George Mackenzie, nephew to the Earl of Seaforth, and grandson to Dr. Bruce, principal of St. Leonard’s College, St. Andrews, was born at Dundee in 1636. He studied at Scottish and French Universities, and was called to the bar in 1656. He published “Aretina,” an original “heroic” romance, in 1660, and in the following year was engaged in his first famous pleading, the defence of the Marquis of Argyll. Knighted and made King’s advocate in 1674, he became notorious with the Covenanters as “the bloodthirsty advocate and persecutor of the saints of God,” a reputation which still clings to his name in Scotland although his conduct in his hated office was upright and even humane. He spent the leisure snatched from his legal duties in writing sundry moral essays on religion, solitude, moral gallantry, and the like; wherein, it may be said, the lawyer pleads for his clients the scholar, the gentleman, and the pedant. On the accession of James II. and the abrogation of the penal laws against the Catholics, he resigned his office, and was induced to re-accept it only to resign it for good when the Revolution, which he opposed, became an accomplished fact. He retired to the scholarly solitude that he loved at Oxford, and died on a visit to London in 1691. He was buried in the churchyard of the Greyfriars, Edinburgh, where his tomb is still noted by the populace, although De Quincey’s is forgotten. Almost all his works, except “Aretina,” are included in the two vol. folio edition, Edinburgh, 1722.

Personal

  The memory of that “noble wit of Scotland” is far from being honoured—nay, it is execrated by his countrymen—by the common people we mean—and, in the long run, they are no bad judges of merit. He was, we believe, no great shakes as a lawyer, either within or without the bar; and, like many other well-born, weak-minded men, had a taste for elegant literature and vulgar blood. Of his “voluminous works, historical and juridical,” we know less than nothing; but his “Essays on several moral subjects,” have more than once fallen out of our hands.

  Sir George Mackenzie’s tomb in the Greyfriars churchyard of Edinburgh is a gloomy structure of stone, erected by him in his lifetime, surmounted by a ponderous cupola, and shut in by a massive door, locked and barred. At the present day, as for generations back, the boys of the old town of Edinburgh (those of them especially whose parents are connected with the moorland districts of Scotland), hold it a feat of daring to go to the persecutor’s tomb as the gloaming darkens into night, and with trembling lips and feet prepared for instant flight, to shout through the key-hole the quaint and horrible adjuration—

	“Lift the sneck and draw the bar,
	Bluidy Mackenyie, come out an ye daur!”

Now who was this man, buried for centuries under the execration of a whole people? He was, as a political adversary, but a wise judge and a most candid contemporary observer, confessed, “the brightest Scotsman of his time.” Even Dryden, at the summit of his fame, avowed that his poetic efforts and successes were originated by the conversation of “that noble wit of Scotland, Sir George Mackenzie.” He was an eminent lawyer, in the great age of the lawyers of a nation which has always been governed by its lawyers; and his institutional works are to this day of high authority in the jurisprudence of Scotland. He was not only a lawyer, but a reformer of the law, and he claims, with justice, that the changes in its administration which he procured were in the direction of protecting the rights of the subject and of the accused against the influence of the Crown and the Bench. Lastly, we shall be able to prove that this alleged persecutor was anything but a bigot; that he was imbued with large and latitudinarian principles in all matters relating to religion; that these principles had the strongest influence over himself personally, and were the rule and guide of his whole public course; and, in particular, that they had the closest connection with those political measures against the Presbyterians which he originated as a minister of the Crown, or carried into execution as public prosecutor.

  All through life he manifested a continuous devotion to literary pursuits, but these were not permitted to interfere with his professional duties. His rise to eminence at the bar was exceptionally rapid. If in solid legal accomplishments he had several superiors, few excelled him in ready eloquence, or the adroit use of legal technicalities…. Mackenzie’s career as public prosecutor can only be defended on the supposition that in law, as well as in love and war, “all things are fair.” His eager interest in constitutional history, and his overbearing temper, are partly accountable for his misuse of legal forms to obtain convictions; and his hatred of religious fanaticism seems also to have itself verged on fanaticism. The one redeeming feature of his character was his devotion to literature and learning.

General

  He has published many books, some of law, and all full of faults; for he was a slight and superficial man.

  Mackenzie may be regarded as the first successor of his countryman Drummond of Hawthornden in the cultivation of an English style; he was the correspondent of Dryden and other distinguished English writers of his day; but he has no pretensions of his own to any high rank either for the graces of his expression or the value of his matter. Whatever may have been his professional learning, too, his historical disquisitions are as jejune and uncritical as his attempts at fine writing are, with all their elaboration, at once pedantic and clownish. He has nothing either of the poetry or the elegance of Drummond.

  His conceits are the offspring of a powerful poetic fancy; some of them would have pleased Donne, others, no doubt, delighted Dryden. Mackenzie stands between the two ages, belonging to the earlier by sympathy, and yet coming sometimes very close to the later when he indulges his satirical foible. The last of the old wits, belated in the North, he holds out his hand to the first of the new.