ROBERT

See also:

• ROBERT NICOLL (1814-1837)
• NICOLL, SIR WILLIAM ROBERTSON (1851– )

NICOLL (1814-1837)  , Scottish poet, was born on the 7th of January, 1814, at the farm of Little Tullybeltane, in the parish of Auchtergaven, Perthshire . When Robert was five years old his father was reduced to poverty . He became a day-labourer, and was only able to give his son a very slight education . At sixteen the boy was apprenticed to a grocer and wine-merchant at Perth . In 1833 he began to contribute to Johnstone's Magazine (afterwards Tait's Magazine), and in the next year his apprenticeship was cancelled . He visited Edinburgh, and was kindly received there, but obtained no employment . He opened a circulating library at Dundee, but in 1836 he became editor of the Leeds Times . He held pronounced Radical opinions, and overtaxed his slender physical resources in electioneering work for Sir William Molesworth in the summer of 1837 . He was obliged to resign his editorship, and died at the house of his friend William Tait, at Trinity, near Edinburgh, on the 7th of December 1837, in his twenty-fourth year . He had published a volume of Poems in 1835; and in 1844 appeared a further volume, Poems and Lyrics, with an anonymous memoir of the author by Mrs C . I . Johnstone .

The best of his lyrics are those written in the Scottish

dialect . They are simple in feeling and expression, genuine folk-songs . An eloquent appreciation of his character and his poetry was included in Charles Kingsley's article on " Burns and his School " in the North British Review for November 1851 . See also P . R . Drummond, Life of Robert Nicoll, Poet (1884) .