MACNEILL, Hector (1746-1818), a min∩r Scottish poet, born near Roslin, October 22, 1746, died at Edinburgh, March 15, 1818. The son of an impoverished army captain, he spent several years of his boyhood on a farm which his father had taken on the banks of Loch Lomond, and was sent to Bristol at the age of fourteen to enter on a mercantile career. Soon afterwards he was despatched to the West Indies, where he remained many years without ever enjoying even a moderate prosperity. When about forty he returned to Scotland with the intention of devoting himself to a literary life, but his ill fortune still pursued him, and he was obliged to go back to Jamaica. The kindness of two friends enabled him soon to come home again to Scotland, and on the journey he finished The Harp, a Legendary Tale, published at Edinburgh in 1789. After six years spent at Edinburgh.
rendered miserable by shattered health and depressed spirits, he retired to the house of a friend at Stirling, where he wrote most of his songs and his Scotland's Skaith, or the History of Will and Jean, a narrative poem intended to show the deteriorating influences of whisky and pothouse politics, which appeared in 1795, and at once made its author popular, having passed through fourteen editions within the year. A sequel, The Ways of War, appeared next year, and in 1799 The Links of Forth, or a Parting Peep at The Carse of Stirling, a somewhat feeble descriptive poem, intended as a parting tribute to his kind host before his own departure for Jamaica. Not long after his arrival an early friend settled on him an annuity of £100, which enabled the poet to return soon afterwards to Scotland, and so close his long struggle against adversity with fifteen years of comparative comfort at Edinburgh....
In 1800 he published The Memoirs of Charles Macpherson, Esq., a novel understood to be a close narrative of his own hardships and adventures. His later works, which added little to his fame, were —The Pastoral or Lyric Muse of Scotland, 1809; two anonymous works in verse entitled Town Fashions, or Modern Manners Delineated, and Byegone Times and Latecome Changes, and The Scottish Adventurers, a novel. He left behind an autobiography still unpublished, but of which an abstract appeared in Blackwood's Magazine for December 1818. A complete edition of the poems he wished to own appeared in 1812, and it is on these that his fame will rest. His songs, “Mary of Castlecary,” “Come under my plaidy,” “My boy, Tammy,” “O tell me how for to woo,” “I lo’ed ne’er a lassie but ane,” “The plaid amang the hether,” and “Jeanie’s black e’e,” will live, spite of Allan Cunningham, for their sweetness and simplicity, while his Will and Jean, quite apart from its excellent intention and tendency, will maintain a place among the most characteristic productions of the Doric Muse in Scotland.
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