Five men: Robert Burns, Richard Baxter, Francis Bacon

Unknown artist

Engraved portrait of Dr James Beattie (1735-1803), Scottish poet and philosopher. In the late 1760s Beattie wrote the two works on which his fame rested: Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism, published in 1770, and the greater part of his most influential poem, The Minstrel, published in two books in 1771 and 1774. The Essay on Truth, written between 1766 and 1769, is a bitterly polemical attack on ‘sceptical philosophy’, in particular on David Hume, whose writings Beattie believed were undermining religion and morals. He corresponded with a number of intellectuals including Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), grandfather of Charles Darwin.