ROBERT, a Scottish poet, was born in the parish of Auchtergaven, in Perthshire, on the 7th of January 1814. His parents were too poor to give him a regular education; but his mother, who was a woman of singular energy and intelligence, snatched an occasional hour when her day of field-labour was done to teach her boy to read. His school education was of the most rudimentary character; but by industry and courage he strove to supply the deficiency. At the age of eight we find him tending cattle for a livelihood, and eagerly reading books. When he was thirteen, he could write an occasional paragraph for a local newspaper; and when bordering on twenty, he had completed his apprenticeship with a grocer and wine-merchant in Perth, and was known as a writer of tales, poems, and songs. In 1834 he opened a small circulating library in Dundee, and during the following year published a volume of *Poems and Lyrics*, which was very favourably received by the press, and soon passed through three editions. His verses, without being characterized by any of the highest qualities of poetry, display great sweetness, purity, and tenderness, and breathe much of the joyous hopeful valour of his life. In 1836 his strongly liberal sentiments got full vent in the pages of the *Leeds Times*, an ultra-radical journal, of which he had become editor. The spirit, energy, and devotion, with which he entered upon this new undertaking, soon tripled the circulation of the paper, but broke the health of the brave young poet. He had been little more than a year in this position when he was compelled to leave it. He died of consumption, at the house of a friend in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, on the 9th December 1837, at the premature age of twenty-three. (See his Life by Mrs Johnstone, in the third edition of his poems.)

NICOL, SAN, the chief town of the island of Tinos, in the Ægean Sea, and the see of a bishop, has a modern cathedral, and a population of 4000.