Pinkerton, JOHN

Pinkerton, JOHN, an acrid little book-maker, was born at Edinburgh, 17th February 1758, and after six years' schooling at Lanark, and five years' irksome apprenticeship to a W.S., in 1780 settled in London as a man of letters, in 1802 in Paris, where he died in indigent circumstances, 10th May 1826. His twenty-four works and compilations include some pseudo-archaic 'rimes,' ballads, &c.; Essay on Medals (1784); Letters on Literature (1785), marked chiefly by a novel system of inflection and orthography, but were the means of introducing him to Walpole and Gibbon; Ancient Scottish Poems from the MS. Collections of Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington (1786); Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths (1787), in which he first fell foul of the whole Celtic race; Inquiry into the History of Scotland preceding the Reign of Malcolm III. (1790); Iconographia Scotica (1795-97); History of Scotland from the Accession of the Stuarts to that of Mary (1797); Walpoliana (1799); Modern Geography (1802-1807); Voyages and Travels (16 vols. 1808-13); New Modern Atlas (1809-15); and Petralogy, or a Treatise on Rocks (1811). See his Literary Correspondence (2 vols. 1830).