ABSTRACT
Robert Chambers wrote two biographies, a major Life and Works of Robert Burns and his last book on Smollett. Neither Robert, nor other biographers, seemed to find Burns’s last years as an Excise Inspector extraordinary. As a historian Robert Chambers is hard to pin down, because history, past, local and contemporary, is scattered through everything he wrote. The past fascinated him, particularly its little-known aspects, and he picked these up and recorded them in his books, his articles, and his encyclopaedias. It might have been better if Robert had got one of his irons really hot; been a great folklorist, historian, geologist, biographer; but not attempted to be all of them combined. As a historian he was like a man who has collected a great many rare delicacies together, but never made a meal. He did not, like his great forbears, Gibbon and de Toqueville, use his material to compare civilisations, to note changes over time and to predict challenge.
