Aged 20 he went to England with a hardware pack; he was not successful, and was a weaver for twenty years, and later a tradesman's clerk and a school usher.
In 1787 the town council of Paisley gave him a pension; he died in the spring of 1800.
James Cuthbert Hadden wrote "He rarely rises above doggerel" in his article on Maxwell in the Dictionary of National Biography.
[1] His works include moral essays, and poems about industrial progress.
A bibliography, comprising fifty-two separate publications, is given in Robert Brown's Paisley Poets, volume 1, pages 17–23.