This may be as fit a place as any to introduce some mention of “The Minstrel, or the Progress of Genius,” by James Beattie; a poem once widely popular, in which several strands of romantic influence are seen twisted together.  The first book was published in 1771, the second in 1774, and the work was never completed.  It was in the Spenserian stanza, 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,
    Juste and eek daunce, and wel purtraye and write,”