Henry Duncan, who was the son of a Dumfriesshire clergyman, was born at Lochrutton manse, in that county, in the year 1774. At the age of twenty-five he too was ordained a clergyman, and appointed to the charge of the parish of Ruthwell, a remote locality in the same county. When very young, it is said, he showed remarkable powers of mind; and it appears he early exercised them in writing for the young, with whom he was an especial favourite. Before he was thirty he had made great progress in geology, and a book he published on the subject when he was about that age gained him the friendship of Dr. Buckland and Mr. Sedgwick. Perhaps, however, he showed most zeal during all the periods of his life in the prosecution of schemes for the benefit of the poor and distressed around him; and his manse in this way, lonely as it was, and far from the busy haunts of men, soon became a place of resort to much of the young and remarkable talent to be found in that part of Scotland. David Brewster, and James Grahame, the Sabbath bard, Dr. Chalmers, and Dr. Andrew Johnson, were frequent visitors beneath his roof; Robert Owen, then an amiable enthusiast in the walks of philanthropy; Thomas Carlyle, a young man who had not then emerged to fame; Robert McCheyne, and many others who subsequently rose to eminence, were friends of the village pastor, and frequently met to talk over with him different schemes of practical benevolence. "Few, indeed," says his biographer, "whose lot has been cast in a retired spot like that of Ruthwell, have been more fortunate in attaching the affection and good-will of so many of the best class of their fellow men," and the boast is neither an idle nor a vain one. Mr. Duncan must have been no ordinary man to have brought round him such a circle of friends. His literary abilities were of no mean order, but gave a charm to all he wrote. Delighting in humble usefulness, he edited, in 1809 and 1810, a number of Tracts for the instruction and moral improvement of "the lower orders," to use the vulgar term then in constant use. The greater part of the work seems to have been the production of his own pen. One series of these Tracts, called "The Cottage Fireside; or, The Parish Schoolmaster," was afterwards published separately with Duncan's name attached, and had a very large sale at the time. "In point of genuine humour and pathos," says a high authority of that period,[19] "we are inclined to think it fairly merits a place by the side of 'The Cottagers of Glenburnie;' while the knowledge it displays of Scottish manners and character is more correct and more profound." Whether the plans which he laid for the benefit of the poor, and which occupied so much of his after life, came up at any of the _réunions_ at his house, we have no means of knowing. However it was, we have Mr. Duncan's own statements to show that they were originated in his mind by the frequent discussion at