he grew in years and strength, his life became none the smoother, and scarcely changed its character till he was advanced to be a regular shepherd. He merely changed one master for another, obtaining some slight increase in the trifling wages which he carried home to his parents, who supplied him with his clothes. He had few holidays, and no pleasures except such as he could find in his communings with nature. He did not even beguile his leisure with many books, and the art of reading tolerably easily came to him only towards middle age; although he never was much of a student, since Wilson, as we remember, makes him say in the "Noctes" that there were but few "byucks in the cupboard at Mount Benger.

he had not an atom of book-lore, his mind | nothing but a story and the sensational was not unstored with matter for roman- episodes that agreeably excited him. As tic meditation. Like many other distinguished men, Hogg, as we have said, had a remarkable mother. She had more than the sound good sense, which, unfortunately, he did not inherit. It was to her side of the house that he seems to have been indebted for his poetic fancy. She delighted in the Border legends and ballads which had fixed themselves in a tenacious memory; and she could recite and relate with such animation and spirit, that the neighbors would gather in of an evening round her hearth. We can picture little James, who had his mother's gift of memory, sitting open-mouthed at her knee, and gulping down the marvels which held her audience entranced. Then he would muse upon them among his ruminating sheep, in scenery that was associated with their incidents, or suggestive of them. What is remarkable is, that in such circumstances, with such associa tions and suggestions, the sparks of his poetic fires were never kindled. We need not be surprised, perhaps, that thoughts did not seek expression with a boy who could barely read or write. But it is strange that he should have been absolutely insensible to any poetical emotion; and the bard of the forest was eminently prosaic till he had arrived at manhood, and something more. So much so, that, as he relates, "it was in the eighteenth year of my age that I first got a perusal of the Life and Adventures of Sir William Wallace,' and of the 'Gentle Shepherd;' and though immoderately fond of them, yet (what you will think remarkable in one who hath since dabbled so much in verse) I could not help regretting deeply that they were not in prose, that everybody might have have understood them; or I thought if they had been in the same kind of metre with the Psalms, I could bave borne with them." The quaint criticism of that concluding sentence carries irresistible conviction of his practical frame of mind. For the doggerel of the metrical version of the Psalms is only made endurable to Presbyterians of taste by solemn youthful associations. The fact being that in those days he cared for

He made no attempt at writing verses till the year 1796. We believe that he was then in his twenty-fifth year; but, as we remarked, he has very characteristically thrown a doubt on the year of his birth. If we are to credit the parish reg ister, where the date is set down in black and white, he was born in December 1770. He always asserted himself that his birthday was on the 25th of January 1772; but as he prided himself on having been born on the same day of the month as Burns, it is little lack of charity to assume that the fixing on that particular date was simply a poetical license. Why he should have advanced the year is not so clear. Whatever be the explanation, he was probably twenty-six before he composed a single couplet. But from the first, his effusions met with encouragement, and he became the popular laureate of the farm-servants and country folk. His manner of composition was original; and never perhaps, since writing became a common accomplishment, had a poet arrived at years of discretion to contend with more serious material difficulties.

But then the writing of them!—that was a save by following the Italian alphabet; and job. I had no method of learning to write, though I always stripped myself of coat and vest when I began to pen a song, yet my wrist took cramp, so that I could rarely make above

four or six lines at a sitting. Whether my | audacious ambition as we remember; and manner of writing it out was new, I know not, even after the wonders he achieved, they but it was not without singularity. Having seem less sublime than ridiculous. The very little spare time from my flock, which was year 1797 was an epoch to the illiterate unruly enough, I folded and stitched a few herd, who had only a few months before sheets of paper, which I carried in my pocket. begun to throw off rhymes for the rustics. "One day during that summer, a half-daft man named John Scott came to me on the hill, and to amuse me repeated

I had no inkhorn ; but in place of it I borrowed a small phial, which I fixed in a hole in the breast of my waistcoat; and having a cork fastened by a piece of twine, it answered the purpose fully as well. Thus equipped, when-Tam O'Shanter.' I was delighted. I ever a leisure minute or two offered, I sat down and wrote out my thoughts as I found them.

