Transcribed from the 1886 Cassell & Company edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org [Picture: Book cover] CASSELL’S NATIONAL LIBRARY * * * * * THE MAN OF FEELING BY HENRY MACKENZIE. [Picture: Decorative graphic] CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED: _LONDON_, _PARIS_, _NEW YORK & MELBOURNE_. 1886. 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 Roubigné.” 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 _The Lounger_, which lasted from February, 1785, to January, 1787. Henry Mackenzie contributed forty-two papers to _The Mirror_ and fifty-seven to _The Lounger_. When the Royal Society of Edinburgh was founded Henry Mackenzie was active as one of its first members. He was also one of the founders of the Highland Society.