He could write almost on any topic, and at any time. As a proof of this, his biographer tells a good anecdote. "A gentleman in Edinburgh," he states, "once told him he wanted as much matter as would form a junction between a certain history and its continuance to a later period. He found Tytler lodged in one of those elevated apartments called garrets, and was informed by the old woman with whom he resided that he had gone to bed rather the worse for liquor. Determined, however, not to depart without fulfilling his errand, he was shown into Mr. Tytler's apartment by the light of a lamp, where he found him in the situation described by the landlady. The gentleman having acquainted him with the nature of the business which brought him at so late an hour, Mr. Tytler called for pen and ink, and in a short time produced about a page and a half of letterpress, which answered the end as completely as if it had been the result of the most mature deliberation, previous notice, and a mind undisturbed by any liquid capable of deranging its ideas." Tytler was a poet of some skill, and wrote a number of popular songs, three of which find a place in "The Celebrated Songs of Scotland." He enjoyed the friendship of Robert Burns. In 1792 he published a prospectus of a paper to be named the _Political Gazetteer_; when it came under the notice of Burns he wrote to him as follows:--"Go on, sir; lay bare with undaunted heart and steady hand that horrid mass of corruption called politics and state-craft." At the time he penned this he was an officer in the Excise, and for this and similar expressions he was rebuked by the Board of Excise. Burns described Tytler as an "obscene, tippling, but extraordinary body; a mortal who, though he drudges about Edinburgh with leaky shoes, a skylighted hat, yet that same drunken mortal is author and compiler of three-fourths of the 'Encyclopædia Britannica,' which he composed at half-a-guinea a week." We must, before dismissing Tytler, give another anecdote, although it does not relate to literature. We read that "he constructed a huge bag, and filled it full of gas, and invited the inhabitants of Edinburgh to witness his flight through the regions of space." Mr. Tytler, it appears, slowly rose in his bag as high as a garden wall, when something went wrong with the machinery, and he was deposited head foremost "softly on an adjoining dunghill." The "gaping crowd nearly killed themselves with laughter." He was afterwards known as "Balloon Tytler." He wrote a seditious placard, and had to flee to save his neck. He found a home in America, and for some time edited a paper at Salem. After a life of toil and trouble, he died in the year 1803.