Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Tennant, William

TENNANT, William (1784-1848), author of Anster Fair, was born in 1784 at Anstruther in Fifeshire, the birthplace of two other contemporary Scottish worthies, Thomas Chalmers and John Goodsir. He was lame from childhood, like his more famous contemporaries Byron and Scott, and this probably determined his father, who was a small merchant and farmer, to educate him for a scholarly career. But the paternal means failed before he had completed his curriculum at St Andrews, and he was obliged to return home and act for some eight years of his early manhood as clerk to one of his brothers, a corn-factor. The corn-factor’s clerk, however, under the impulse of a genius for language and a strong delight in literature, besides Greek and Latin and Hebrew, mastered, during his leisure, Italian and German, and not only read, but set himself to imitate, Ariosto and Wieland. And, strange to say, this poor youth, in a remote country town, anticipated the fashion of mock-heroic verse, which was set for England by “the ingenious brothers Whistlecraft,” and which gave Byron the hint for his Don Juan. Anster Fair, a fantastic poem in ottava rima, amazingly fluent, brimming over with high spirits, rich almost to excess in diction and fanciful imagery, was written by Tennant in 1811, when his brother’s business had failed and he did not know where to look for employment. Its publication in 1812 brought the poet into notice, and employment was found for him as schoolmaster of the parish of Dunino, near St Andrews. From this he was promoted (1816) to the school of Lasswade, near Edinburgh; from that (1819) to a mastership in Dollar academy; from that (1831), by Lord Jeffrey, who had written an admiring review of Anster Fair, to the professorship of Oriental languages in St Andrews. Tennant never fulfilled the promise of his first poem, which reads as if it had been dashed off in a fit of careless and happy inspiration, and never flags in its humorous glee from the first stanza to the last. The Thane of Fife (1822), in which he essayed the same vein, evidently cost him more pains, shows the same high reach of humorous imagination, and is indeed, as he claimed for it, “bold in its style and rare, fantastic, and sublime.” But the subject was more remote from general interest; the mock-epic machinery, with all his wealth of grotesque description, was too far-fetched for the popular taste; and the poem fell flat. A third poem, in the Scotch dialect, Papistry Stormed (1827), though full of the most spirited description, was also in a vein of humour that found few sympathizers. He wrote also two historical dramas. Cardinal Beaton (1823) and John Baliol (1825). His last published work was a series of Hebrew Dramas (1845), founded on incidents in Bible history. He died near Dollar, on 15th February 1848.

A Memoir of Tennant by M. T. Conolly was published in 1861.