Motherwell, WILLIAM

Motherwell, WILLIAM, a Scottish poet and antiquary, was born in Glasgow, 13th October 1797, and educated in Edinburgh and at the grammar-school of Paisley, where, in his fifteenth year, he entered the office of the sheriff-clerk. At the age of twenty-one he was appointed sheriff-clerk depute of the county of Renfrew. In 1819 he published his first work, the Harp of Renfrew- shire, containing biographical notices of the poets of that district from the 16th to the 19th century. This work was but the prelude to one of far greater importance—his Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern (1827). In 1828 he commenced the Paisley Magazine, in which some of his finest original pieces first saw the light, and in the same year accepted the editorship of the Paisley Advertiser, a Conservative journal. In 1830 he became editor of the Glasgow Courier. In 1832 he published a collection of his best poems, entitled Poems Narrative and Lyrical. He died in Glasgow, November 1, 1835, at the early age of thirty-eight. Motherwell displays in his best moods (but only then) a rich, beautiful, and strong imagination, great warmth and tenderness of feeling, and a thorough knowledge of the technique of a poet. His Jeanie Morison is unsurpassed for the mingled pathos and picturesque beauty of its reminiscences of boyish love; and the little piece beginning, 'My heid is like to rend, Willie,' has seldom been read without tears. An enlarged edition of his poetical remains, with a memoir, was published in London in 1849.