66

was far more than delighted; I was ravished. I cannot describe my feelings; but in short, before Jock Scott left me, I And these scrambling habits of offhand could repeat the poem from beginning to composition stuck by him to the last. In end, and it has been my favorite poem his poems especially, he trusted almost ever since. He told me that it was made everything to a retentive memory, which by one Robert Burns, the sweetest poet he had exercised when paper and leisure that ever was born; but that he was now were scarce. He says: "Let the piece dead, and that his place would never be be of what length it will, I compose and supplied." Hogg was by no means sure correct it wholly in my mind or on a slate, of that. "What is to hinder me from ere ever I put pen to paper; and then I succeeding Burns?" he asked himself. write it down as fast as the ABC; " The arguments by which he encouraged though as "Kilmeny " or Queen himself were peculiar and characteristic. Hynde" could hardly have been con- He was born on the same day as the imdensed on a slate, we presume that he mortal lyrist, — though that, as we have threw off his longer works in sections. seen, was questionable. As a shepherd But it is certain that, unfortunately for he had more time upon his hands than his fame as a poet, and still more injuri- any possible ploughman, and his memory ously for his credit as a novelist, he never was richly stored with songs composed by could be persuaded to revise his work, other people. Equally characteristic was and would scarcely condescend to correct it, that in place of making any mystery of “When once it is written, it remains his high-flown hopes, he babbled them out in that state; it being, as you very well to all and sundry. Maliciously enough, know, with the utmost difficulty that I can one of his friends betrayed him, be brought to alter one syllable, which, I bitter jest," for the amusement of a supthink, is partly owing to the above prac-per-party. Whereupon his stanch pattice." So the Shepherd's works, with their faults and their beauties, were essentially the crude and capricious inspirations of spontaneous genius, as his publishers sometimes found to their cost, and his numerous admirers to their disappoint

it.

ment.

66 as a

ron, Mr. Grieve, with a kindly sagacity which did him honor, came good-naturedly to the rescue. He let the mortified shepherd down gently with a happy piece of prophetic flattery: "After what he has done, there is no man can say what he may do."

But when it had dawned upon him that The first poem which Hogg published nature had meant him for a poet, overween- was as good as anything of the kind he ing self-confidence rapidly grew upon him. ever wrote. In "Donald M'Donald," The vanity and self-satisfaction he never which went off merrily to the lively old cared to conceal, no doubt contributed lilt of "Woo'd an' married an' a'," there largely to his success; for among the Shep- was a martial clang, and a soft echo of herd's many admirers, few were so enthusi-pathos as well, which alternately excited astic as himself. The circumstances con- the spirits and subdued them. Thor sidered, the first day-dreams of his possi-oughly national, stirringly patriotic, with ble destiny are as strange an instance of its fiery appeals by epithets to the muster

roll of the clans, it hit happily the temper | which he had most reason to think favorof the times, when the war fever was at ably, and leaves them with a friend to its height and the Corsican was threaten- have them published. He never dreams ing invasion. In its fire, in its rough yet of bargaining for a price, or asks whether not ungraceful abruptness, even in such there is a chance of their selling. A faults as the occasional trivialities of ex- thousand copies are thrown off; and some pression, the writer reminds us of the best of the copies are sent to him in the counof the old Border ballad-makers. Take try. No man would have been more dethis stanza by way of example, in which, lighted to admire himself in type; but if the first couplet rings somewhat ridic- never perhaps was a novice more disulously, the second, when sung with power gusted with a literary début, or with better and feeling, almost changes the passing reason. For on comparing the little volsmile into tears: ume with his original scraps of manuscript, he saw that the inevitable emendations and alterations were all for the worse; that stanzas had been dropped out of their places; and finally, that the unrevised pages were over-crowded with ludicrous blunders.

Wi' rocks o' the Nevis an' Garry,

We'd rattle him off frae our shore; Or lull him asleep in a cairny,

An' sing him- Lochaber no more.

against time under pressure of stern necessity. We have no intention of following out Hogg's literary history in detail, though an unusual amount of references to biographical incidents is essential to any illustration of his genius. But as the

The astonishing success of Donald M'Donald " was a case of sic vos non Except costing him much mortification, vobis, so far as the anonymous author and some money he could ill afford, that was concerned. He neither got solid first publication did nothing for him one reward nor even empty fame by it. Its way or another. It was never read till popularity, as he assures us, was un- many years later, when the author having bounded, yet no one asked the name of become famous, it was maliciously rethe writer. While, to make matters printed. But the story is highly typical worse, a man of less jealous disposition of the manner in which too many of his might well have been irritated at the works were brought before a critical pubhonors and profit carried off by others lic. They were thrown off in hasty bursts who merely sang his war-song with spirit. of inspiration, or hurriedly scribbled He relates with natural indignation how Lord Moira, at a banquet in Edinburgh thanked a certain Mr. Oliver for his rendering of a song which must be of public benefit at such a national crisis, proceeding to back up his thanks with an offer to the singer of all his lordship's interest in Scotland. Indeed the credit of the lay, which seemed to be going begging, did Hogg harm rather than otherwise; for it induced him to come before the public prematurely in his proper person, with a random collection of specimen pieces which he would afterwards have gladly suppressed. The circumstances of the publication are perhaps as singular as anything else among the literary curiosities of his life. Here we have a rough shepherd who has driven a flock of sheep from Selkirkshire to the Edinburgh market. Having penned his charge, he has nothing to do for a couple of days. Happily he never cared much for drinking, except under the irresistible seductions of good-fellowship; and he stands hesitating as to how to kill the time. Whereupon it occurs to him that he might turn it to profit by writing out some of his poems for the printer. No sooner said than done; but he has to trust entirely to his memory. So he scratches down the poems he remembers best, - not those of

