Tennant, WILLIAM

Tennant, WILLIAM, the author of Anster Fair, was born May 15, 1784, at Anstruther in Fife. A cripple almost from his birth, he naturally took to reading, and in 1799 went to the university of St Andrews, but was compelled to leave after two years to act as clerk to his brother, a corn-dealer. The business soon failed, and in 1813 Tennant was fain to accept the situation of parish schoolmaster at Dunino, near St Andrews, with a salary of £40 a year. The year before he had published his Anster Fair, a poem of much sprightliness and humour, notable as the first attempt to naturalise in our language the gay ottava rima of the Italians—soon after to be adopted with splendid success by Byron in his Beppo and Don Juan. A highly laudatory notice of the poem appeared in the Edinburgh Review in 1814, from the pen of the then omnipotent Jeffrey. In 1816 Tennant became a teacher at Lasswade near Edinburgh, whence three years later he was transferred to a mastership in Dollar Academy. His attainments as a linguist were extraordinary, and in 1835 he was appointed by the crown to the chair of Oriental Languages in the university of St Andrews. He died near Dollar, 15th February 1848. Tennant never equalled his first poem, although there was no little merit buried with the Thane of Fife (1822), Papistry Stormed (1827), and even the dramas of Cardinal Beaton (1823) and John Baliol (1825). See the memoir by Matthew Conolly (1861).