Sharpe, CHARLES KIRKPATRICK, virtuoso, was born at Hoddam Castle, Dumfriesshire, 15th May 1781, and in 1798 entered Christ Church College, Oxford, where he graduated B.A. in 1802. In 1813 he fixed his bachelor home in Edinburgh (No. 93 Princes Street), and here he died in March 1851. A Scottish Horace Walpole (with a difference), he was a great collector of pictures and curios, was a clever versifier and a clever draughtsman, wrote for the Anti-Jacobin, contributed two original ballads to the third volume of Scott's Minstrelsy, and edited several club-books, but is chiefly remembered nowadays by his immense correspondence, two big volumes of which have been edited by Alexander Allardyce (Edin. 1888).
See the Memoirs prefixed thereto and to his Etchings and Prose Fragments (Edin. 1869), and a third in Mark Napier's Memoirs of Montrose (4th ed. 1856).