John, the author of the Ode to the Cuckoo and other poems, was the son of a small farmer, and was born at Fala, county of Edinburgh, in 1748. After receiving his elementary education at Musselburgh, he entered the University of Edinburgh in 1762, with the intention of becoming a dissenting minister. There he studied the learned languages with great success, cultivating at the same time, in the society of his class-fellow, Michael Bruce, his native taste for poetry. In 1766 he entered the class of rhetoric and belles-lettres; and having attracted the notice of the professor, Dr Blair, by a critical paper on the Spectator, he was recommended by him, in 1768, as tutor to Mr, afterwards Sir John Sinclair, the eminent statistician. This situation he soon relinquished, and returning to Edinburgh, he resumed his theological studies in connection with the Established Church. In 1770, editing the works of his deceased friend, Michael Bruce, he introduced indiscriminately among them several poems of his own, which were afterwards claimed for the former poet. Of these, the most disputed, because the best, is the well-known Ode to the Cuckoo. Its authorship is now generally ascribed to Logan, on the ground that, long before its publication, he showed it to many of his friends as his own, and that his claim was never questioned during his life—proofs which the weight of evidence in favour of Bruce fails to balance. Some of Logan's most popular hymns are also said (and perhaps justly) to have been perfected out of some unformed thoughts and images that Bruce left in MS. In 1773 he was licensed as a preacher, and was appointed minister of South Leith.

Not content with the high excellence which he soon attained as an eloquent preacher, he applied himself to historical studies; and at Edinburgh, in 1779, delivered a course of lectures on the philosophy of history, which were published in a condensed form in 1781. So marked did he become in this new capacity, that he would undoubtedly have been promoted, in 1780, to the chair of universal history at Edinburgh, had it not been an invariable custom for the patrons to elect a member of the Scottish bar. In 1781 were published his Lecture on the Manners and Government of Asia and the first edition of his Poems; and after a year the latter reached a second edition. In 1783 Logan produced his Rannamode, a tragedy founded on the granting of the Magna Charta. On account of some political allusions, it was interdicted by the Lord Chamberlain during its rehearsal at Covent Garden Theatre; but it was acted the same year at Edinburgh, though with little success. His parishioners, offended at this clerical use of his talents, now openly condemned him; and in 1786, being charged with drunkenness, he was forced to retire upon a part of his stipend. He had repaired to London in the preceding year, and devoted himself to literature. Besides several contributions to the English Review, he produced, in 1788, A Review of the Principal Charges against Mr Hastings, a pamphlet which advocated the defendant so ably, that the friends of the impeachment arraigned the publisher, Stockdale, for a breach of the privileges of the House of Commons. In the same year Logan published, under the name of Dr Rutherford, A View of Ancient History. After a lingering illness, he died on 28th December 1788.

His friend Dr Robertson published the first volume of his Sermons in 1790, and the second in 1791. Among his MSS. were also found, but never published, four tragedies (two of which were unfinished), six lyric poems, several parts of an intended periodical called the Guardian, and twenty-five Lectures on Roman History.

Logan's peculiar merit lay in the successful treatment of old and familiar themes—a gift peculiar alike to a popular preacher and a lyric poet. Subjects that had become faded and worn through frequent handling, were rendered new and attractive to the eye by the fine polish of his diction, and the fresh hues of his fancy. The literary ability and the tender pathos of his sermons have saved them from that neglect to which kindred works are, with few exceptions, doomed. Of his poems, the best are the Ode to the Cuckoo and the Hymns forming part of the paraphrases used by the Church of Scotland. The latter are pervaded by a delicate and often plaintive strain of feeling. The simple diction and finely-woven fancies of the former entitle its author to a high rank as a lyrist. A third edition of Logan's Poems, accompanied by his Life, was published in 1805. A new edition of his Sermons, with a Life prefixed, appeared in London, 1810.

LOGGAN, David, an engraver of considerable reputation, was born at Dantzig in 1635. He received the first lessons of his art from Simon Passe in Denmark; and subsequently, on paying a visit to Holland, he further perfected himself in the study under the guidance of Hondius. He came to England in the time of the Commonwealth, and engaged in engraving portraits and landscape pieces. The first work of Loggan, however, which attracted general notice, and gained for its author very considerable reputation, was his views of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Having married into a good family near Oxford in 1672, he took up his residence there, and shortly afterwards published a large folio volume of plates: Habitus Academiarum Oxoniorum, a Doctore ad Servientem, by David Loggan, Gandensis, Universitatis Oxonie Chalographus. His engravings are remarkable for the neatness and accuracy of their execution, but this quality sometimes degenerates into stiffness and formality.