Blind poet. Headnote to his poem in *Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal*, 28 February 1835,
states that he was “an inmate of the Asylum for the Blind, at Edinburgh.” Lost sight
from young age, according to Thomas Anderson’s *Observations on the Employment, Education,
and Habits of the Blind*, Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1837, p. 95. (AC)