MACKENZIE, Sir George (1636-1691), of Rosehaugh, knight, a prominent Scottish lawyer, was the grandson of Kenneth, first Lord Mackenzie of Kintail, and the nephew of Colin and George, first and second earls of Seaforth; his mother was a daughter of Dr Andrew Bruce, principal of St Leonard’s College, St Andrews. He was born at Dundee in 1636, and, having passed through the grammar school there, was sent at an early age to college at Aberdeen, and afterwards at St Andrews, graduating at sixteen. He then engaged for three years in the study of the civil law at Bourges; on his return to Scotland he was called to the bar in 1656, and before the Restoration had risen into considerable practice. Immediately after the Restoration he was appointed a “justice-depute,” and it is recorded that he and his colleagues in that office were ordained by the parliament in 1661 “to repair, once in the week at least, to Musselburgh and Dalkeith, and to try and judge such persons as are there or thereabouts delate of witchcraft.” In the same year he acted as counsel for the marquis of Argyll; soon afterwards he was knighted, and he represented the county of Ross during the four sessions of the parliament which was called in 1669. He succeeded Sir John Nisbet as king’s advocate in August 1677, and in the discharge of this office became implicated in all the worst acts of the Scottish administration of Charles II., earning for himself an unenviable distinction as “the bloody Mackenzie.” His refusal to concur in the measures for dispensing with the penal laws against Catholics led to his removal from office in 1686, but he was reinstated in February 1688. At the Revolution, being a member of convention, he was one of the minority of five in the division on the forfeiture of the crown. King William was urged to declare him incapacitated for holding any public office, but refused to accede to the proposal. When the death of Dundee (September 1689) had finally destroyed the hopes of his party in Scotland, Mackenzie betook himself to Oxford, where, admitted a student by a grace passed on June 2, 1690, he was allowed to spend the rest of his days in the enjoyment of the ample fortune he had acquired, and in the prosecution of his literary labours. One of his last acts before leaving Edinburgh had been to pronounce (March 15, 1689), as dean of the faculty of advocates, the inaugural oration at the foundation of the Advocates’ Library. He died at Westminster on May 8, 1691, and was buried in Greyfriars churchyard, Edinburgh.

While still a young man Sir George Mackenzie appears to have aspired to eminence in the domain of pure literature, his earliest publication having been Aretina, or a Serious Romance (anon., 1660); it was followed, also anonymously, by Religio Stoici, a Short Discourse upon several Divine and Moral Subjects (1663), A Moral Essay, preferring Solitude to Public Employment (1665), and one or two other disquisitions of a similar nature. None of these earlier efforts are now read, if they ever were; and perhaps Mackenzie’s strongest claim to be remembered at all in connexion with belles lettres is that which rests upon Dryden’s grateful reminiscence of some stimulating conversation held with “that noble wit of Scotland, Sir George Mackenzie,” aboutl673. (See Dryden’s “Discourse on the Origin and Progress of Satire,” prefixed to his Juvenal in 1693.) His most important legal works are entitled A Discourse upon the Lawsand Customs of Scotland in Matters Criminal (1678), Observations upon the Laws and Customs of Nations as to Precedency, with the Science of Heraldry (1680), Institutions of the Law of Scotland (1684), and Observations upon the Acts of Parliament (1686); of these the last-named is the most important, the Institutions being completely overshadowed by the similar work of his great contemporary Stair. In his Jus Regium ; or the Just and Solid Foundations of Monarchy in general, and more especially of the Monarchy of Scotland, maintained (1684), Mackenzie appears as an uncompromising advocate of the highest doctrines of prerogative. His Vindication of the Government of Scotland during the reign of Charles II. is valuable as a piece of contemporary history. The collected Works were published at Edinburgh (2 vols, f>>l.) in 1716-22; and Memoirs of the Affairs of Scotland from the Restoration of King Charles 11., from previously unpublished MSS., in 1821. It may be well to add that the subject of this notice must not be confounded with Dr George Mackenzie, the author of Lives and Characters of the Most Eminent Writers of the Scots Nation (1708-22).

