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ALEXANDER SELKIRK.
A Memoir.

 E FOE is generally supposed to have founded his famous fiction
on the real adventures of a Seotch seaman, named Alexandor
Solkirk, who spent some years in solitude on the island of
Juan Fornandez. The life of this individual was so full ot
romantic incidents that a brief outline of it may probably be
acceptable to our readers,

Alexander Selkirk, or Selcraig, as his name was originally
spolled, was born in the year 1676, at Largo, a small seaport town on tho
coast of Fife. He was the seventh son and seventh child of John Selcraig
and his wife, Kuphan Mackie; and, according to an old superstition, was
fated from his birth to be the hero of extraordinary adventures.

At an early age he was sent to school, where he evinced much quicknoss
of parts and waywardness of temper, with a decided bias towards a seafaring
life. Ho made considerable progress in the branches of study there taught,
and especially in navigation ; but out of school made a not less considerable
progress in the art of daring mischief, His faults seem to have been
developed by the over-indulgence of his mother, which provoked, as is often
the case, a too great severity on the part of the father. The latter frequently
threatened to disinherit him; and on one occasion flung at his son a walk-
ing-staff, with the pithy sentence: “ A whip for the horse, a bridle for the
ass, and a rod for the fool’s back.”

In most of the Scottish parishes, at the epoch of the great revolution of
1688, a ferment arose of a mixed political and ecclesiastical character; and
the clergy who favoured the new Government were frequently dismissed
from their cures by their indignant parishioners. In Largo the people
assembled in the churchyard, and opposed the clergyman’s entry iutu the