Online Encyclopedia

ALEXANDER ROSS (1699-1784)

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Originally appearing in Volume V23, Page 739 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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ALEXANDER ROSS (1699-1784)  , Scottish poet,
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wad born on the 13th of
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April 1699 at Kincardine-O'Neil,
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Aberdeenshire . He was educated at Marischal College, Aberdeen, and became tutor to the children of
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Sir William Forbes of Craigievar . He became in 1732 schoolmaster of Lochlee, Angus, where the rest of his
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life was spent . He had long been in the habit of writing verse for his own amusement, when in 1768 he published, at the
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suggestion of James Beattie, The Fortunate Shepherdess . . . to which is (sic) added a few songs . This is a pastoral narrative poem, written in obvious imitation of Allan Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd . Its affectations are chiefly on the
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surface . The background of shepherd life as known to Ross, and the rather sordid _motives of the characters, despite their high-sounding names of Helenore, Rosalind, &c., are depicted with uncompromising truth . He died at Lochlee, and was buried on the 26th of May 1784 . See Helenore, or the Fortunate Shepherdess, edited by John Longmuir (1866); also H . Walker, Three Centuries of Scottish Literature (1893), ii . 28–34 .

The bulk of Ross's writings remain in MS .

End of Article: ALEXANDER ROSS (1699-1784)
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