MACKENZIE, Henry (1745-1831), was born at Edinburgh in August 1745. His father was Dr Joshua or Josiah Mackenzie, a successful physician, who also cultivated letters in a small way. Mackenzie got the ordinary education of a youth in his position at the high school and university of Edinburgh, and was afterwards articled to Mr Inglis, who was then attorney for the crown in the management of exchequer affairs. To this comfortable post the author in due time succeeded, and perhaps knew as little as any of that tribe ever did about the struggles and sorrows of a literary career. For his work’s sake it would have been better if he had travelled some of life’s rougher paths, or else been content to write about what he had actually seen in the Scottish world of that day. There was plenty of material there if he had had the open eye to see it, as "Walter Scott showed by and by; and it is a pity that Mackenzie did not try his hand at it, having been more in the heart of it than Scott could ever have been. As it is, his stories are clearly not the fruit of his experience, but rather the echo of his reading. He could write graceful enough sentences, somewhat artificial, yet smooth and pointed; but the men he describes are mere shadows, and the life altogether unreal. His first and best-known work, The Man of Feeling, was published anonymously when he was only twenty-six years of age, and soon became highly popular. It was a droughty season in Scottish literature, and therefore any little blossom, however sickly, was welcome for its rarity. Hume and Robertson and Smith had left the scene; Burns was just learning to think of the daisy he turned up with his ploughshare, and Fergusson had lately closed his brief and troubled career. Mackenzie had the field all to himself, and got the attention which is given to a solitary figure. He had read the Sentimental Journey, as one can see from expressions here and there, as well as from the affectation of writing his story in a fragmentary form; but he had not a gleam of Sterne’s humour to relieve the sentimentality. He had read Richardson too, but he had none of that writer’s subtle insight into character. Perhaps Goldsmith was his real model, but the likeness was as that between a firefly and a star. The “man of feeling” is a weak foolish creature, possessed with a futile benevolence, who goes up to London, where his friends should never have let him go, and meets a variety of sharpers, and comes out of their hands pretty much as Goldsmith makes the vicar’s son do, only without the fun that clings to poor Moses. For this book is all in one key, sentimental and lachrymose, and the hero dies at last, from no particular cause, in a highly tragic fashion beside his fainting mistress. His next work, The Man of the World, is the picture of a born villain, a rogue in grain, who begins his rascality at school, perhaps earlier, and carries it through with entire consistency to the end. The man is unnaturally bad, and the incidents are badly unnatural; and such a book at present would only find a place in some third-rate penny paper, if even there. Julia de Roubigηe, his only other novelette, was meant to depict the misfortunes of a number of quite blameless people—to be, in short, a tragedy without a villain, an Othello without an Iago. But, as it has no insight, and does not even try to have any insight, into the mystery of such’ calamities, the result is insipid and tedious. All these works had great popularity in their day; but that day is long past, and what life they now have is only a tradition.

Mackenzie also wrote several dramas, mostly of the tragic sort, for in that tone he had won his successes, such as they were. But one who had no conception of distinct character, of human individuality, was not likely to succeed in the drama, which depends more on that than on anything; and hence it was not our author’s good fortune to deliver his country from the stigma of never having produced a genuine tragedy. Of The Spanish Father, The Prince of Tunis, and The Shipwreck, the second was brought on the stage, and managed to live for six nights; the other two were stillborn, and probably no man living·has ever read them, unless for purely critical purposes.

But Mackenzie, if nowise a great writer, but quite otherwise essentially a small writer, with a knack of making sentences indeed, but having nothing particular of his own to say, was not therefore altogether a useless man in his day. That he did well for himself, and perhaps for the exchequer too, is quite likely, even though he toiled in the high-Tory service of Dundas, and wrote tracts meant to “broom” out of the country the tide of French Revolutionary notions. At any rate he became in his old age a kind of literary centre and social power in Edinburgh, when that was really needed and useful. He had known John Home and blind Dr Blacklock, and wrote lives of them; but, what is of more consequence, he was among the first to recognize the genius of Robert Burns, as editor of The Lounger, which he and a group of young men with some literary tastes wrote and printed for some years. Yet, though he once breakfasted with Johnson, and certainly met Burns more than once, he has told us nothing about either of them, though a page of Burns’s talk would have been worth all The Man of Feeling twice told. It was so far good, however, that he hailed the peasant poet cordially, which we could hardly have hoped so artificial a writer would do, and even better that he noticed the dawn of German literature when Lessing and Schiller rose above the horizon, and not only wrote some account of them, taken from French sources, but boldly set to the study of German that he might really know them at first hand. How far he went in that study we do not know, only he set young Walter Scott on the scent, with results such as he himself could never have imagined. So he lived on, a kind of small king in the Edinburgh literary world, till 1831, dying in his eighty-sixth year, with a wonderful new world around him, which had not yet begun to criticize, but only to admire and honour him.