Bruce, Michael

Bruce, Michael, Scottish poet, was born 27th March 1746, at Kinnesswood, near the eastern shore of Loch Leven. A weaver's son, he tended sheep in his boyhood, but in 1762 was sent to Edinburgh University to study for the ministry. He had all his life to struggle with poverty; and after he left the university in 1765, and settled as a schoolmaster, first at Gairney Bridge, then near Tillicoultry, to poverty were added sickness and melancholy. He died of consumption, 5th July 1767, aged twenty-one. His tender and pathetic Poems on Several Occasions, seventeen in number, were published by the Rev. John Logan, his college friend, in 1770. The authorship of the Ode to the Cuckoo, and of some of his hymns, has proved a vexed question of literary controversy, Logan having been charged with appropriating poems by Bruce, and publishing them as his own. Logan's claim is defended by David Laing and J. Small (1873-78), Bruce's by Grosart (1865-86). See the Life of Bruce by Mackelvie (1837).