Nicoll, ROBERT, minor Scottish poet, was born the son of a small struggling farmer at Little Tullybeltane, in the Perthshire parish of Auchtergaven, 7th January 1814. He was four years a grocer's apprentice at Perth, next opened a circulating library in Dundee, and here took to writing for the newspapers, and published a volume of Songs and Lyrics (1835). In 1836 he became editor at a salary of £100 of an ultra-radical weekly, the Lochs Times, but worked too zealously for his health, and gave himself his death-blow by his exertions in the victorious contest of Sir William Molesworth with Sir John Beckett in the summer of 1837. He went north for rest, only to die of consumption at Trinity, near Edinburgh, 7th December 1837. He was buried in North Leith Churchyard. Beyond a doubt Nicoll was a genuine poet, and moreover it must ever be remembered that he died at twenty-three. But it is far more from their intrinsic value than the mere pathos of his story that his countrymen remember such poems as 'We are Brethren a', 'Thoughts of Heaven,' and 'The Dew is on the Summer's Greenest Grass.'
See the Life by Mrs Johnstone, first prefixed to the 1842 edition of the poems; that prefixed to the Paisley edition (1877); and the somewhat uneretical life, by P. R. Drummond (published posthumously, 1884).