their former number. He maintained that education should be free, compulsory, and secular.
After his temporary migration to Sydney (1879–83), he was again in 1883 elected for his old constituency, and resumed residence at Sandhurst. He died there on 5 July 1886, aged 62.
MacKay was an enthusiastic sportsman, and a member of the cricket team which in 1866 opposed the first All England eleven that visited Australia (Year-nook of Australia, 1886).
He was married, and his widow, two sons, and three daughters survived him.
[Melbourne Argus, 6 July 1886; Mennell's Dict. of Australasian Biog.]
McKAY, ARCHIBALD (1801–1883), poet and topographer, was born at Kilmarnock in 1801. After receiving a scanty education he was apprenticed to a handloom weaver, but subsequently abandoned the loom and became a bookbinder. He also conducted a circulating library in King Street, Kilmarnock, where he died in April 1883. He wrote:
- 'Poems,' 12mo, 1830.
- 'Recreations of Leisure Hours,' 12mo, 1832 (2nd edition in 1844), a collection of pieces in prose and verse.
- 'A History of Kilmarnock,' 12mo, 1848 (other editions in 1858 and 1864), a creditable compilation.
- 'Ingle-side Lilts,' 12mo, 1855.
His poems attracted considerable attention, and some of the pieces, such as 'My First Bawbee,' 'My ain Couthie Wife,' and 'Drouthy Tam' (first published in 1828), gained great popularity.
[Rogers's Modern Scottish Minstrel, v. 85; Times, 27 April 1883.]
MACKAY, CHARLES, LL.D. (1814–1889), poet and journalist, was born at Perth in Scotland on 27 March 1814. His father, George Mackay, was the second son of Captain Hugh Mackay of the Strathnaver branch of the clan, whose chief is Lord Reay. George, as a boy, on H.M. sloop the Scout, witnessed the evacuation of Toulon by the British in 1793, and subsequently the capture, with the aid of Paoli and his volunteers, of the island of Corsica. The Scout later on was seized by the frigates Alceste and Vestale, and George was detained during four years in France as a prisoner of war. He there eked out existence among the peasantry by playing the flageolet. On escaping from France he was again afloat on board H.M.S. Hydra, under the command of Captain (afterwards Admiral) Francis Laforey [see under Laforey, Sir John]. After serving six more years at sea he quitted the royal navy and joined the army. As an ensign in the 47th foot he in 1809 served under the Duke of York in the ill-starred Walcheren expedition. Prostrated by malaria, he returned to England on sick leave. There, on his restoration to health, he married, and as a half-pay lieutenant settled for a while in Scotland.
The son Charles, having lost his mother during his infancy, lived until his eighth year under the care of a nurse, Grace Stuart, at a lonely house near the village of Newhaven, on the Firth of Forth. The nurse married Thomas Threlkeld, a tailor, formerly a soldier in George Mackay's regiment, and Charles in 1822 was sent to reside with them at Woolwich. After attending a dame's school, he was entered in 1825 as a student at the Caledonian Asylum, then situated at Hatton Garden, and twice every Sunday for three years listened to Edward Irving [q. v.] in Cross Street Chapel, Hatton Garden. In 1828 he was placed by his father at a school in Brussels, on the Boulevard de Namur, and became proficient in French and German, and later on in Spanish and Italian. In 1830 Mackay was engaged, at a salary of twelve hundred francs, as a private secretary to William Cockerill [q. v.], the ironmaster of Seraing, near Liège, and began writing in French in the ‘Courrier Belge,’ and sent English poems to a local newspaper called ‘The Telegraph.’ Thenceforth he spent nearly all his leisure in writing verse. In the summer of 1830 he visited Paris, and he spent 1831 with Cockerill at Aix-la-Chapelle. In May 1832 his father brought him back to London, where he first found employment in teaching Italian to Benjamin Lumley [q. v.], then a young solicitor. In 1834 he secured an engagement as an occasional contributor to ‘The Sun,’ and brought out his maiden work, ‘Songs and Poems,’ which he inscribed to his former instructors at the Caledonian Asylum. From the spring of 1835 till 1844 he was assistant sub-editor of the ‘Morning Chronicle,’ then in its palmiest days. In the autumn of 1839 he spent a month's holiday in Scotland, witnessing the Eglintoun Tournament, which he described in the ‘Chronicle,’ and making many literary acquaintances in Edinburgh. On severing his connection with the ‘Morning Chronicle’ in the autumn of 1844, he removed to Scotland, and became editor of the ‘Glasgow Argus.’ In 1846 he collected verses which had appeared in the ‘Daily News’ under Dickens's editorship as ‘Voices from the Crowd.’ Henry Russell, to whom Lumley had introduced him, set some of the poems to music, and in that form they became popular all over the world. Of one of them, ‘The Good Time Coming,’ four hundred
