Author: Alves, Robert
Biography:
ALVES, Robert (1745-94: ODNB)
Teacher and poet. Born at Elgin, Moray, to John Alves and his wife Jannet Grant, he was baptised on 11 Dec. 1745. He was educated at the Elgin Grammar School and Marischal College, Aberdeen, where he studied with Dr James Beattie who admired his poem “An Elegy on Time.” After earning his AM, he became first a schoolmaster in Deskford, Banffshire and then a private tutor in Bognie, Aberdeenshire, before being appointed Headmaster of the Banff Grammar School in 1773. At Banff, he met the woman addressed as “Delia” by some of his love poetry; when she rejected him, he moved to Edinburgh in 1779 and earned his living by teaching, translating, and contributing to periodicals. When he died suddenly on 1 January 1794, he was preparing for publication his Sketches of a History of Literature. The ODNB erroneously attributes to him James Alves’s The Banks of Esk. Alves also published verse in the Methodist Arminian Magazine. (ODNB 16 Jan. 2018, 28 Jan. 2025; “Biographical Account of the Author,” Sketches of a History of Literature by the Late Robert Alves, AM [1794]; Arminian Magazine 13 [1790]) SR