In private life, however, he was a cultivated and learned gentleman with literary tendencies, and is remembered as the author of various graceful essays, of which the best known is A Moral Essay preferring Solitude to Public Employment (1665).  He also wrote legal, political, and antiquarian works of value, including Institutions of the Law of Scotland (1684), Antiquity of the Royal Line of Scotland (1686), Heraldry, and Memoirs of the Affairs of Scotland from the Restoration of Charles II., a valuable work which was not pub. until 1821.  M. was the founder of the Advocates’ Library in Edin.  He retired at the Revolution to Oxf., where he d.

MACKENZIE, HENRY (1745-1831).—­Novelist and miscellaneous writer, s. of a physician in Edin., where he was b. and ed. He studied for the law, and became Controller of Taxes for Scotland.  He was the author of three novels, The Man of Feeling (1771), The Man of the World (1773), and Julia de Roubigne (1777), all written in a strain of rather high-wrought sentimentalism, in which the influence of Sterne is to be seen.  He was also a leading contributor to The Mirror and The Lounger, two periodicals somewhat in the style of the Spectator.  In his later days he was one of the leading members of the literary society of Edinburgh.