James Mercer

James Mercer (baptised 1734 – 1804) was a Scottish soldier and poet. He is now best known as the friend of the abolitionist poet James Beattie.

Early life He was the eldest son of Thomas Mercer, of a cadet line of the Mercer family of Aldie, Perthshire, and was born in Aberdeen, Scotland on 27 February 1734; Hugh Mercer and Captain William Mercer of the Bengal Army were cousins. He was educated at Aberdeen High School, and then at Marischal College, where he graduated M.A. in 1754.

Soldier Mercer went to Paris, where his Jacobite father was then living. After his father's death in 1756, he joined a British regiment, and served in the Seven Years' War. He was under Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick through its early campaigns, and in 1759 fought at the battle of Minden. He was in 1761 presented by General David Graeme with a company in the newly raised 105th Foot, but the corps was reduced on the peace and Treaty of Paris of 1763.

Later life Mercer settled in the neighbourhood of Aberdeen, and cultivated the friendship of James Beattie.

In 1799 Beattie appointed Mercer one of his executors, together with a friend they had in common, Robert Arbuthnot of Haddo (1729–1803); Beattie himself died in 1803. Mercer settled at Sunny Bank, near Aberdeen, where he died on 27 November 1804.

Works At Marischal College Mercer had his literary taste shaped by the classical scholar Thomas Blackwell. He wrote poems influenced by Horace, as well as those owing something to his friend James Beattie.

An anonymous Lyric Poems was published in 1797, by Mercer's brother-in-law Lord Glenbervie, A second edition appeared in 1804, under Mercer's name, and the third edition was published posthumously in 1806, as Lyric Poems by the late James Mercer, with an Account of the Life of the Author by Lord Glenbervie, London. It received fulsome praise in the Edinburgh Review (January 1807) and from Sir James Mackintosh, who described the poems as "everywhere elegant and sometimes charming". Egerton Brydges quoted the "Ode to Novelty" in his Censura.

Family Mercer married, on 13 September 1763, Katherine Douglas, a beauty, and sister of Sylvester Douglas, Lord Glenbervie. She died on 3 January 1802.