Author: Erskine, Andrew
Biography:
ERSKINE, Andrew (1740-93: ODNB)
He was the fifth child of Alexander Erskine, fifth earl of Kellie, and his wife, Janet Pitcairn. Born at Carnbee, Fife, on 10 Aug. 1740 he spent his childhood there at Kellie Castle. The family had suffered financially for its Jacobite sympathies, and Erskine joined the military although writing poetry was more to his liking. For much of his life he lived with his sister, Lady Betty, in Dunbartonshire and, after her second marriage, in Edinburgh. He contributed to several volumes of Alexander Donaldson’s Collection of Original Poems (1760, 1762), was befriended by James Boswell (their correspondence was published in 1763), and wrote a farce, She’s not Him, and He’s not Her (1764). By 1770 he was living in Edinburgh and had entered the long period of loneliness and depression that ended in early Oct. 1793 with his suicide by walking into the sea near Edinburgh. The best-known of his songs, “How Sweet the Lone Vale,” was printed in George Thomson's Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs (1802) only after his death. (ODNB 11 May 2020) SR