PINKERTON, John (1758-1826), archaeologist, numismatist, historian, geographer, and miscellaneous writer in prose and verse, was born at Edinburgh, February 17, 1758. After a brief education at Lanark he was articled as a law clerk in Edinburgh, his earliest work, printed during his clerkship, being an Elegy on Craigmillar Castle (1776). In 1780 he removed to London to devote himself to literary work, publishing in 1781 a volume of Rimes of no great merit, and a professed collection of Scottish Tragic Ballads. These were followed in 1782’by Two Dithyrambic Odes on Enthusiasm and Laughter, and by a series of Tales in Verse. Under the title of Select Scottish Ballads he reissued in 1783 his tragic ballads, with a supplement comprising Ballads of the Comic Kind,— a collection which obtained for him the not wholly appropriate title of “the second Chatterton.” An Essay on Medals in 1784 won him a considerable reputation, which was in some respects unpleasantly maintained by his bold but eccentric Letters on Literature published in 1785 under the pseudonym of Robert Heron—a temporary adoption of his mother’s surname. In the following year he edited the Ancient Scottish Poems from the MS. Collections of Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington,— a genuine reproduction, though his confession in the preface of forgery in the previous collections published by him brought groundless suspicion upon it. It was succeeded in 1787 by a compilation, under the new pseudonym of Bennet, entitled the Treasury of Wit, and by his first important historical work, the Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths, to which Gibbon professed himself indebted. Turning his attention to hagiology, Pinkerton next collected and printed in 1789 certain Vites Sanctorum ...