Scotland, died near:y fifty years ago, at the age of
twenty-three.
Mr. Drummond, who was his friend, wrote this biography, and left it at his death unfinished. It now comes out under the editorship of his son. It is enough to say that it was worth publishing. A more distinct portraiture could hardly have been given. Mr. Drummond ever regarded his dead friend with great affection ; but he is quite
free from the biographical animus of partiality. He paints us the man as he was, eager and hot-headed, satis ingenii, prudentim parum. We have said that Nicoll was a peasant. That was his father's station, and he himself tended kine daring his boyhood. Bat at sixteen he vi as apprenticed to a grocer in Perth, and at twenty, by the help of Mr. Drummond and another friend, started in business as a bookseller in Dundee. His last employment was that of editor of a Liberal newspaper in Leeds. He was indeed, a fiery politician, full of all the ardour which men felt in the days of the first Reform Bill. us biographer thinks that politics killed him, and certainly he never spared himself in his eagerness to "make the world better," as he expressed it, by speeches and lead- ing articles. But we should think that they no more killed him than the Quarterly Review killed Keats. This volume contains some of his eady verse, remarkably smooth and polished for a lad who never had a year's regular schooling in his life.
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