mmunicative and frank as I could have wished.

Gray could not have requited him with such excess of admiration; but
continued during the rest of his life to regard Beattie with affection
and esteem.

It was not till the spring of this year, when his Judgment of Paris was
printed, that he again appeared before the public as an author. This
piece he inserted in the next edition of his poems, in 1766, but his
more mature judgment afterwards induced him to reject it. Some satirical
verses on the death of Churchill, at first published without his name,
underwent the same fate. The Wolf and the Shepherds, a Fable, and an
Epistle to the Rev. Mr. Thomas Blacklock, which appeared in the second
edition, he also discarded from those subsequently published. He now
projected and began the Minstrel, the most popular of his poems. Had the
original plan been adhered to, it would have embraced a much wider
scope.

In 1767, he married Mary, the daughter of Dr. Dun, rector of the Grammar
School at Aberdeen. This union was not productive of the happiness which
a long course of previous intimacy had entitled him to expect. The
object of his choice inherited from her mother a constitutional malady
which at first shewed itself in capricious waywardness, and at length
broke out into insanity.

From this misery he sought refuge in the exercise of his mind. His
residence at Aberdeen had brought him into the society of several among
his countrymen who were engaged in researches well suited to employ his
attention to its utmost stretch. Of these the names of Reid, author of
An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense--and
Campbell, Principal of Marischal College, author of An Essay on
Miracles, are the most distinguished. His own correspondence with his
friends about this time evinces deep concern at the progress of the
sceptical philosophy, diffused by the writings of Hobbes, Hume,
Mandeville, and even, in his opinion, of Locke and Berkeley. Conceiving
the study of metaphysics itself to be the origin of this mischief, in
order that the evil might be intercepted at its source, he proposed to
demonstrate the futility of that science, and to appeal to the common
sense and unsophisticated feelings of mankind, as the only infallible
criterion on subjects in which it had formerly been made the standard.
That his meaning was excellent, no one can doubt; whether he discovered
the right remedy for the harm which he was desirous of