As a man of ingenuity, various acquirements, and agreeable manners, Mr Skinner was held in much estimation among his contemporaries.  Whatever he read, with the assistance of a commonplace-book, he accurately remembered, and could readily turn to account; and, though his library was contained in a closet of five feet square, he was abundantly well informed on every ordinary topic of conversation.  He was fond of controversial discussion, and wielded both argument and wit with a power alarming to every antagonist.  Though keen in debate, he was however possessed of a most imperturbable suavity of temper.  His conversation was of a playful cast, interspersed with anecdote, and free from every affectation of learning.  As a clergyman, Mr Skinner enjoyed the esteem and veneration of his flock.  Besides efficiently discharging his ministerial duties, he practised gratuitously as a physician, having qualified himself, by acquiring a competent acquaintance with the healing art at the medical classes in Marischal College.  His pulpit duties were widely acceptable; but his discourses, though edifying and instructive, were more the result of the promptitude of the preacher than the effects of a painstaking preparation.  He abandoned the aid of the manuscript in the pulpit, on account of the untoward occurrence of his notes being scattered by a startled fowl, in the early part of his ministry, while he was addressing his people from the door of his house, after the wanton destruction of his chapel.

In a scene less calculated to invite poetic inspiration no votary of the muse had ever resided.  On every side of his lonely dwelling extended a wild uncultivated plain; nor for miles around did any other human habitation relieve the monotony of this cheerless solitude.  In her gayest moods, Nature never wore a pleasing aspect in Long-gate, nor did the distant prospect compensate for the dreary gloominess of the surrounding landscape.  For his poetic suggestions Mr Skinner was wholly dependent on the singular activity of his fancy; as he derived his chief happiness in his communings with an attached flock, and in the endearing intercourse of his family.  Of his children, who were somewhat numerous he contrived to afford the whole, both sons and daughters, a superior education; and he had the satisfaction, for a long period of years, to address one of his sons as the bishop of his diocese.

The death of Mr Skinner’s wife, in the year 1799, fifty-eight years after their marriage, was the most severe trial which he seems to have experienced.  In a Latin elegy, he gave expression to the deep sense which he entertained of his bereavement.  In 1807, his son, Bishop Skinner, having sustained a similar bereavement, invited his aged father to share the comforts of his house; and after ministering at Longside for the remarkably lengthened incumbency of sixty-five years, Mr Skinner removed to Aberdeen.  But a greater change was at hand; on the 16th of June 1807,