Blackie

Blackie, JOHN STUART, a versatile writer, born in Glasgow in 1809, was educated at Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and in 1829 went to the Continent, where he continued his studies at Göttingen and Berlin, and afterwards at Rome. In 1834 he published a good metrical translation of Goethe's Faust, and in the same year passed as advocate at the Edinburgh bar. But the practice of his profession failed to wean him from literary pursuits, and he soon began to make himself known by his articles on German subjects contributed to the magazines of the time. In 1841 he was appointed to the chair of Humanity in Marischal College, Aberdeen, which he held until 1852, when he was elected to the Greek chair in the university of Edinburgh. After he became professor he took an active part in promoting educational reform, and in the movement that led in 1859 to the remodelling of the Scottish universities. His incessant activity in lecturing and writing letters to the newspapers showed his marvellous vitality and the breadth of his sympathies. He always figured as the patriotic champion of Scottish nationality and its characteristic features, and advocated with equal ardour the preservation of things as dissimilar as old south-country customs and the Gaelic language. During the years 1874-76 he advocated throughout the country with great enthusiasm the found- ation of a Celtic chair in Edinburgh University, and was successful in raising upwards of £12,000 for its endowment. He resigned his chair in 1882 to become a kind of peripatetic philosopher, expounding throughout Scotland alternately wit and wisdom, and the inalienable rights of the Highland crofter. He published a fine verse translation of Æschylus in 1850, another of the Iliad in ballad metre in 1866, as well as several volumes of verse. His prose works embrace moral and religious philosophy, the method of history, the land laws, and a short life of Burns (1888). His principal philological papers were collected in Horæ Hellenicæ (1874). He died 2d March 1895. See the Life by Miss Stoddart (1895), and the shorter sketch by his nephew (1896).