Queen's Wake" is undoubtedly his masterpiece, his own account of its origin and publication is worth noting. So far as it can be said to have any comprehensive design, the design was merely to turn literary waste to profit. The Shepherd's fast friend, Mr. Grieve, had been greatly pleased with some poems which had appeared in the Spy; and "nothing would serve him but that I should take the field once more as a poet, and try my fate with others. I promised; and having some ballads or metrical tales by me which I did not like to lose, I planned the Queen's Wake,' in order that I might take these all in, and had it ready in a few months after it was first proposed." His interview with Constable, as he relates it with the frankest naïveté, might be a Scotticized scene from one of Molière's comedies. Knowing the circumstances in which sundry fugitive pieces had been hurriedly linked together, it might have been supposed that the author must have felt a certain diffidence in offering his wares to the autocrat of the northern

sonable; he confessed his fault with effusive self-humiliation, and thenceforth put a more generous construction on motives he should have understood and respected from the first.

book-trade. Not a bit of it! "I next went to my friend Mr. Constable, and told him my plan of publication (!); but he received me coldly, and told me to call again. I did so → when he said he would do nothing until he had seen the manu In fact, an odder compound of genius, script. I refused to give it, saying, simplicity, conceit, and candid egotism, 'What skill have you about the merits of never lived, than the peasant who became a book?' 'It may be so, Hogg,' said he, the associate, and frequently the butt, of 'but I know how to sell a book as well as all the men of talent who knew him. As any man, which should be some concern unreserved as James Boswell, to know the of yours; and I know how to buy one Shepherd to the core, we have only, as he too."" The Shepherd's behavior, when might have said, "to hearken to himself." it was a question of being launched on "I like to write about myself; in fact, the world of literature under favorable there are few things I like better," is the auspices, speaks volumes for those defects opening sentence of his inimitable piece in his character which were continually of autobiography. And we come upon betraying him into follies. He had as the following passage in the first of his little worldly wisdom or self-control as letters, which he quotes: I must again worldly knowledge, and never practised apprise you, that whenever I have occathe simplest rudiments of diplomacy. He sion to speak of myself and my performwas governed by his impulses in every-day ances, I find it impossible to divest mylife, as he followed the caprices of his self of an inherent vanity." We have fancy in the composition of his poetry. seen how he carried himself with ConWarm-hearted and simple-minded, he won stable when declining even to submit the powerful friends; and when they chanced manuscript of "Kilmeny" for approval; to cross his will, he would cast them off and when Mrs. Izett of Kinnaird sugregardless of consequences. It speaks gested to him the theme of his "Mador," volumes for his winning qualities and his he observed complacently, "Well, though sterling worth, that the illustrious men he I consider myself exquisite at degrossly insulted were always so willing to scriptions of nature and mountain scenforgive him. The occasion of his memor-ery in particular, yet I am afraid that a able quarrel with Scott was a case in poem wholly descriptive will prove dull point. It had struck the Shepherd that a and heavy." A literary friend, on whose collection of poems by all the living au- judgment he relied, gave him some highly thors of any celebrity in Britain must injudicious advice as to the publication of "make his fortune." The idea might the " Pilgrims of the Sun." "This adwell have occurred to anybody, though vice . . I am convinced was wrong; but few would have the face to act upon it. I had faith in every one that commended Hogg sent out his applications right and any of my works, and laughed at those left; and strange to say, almost all were who did otherwise, thinking and asserting successful. He actually received various that they had not sufficient discernment.' poems, with many promises of others. He had undoubtedly reason to be offend"Mr. Walter Scott," however, refused, ed with Wordsworth for the sneer at his which Hogg "took exceedingly ill;" but remark on "the meeting of the poets" he nevertheless persisted in the modest under the rainbow-arch thrown over Winrequest, urging, with superb poetical dermere. But sublimer examples of his license, that "I had done as much for self-appreciation are to be found scathim, and would do ten times more if he tered over his articles passim; and one required it." But Scott stood firm; and of them we chance to call to mind is Hogg, forgetting that the "great magi- in the "Anecdotes of the Shepherd's cian" of the "Chaldee Manuscript" had Dog," contributed to " Maga" of March, been his stanch patron since the day 1818. A sheep-farmer had questioned when they made acquaintance among the his ability to drive a stray sheep in the Border hills, sent him a grossly abusive darkness through the flocks scattered letter. Their intercourse was naturally over the hills. "I said I would try to do suspended, till the Shepherd's heart was it." "Then let me tell you," said he, touched by Scott's forgiving kindness "that you may as well try to travel to when he lay stretched on a sick-bed. yon sun. "The man did not know," is Recognizing the other's magnanimity, all Hogg's comment, "that I was destined his sullenness melted; his penitence was to do both the one and the other." And as deep as his passion had been unrea- for a practical illustration of his opinion

