Later he taught in a school in his native parish, and many lived to remember him gratefully for his rough and ready but successful teaching of them.
On her retirement in 1800 he look another partner, and, having succeeded in obtaining a government contract to supply the navy with canvas, in a few years he possessed considerable property.
During the war with France, he published patriotic poems and songs in the Dundee Advertiser, which were reprinted in London.
To the Northern Minstrel of Newcastle upon Tyne he furnished many songs, and a number of poems to the Montrose Literary Mirror.
Ha wrote an account of Arbroath for Sir David Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopædia and several papers for Alexander Tilloch's Philosophical Magazine.
In October 1818, for the sake of his children's education, he transferred himself to Edinburgh, and obtained a situation as clerk in the great publishing house of the Messrs. Blackwood.
In 1825 he republished from Constable's Edinburgh Magazine Characters omitted in Crabbe's Parish Register (1 vol.
Balfour wrote his novels for The Minerva Press, as needing "daily bread" but he never pandered to the low morals of its habitual readers.
Pathos and shrewdness of insight and a very graphic faculty of sketching character are his chief characteristics.