ABSTRACT
Robert Wallace (1697-1771) was a prolific writer. The aim of this chapter is to try to answer the question as to what place Wallace should occupy in the history of the Scottish Enlightenment. His obituarist was his second son George, who published an article on his father in the Scots Magazine in 1771. Nearly 40 years later, the same journal sketched a life of Robert Wallace when the second edition of Mankind, one of his major works, was published (1809). This version was shorter than the first, though it contained some new information about Wallace, and it was on this second biography, I presume, that the entry in the first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, the shortest of three versions of his biography, was based.1
