Pringle, THOMAS

Pringle, THOMAS, minor poet, was born at Blaiklaw (near Kelso), Roxburghshire, 5th January 1789. Lame from childhood, dyspeptic, devont, he went at seventeen to Edinburgh University, and found bread if not contentment of mind as clerk in the Scottish Public Records Office. He took to writing at an early age, and, besides other literary schemes and ventures, started the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, the parent of Blackwood, in which his own most important article was on the Gypsies, from notes supplied by Scott. In 1820 he set sail with a party of twenty-four emigrants of his father's family for Cape Colony. He travelled into the interior with the party, and had his heart stirred within him to see the inhumanity practised towards the natives by English and Dutch residents alike. For three years he lived at Capetown as librarian of the government library at a salary of £75 a year. He started the South African Journal, and fought a brave fight for the freedom of the press. But he bullied by the tyrannical and petty-minded governor of the day, Lord Charles Somerset, his schemes crushed, and himself reduced to poverty. He returned to London in 1826, and became secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. He died in London, 5th December 1834. His Ephemerides (1828) was a collection of graceful verse. Those poems that related to South Africa—the best 'Afari in the Desert'—were reprinted in the volume of African Sketches (1834), a series of glowing sketches of South African scenery. Pringle's Poetical Works were edited, with a florid enlogium, rather than a life, by Leitch Ritchie (1839).