The Works of Henry Mackenzie

Henry Mackenzie was one of the luminaries of the second phase of the Scottish Englightenment, and the exponent and arbiter of the sentimental taste in literature which swept Europe in the final quarter of the eighteenth century. His novel in fragments The Man of Feeling [1771] was a hugely influential experiment in structure and in tone - its vogue inspired major literature from Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther to the lyrics of Robert Burns (who declared that he prized the work 'next to the Bible'). Two further novels, The Man of the World (1773) and Julia de Roubigne (1777), completed Mackenzie's trilogy of Sensibility. Mackzenzie was equally well known to his contemporaries for his editorship of the periodical essays The Mirror (1779) and The Lounger (1785-6); the latter contains his celebrated discovery for a genteel audience of the poetry of Burns. Most of Mackenzie's work has not been available since the original collected edition of 1808. The present facsimile collection makes the central literature of sensibility accessible for reassessment, as well as providing access to the critical writings of one of the major transitional writers of Enlightenment and Romantic Scotland.