Aird

Aird, THOMAS, minor poet, was born at Bowden, Roxburghshire, in 1802, and in 1816 passed from the parish school to the university of Edinburgh. There he made Carlyle's acquaintance; whilst, as tutor in the family of a Selkirkshire farmer, he often met Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. He was destined for the church, but preferred to devote himself to letters, and in 1826 published Martzouffe, a Tragedy, with other Poems; in 1827, Religious Characteristics, a series of prose essays which Professor Wilson eulogised in Blackwood's Magazine. From 1835 till 1863 Aird edited the Dumfries Herald, a new Conservative journal. The Devil's Dream, his best-known poem, has a Landoresque, if not Dantesque grandeur; but Aird's poetry has never become popular. Whether the themes are colossal, as in The Devil's Dream, or pathetic, as in My Mother's Grave, there is the same clear, vigorous, picturesque word-painting. In 1845 appeared his Old Bachelor in the Scottish Village, a volume of tales and sketches; in 1848, a collected edition of his poems; and in 1852 he edited the select poems of David Moir ('Delta'). Aird died at Dumfries, 25th April 1876. See the Life by J. Wallace, prefixed to the fifth edition of his poems (1878).