of the most halting of his performances, | ripened into life-long intimacy. In our

we may turn to his explanations of the first article we adverted to the Shepherd's failure of his "Brownie of Bodsbeck,". share in originating the idea of the maga a failure which was unmistakable even to zine. When "Maga" had changed her his fatherly partiality. He relates how crew, and was fairly floated, the Shepherd Scott had got the start of him with "Old was thrown into social as well as literary Mortality "owing to an unfortunate com- relations with the inner coterie of conbination of circumstances; how the au-tributors. Gillies, in the "Reminiscences thor of " Waverley" had preoccupied of a Literary Veteran," as well as Hogg much of the ground, and especially an- himself, gives us glimpses at his life in ticipated him in taking Balfour of Burleigh for a hero. He confesses that his story had suffered from the consequent hacking about and remodelling. But he consoles himself for running a bad second to Walter Scott with the reflection, "A better instance could not be given of the good luck attached to one person, and the bad luck which attended the efforts of another." And Scott, by the way, supplies another example in one of his let ters, when, so far as we remember, the greater and the lesser Border bards had met at a London dinner-party. "The honest grunter opines with a delightful naïveté that Miur's verses are far ower answered by Thompson that Moore's ear or notes, I forget which, were finely strung." "They are far ower finely strung," replied he of the forest, "for mine are just right." Hogg was a mer ciless critic, too, of the efforts of others when they had trenched upon his own favorite fields. "On the appearance of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,' he writes, "I was much dissatisfied with the imitations of the ancient ballads contained in it, though these imitations, be it remembered, embraced the most brilliant of the lays by Scott and Leyden; so" I immediately set about imitating the ancient ballads myself."

sweet

Such was the man who came, like Burns, to Edinburgh to be lionized in its literary society, and who sat to Wilson for the hero of the "Noctes," which are adorned by many of his most sparkling gems of song. He was bound to Blackwood in the first place, by the handsome way in which that gentleman behaved to him when the Shepherd was liquidating his affairs in one of his periodical insol vencies. The story of the beginning of his friendship with Wilson is better known. He wrote a note to the author

of the " Isle of Palms," expressing an earnest desire for his acquaintance, and inviting him to "pot-luck" at his lodgings in Gabriel's Road. The invitation was accepted as heartily as it was given; and that "meeting of the poets" was so mutually satisfactory, that the acquaintance

Edinburgh in those halcyon days, when he was fed, fêted, and flattered, and had to pay for little but a bedroom. The genius who had for the nonce exchanged homespun for broadcloth, with his fine fancies and his flashes of natural eloquence, with his audacious ignorance of the world and his seductive gullability, was a godsend to wits like Wilson and Lockhart. They loved the man and liked his company Lockhart in special, laughing at him and with him. Looking back upon these happy days, and speaking feelingly of his "warm and disinterested friendship," which is confirmed by many private letters in our possession, Hogg describes Lockhart as a mischiev ous Oxford puppy, for whom I was terri fied." Mystifying the Shepherd in all manner of ways was a standing joke with him; and especially did he delight in confusing the countryman as to the contributors to the magazine and the authorship of the articles. “I never parted company with him that my judgment was not entirely jumbled with regard to characters, books, and literary articles of every description." All that, however, merely shows the grotesque side of their converse. The fanciful Shepherd of the "Noctes,' who occasionally sinks into the buffoon, more often holds the society spellbound by his eloquence; and the Wilsons and Lockharts would never have welcomed Hogg to their intimacy had they not admired even more than they liked him. For a presentation of him at one of the proudest moments of his life for a serious picture of him exactly as he seemed, uncouth of aspect but radiant in soulwe must go again to Lockhart in "Peter's Letters." Dr. Morris is assisting at the memorial banquet to Burns, from which we have already borrowed the doctor's sketch of Wilson. Wilson had risen to propose Hogg's health:

duced on Hogg himself, was to my mind by The effect which Mr. Wilson's speech profar the most delightful thing that happened during the whole of the night. The Shepherd was one of the stewards, and in every point of view he must have expected some particular