Excerpt from The Man Forbid, and Other Essays John Davidson was born at Barrhead, in Renfrewshire, Scotland, on the eleventh of April, 1857. His father, the Reverend Alex ander Davidson, was a minister of the Evangelical Union. The boy's training was hardly academic in the true sense of the word, and was limited to what he was inclined to gather in The Highlanders' Academy in Greenock, where he acted as a sort of pupil teacher, and in the course of a single session at the University of Edinburgh. Leaving college in 1877, he wrote his first play, now known as An Unhistorical Pastoral, which, however, was not published until over ten years later. As a boy he had worked as an assistant in a chemical laboratory in Green ock, and later as assistant to the Town Analyst. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.