Born, at Keir, Dumfriesshire, 7 Dec. 1784. Educated at village school. Apprenticed to his brother James, stonemason, 1795. Wrote songs and verses. To London, April 1810. Obtained employment from sculptor. Employed on staff of “The Day” to write poetry and political reports. Married Jean Walker, 1 July 1811. Acted as secretary to Francis Chantrey, 1814–41. Worked at literature in spare time. Contributed to “Blackwood,” 1819–21; to “London Magazine;” to “The Popular Encyclopædia,” 1841. Edited “The Anniversary,” 1829–30. Presented with Freedom of Dumfries, 1831. Died, in London, 30 Oct. 1842. Buried at Kensal Green. Works: “Songs,” 1813; “Sir Marmaduke Maxwell, etc.,” 1822; “Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry,” 1822; “The Songs of Scotland,” 1825; “Paul Jones,” 1826; “Sir Michael Scott,” 1828; “The Lives of the most eminent British Painters, etc.,” 1829; “The Maid of Elvar,” 1833; “Biographical and Critical History of the British Literature of the last Fifty Years” (from “The Athenæum”), 1834; “The Cabinet Gallery of Pictures,” 1834; “Lord Roldan,” 1836. Posthumous: “The Life of Sir David Wilkie” (ed. by P. Cunningham), 1843; “Poems and Songs” (ed. by P. Cunningham), 1847. He edited: “Burns’ Works,” 1834; Pilkington’s “General Dictionary of Painters,” 1840; Thomson’s “The Seasons,” 1841. Life: by David Hogg, 1875.

Personal

  We breakfasted at honest Allan Cunningham’s—honest Allan—a real and true Scotsman of the old cast.

  Allan Cunningham was with us last night. Jane calls him a genuine Dumfriesshire mason still; and adds that it is delightful to see a genuine man of any sort. Allan was, as usual, full of Scottish anecdotic talk. Right by instinct; has no principles or creed that I can see, but excellent old Scottish habits of character. An interesting man.

  Allan has none of that proverbial Scottish caution about him; he is all heart together, without reserve either of expression or manner; you at once see the unaffected benevolence, warmth of feeling, and firm independence of a man conscious of his own rectitude and mental energies.

  He is a very tall, stout and rustic-looking person; and while we were conversing together I could not help scanning his bulky frame over, to see if I could discover the outward visible signs of the poet and painter. But with the exception of his eye, which is rather expressive, and of a dark hazel colour, there is little in his looks or demeanour which would indicate a first-rate literary man. His conversation, however, was very sensible, and he talks with ease, and without any of that studied and set manner which we see in some distinguished men, who always seem, when talking even to a single friend in private, as if they were delivering an harangue to a numerous audience. I should think Mr. Cunningham is a plain, honest, unassuming, and clever man, and well worthy of the reputation he at present enjoys in the periodical and lighter literature of the day.

  This very sudden news of poor Allan Cunningham’s death has both shocked and grieved me. I had a letter from him on Friday morning last—I suspect the last he wrote—it was in his old cordial, kindly tone, but evidently written by an invalid. So I sat me down on Saturday night, and wrote him a long epistle, urging him to come down to Lucy and me for a week, as I was quite in hopes a few days’ country air and quiet relaxation would do him good. I exerted all my powers of persuasion as eloquently as I could, of course to no purpose, for at the very time I was writing he was dying. And so I have lost my old favourite—him whom Charles Lamb used to call the “large-hearted Scott”—and a large and warm heart he had of his own.

  From the light of a November fire, I first saw reflected the dark flashing guerilla eye of Allan Cunningham. Dark it was, and deep with meaning; and the meaning, as in all cases of expressive eyes, was comprehensive, and therefore equivocal. On the whole, however, Allan Cunningham’s expression did not belie his character, as afterwards made known to me: he was kind, liberal, hospitable, friendly; and his whole natural disposition, as opposed to his acquired, was genial and fervent. But he had acquired feelings in which I, as an Englishman, was interested painfully. In particular, like so many Scotsmen of his original rank, he had a prejudice—or, perhaps, that is not the word: it was no feeling that he derived from experience—it was an old Scottish grudge: not a feeling that he indulged to his own private sensibilities, but to his national conscience—a prejudice against Englishmen. He loved, perhaps, this and that Englishman, Tom and Jack; but he hated us English as a body: it was in vain to deny it.

  He was a tall man, powerful of frame, and apparently of an iron constitution. Of a genial, kindly, courteous nature, these qualities gained for him not only esteem but affection, yet to the last he gave the idea of a man self-taught, or rather whose teacher was Nature; and his tongue, always when he warmed to a subject, smacked of the heather. There is a pile of granite reared over his grave in Kensal Green—granite from Aberdeen it is true—but it would seem more in keeping with the memory of Allan Cunningham if daisies grew where he was laid: or as his friend Theodore Martin wrote, in a noble poem that commemorated the burial of Campbell:

	“Better after-times should find him—
	To his rest in homage bound,
	Lying in the land that bore him, with its glories piled around.”

His admirable wife, the bonnie Jean of his earlier poems, rests by his side.

