Andrew Donald (as he was then known) attended the Grammar School in Leith and at an early age he demonstrated a flair for music.
The Donald family was Episcopalian; the non-juror Scottish Episcopal Church at this time was heavily proscribed following its support for Bonnie Prince Charlie in the Jacobite rising a few years before.
After 1745 the Hanoverian Government passed laws to restrict Episcopalian clergy from officiating, unless they swore allegiance to the King.
Although Scottish Episcopal ordination was officially banned at the time, Bishop Forbes ordained Andrew Donald into deacon's orders in 1775.
At this time Glasgow had a thriving authorised ('qualified') Episcopal chapel, St Andrew's-by-the-Green, whilst Macdonald's small non-juror congregation assembled in a meeting-house in Stockwell Street.
Macdonald first appeared in print as a poet in 1772 when he published Velina, a poetical fragment in imitation of the style of Edmund Spenser.
To earn some money, Macdonald wrote for newspapers, mostly satirical pieces under the pseudonym Matthew Bramble (the name of a character in the novel Humphry Clinker, by fellow Scot, Tobias Smollett).
Although by nature buoyant, amiable, and engaging, the pressure of his hardships overwhelmed Macdonald, and ‘having no powerful friends to patronise his abilities, and suffering under the infirmities of a weak constitution, he fell victim, at the age of three and thirty, to sickness, disappointment and misfortune.’[7] Andrew Macdonald died on 22 August 1790,[13] leaving his wife and young child destitute.