General

  A man of genius, besides, who only requires the tact of knowing when and where to stop, to attain the universal praise which ought to follow it. I look upon the alteration of “It’s hame and it’s hame,” and “A wet sheet and a flowing sea,” as among the best songs going. His prose has often admirable passages; but he is obscure, and overlays his meaning, which will not do now-a-days, when he who runs must read.

  Our author’s prose, consisting of a copious preface and critical notices, is both florid and pedantic; it continually aspires to the vicious affectation of poetry, and explains the most common sentiments by a host of illustrations and images, thus perpetually reminding us of the children’s play of “What is it like?” As a poet, his fame has long been established, and the few original pieces which he has introduced into the present collection have the ease and natural vivacity conspicuous in his former compositions.

  North—“Allan Cunningham’s ‘Lives of the Painters’—I know not which of the two volumes is best—are full of a fine and instructed enthusiasm. He speaks boldly, but reverentially, of genius, and of men of genius; strews his narrative with many flowers of poetry; disposes and arranges his materials skilfully; and is, in few words, an admirable critic on art—an admirable biographer of artists.”

  I was astonished at the luxuriousness of his fancy. It was boundless; but it was the luxury of a rich garden overrun with rampant weeds. He was likewise then a great mannerist in expression, and no man could mistake his verses for those of any other man. I remember seeing some imitations of Ossian by him, which I thought exceedingly good; and it struck me that the style of composition was peculiarly fitted for his vast and fervent imagination…. Mr. Cunningham’s style of poetry is greatly changed of late for the better. I have never seen any style improved so much. It is free of all that crudeness and mannerism that once marked it so decidedly. He is now uniformly lively, serious, descriptive, or pathetic, as he changes his subject; but formerly he jumbled all these together, as in a boiling caldron, and when once he began, it was impossible to calculate where or when he was going to end.

  Does not his name alone recall to your recollection many a sweet song that has thrilled the bosom of the village maiden with an emotion that a princess need not blush to own?

  Whether from defective opportunities (he had never, I believe, set his foot in Ayrshire), or a failure to apprehend and grapple with the difficulties of the subject, this honest-hearted writer seems to have also failed to produce a work [“Life of Burns”] which could leave nothing to be desired.

  He evidently puts his soul in all that he writes, and makes us feel because he feels first himself. Some of his smaller poems are perfect gems, and his dissertation upon the history and peculiarities of Scottish song exhibits a prose style of great clearness, eloquence and power.

  Under pretense of collecting a world of previously unknown local song from the well-gleaned land of Burns and Scott, the young man, finding in Cromek (who had more natural taste than reading or acumen) a good subject for the cheat, and a willing one, palmed off, as undoubted originals, a whole deskful of his own verse in slightly antique mould. Verse, it proved bold, energetic, and stirring, or tender, sentimental and graceful; the best of modern Scottish songs and ballads since those of the Ayrshire peasant, though wide the interval!

  The genius of Cunningham, unlike that of Hogg was essentially lyrical. It was incapable of continued flight, and was best evinced in the poetry of songs and ballads, where concentration was necessitated, as Allen did not know when to hold his hand. Scott classed “among the best songs going,” “The Wet Sheet and a Flowing Sea,” and the touching piece “It’s Hame, and it’s Hame,” which Mrs. Lockhart, his daughter, sang so charmingly. The magnificent ballad “Sir Roland Graeme” is one of the finest specimens of word-painting out of Homer,—full of dash, vigour, and energy. Then there are “The Mermaid of Galloway,”—which suggested to Hilton, the Royal Academician, a picture which once formed part of the collection of Sir John Fleming Leicester, “She’s gane to dwell in Heaven,” “Bonnie Lady Anne,” “The Lord’s Marie” and many others, which are, in their way, of the very highest order of merit. It is, indeed, upon these, and his contributions to Cromek’s Relics, that his reputation must rest.

  No more genuine Scot could be, either in his works or sentiments, than Allan Cunningham, “honest Allan,” one of those men, peasant-born and but barely educated, who, by dint of something which we must call genius, though not great enough to reach an exalted rank, have made their way out of the fields and workshops into the world of literature. Nothing but a spark of a divinity uncontrollable and subject to no laws, which, like the winds, goes “where it listeth,” could account for the appearance here and there of such a simple and stalwart figure, in regions so different from those which brought him forth. Allan Cunningham was all the more remarkable that he had not only brought out of a gardener’s cottage enough of the faculty of Song to find him a place in the poetic records of his country, but also out of the stonemason’s yard some perception of art which made him capable of becoming the trusty assistant and head workman of a great sculptor. His connection with Chantrey is still more remarkable than his connection with literature, for art exacts a harder apprenticeship than has ever been required for authorship.

  Cunningham began—following a taste very rife at the time—with imitated, or to speak plainly, forged ballads; but the merit of them deserved on true grounds the recognition it obtained on false, and he became a not inconsiderable man of letters of all work. His best known prose work is the “Lives of the Painters.” In verse he is ranked, as a song writer in Scots, by some next to Burns, and by few lower than Hogg. Some of his pieces, such as “Fair shines the sun in France,” have the real, the inexplicable, the irresistible song-gift.