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 BY SIR GEORGE 
 DOUGLAS 
 
 FAMOUS 
 •SCOTS' 
 •SERIES' 
 
LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 r, ^ 
 
JAMES 
 HOGG 
 
FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES 
 
 The following Volumes are now ready : — 
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. By Hector C. Macpherson. 
 
 ALLAN RAMSAY. By Oliphant Smeaton. 
 
 HUGH MILLER. By W. Keith Leask. 
 
 JOHN KNOX. By A. Taylor Innes. 
 
 ROBERT BURNS. By Gabriel Setoun. 
 
 THE BALLADISTS. By John Geddie. 
 
 RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor Herkless. 
 
 SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By Eve Blantyre Simpson. 
 
 THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. Garden 
 
 Blaikie. 
 JAMES BOSWELL. By W. Keith Leask. 
 TOBIAS SMOLLETT. By Oliphant Smeaton. 
 FLETCHER OF SALTOUN. By G. W. T. Omond. 
 THE "BLACKWOOD" GROUP. By Sir George Douglas. 
 NORMAN MACLEOD. By John Wellwood. 
 SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Professor Saintsbury. 
 KIRKCALDY OF GRANGE. By Louis A. Barbe. 
 ROBERT FERGUSSON. By A. B. Grosart. 
 JAMES THOMSON. By William Bayne. 
 MUNGO PARK. By T. Banks Maclachlan. 
 DAVID HUME. By Professor Calderwood. 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR. By Oliphant Smeaton. 
 SIR WILLIAM WALLACE. By Professor Murison. 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. By Margaret Moyes 
 
 Black. 
 THOMAS REID. By Professor Campbell Fraser. 
 POLLOK AND AYTOUN. By Rosaline Mass>on. 
 ADAM SMITH. By Hector C. Macpherson. 
 ANDREW MELVILLE. By William Morison. 
 JAMES FREDERICK FERRIER. By E. S. Haldane. 
 KING ROBERT THE BRUCE. By A. F. Murison. 
 JAMES HOGG. By Sir George Douglas. 
 
•JAMES 
 HOGG 
 
 BY 
 SIR GEORGE 
 DOUGLAS 
 
 FAMOUS 
 •SCOTS- 
 •SERIES* 
 
 £=S> 
 
 $=2 
 
 PUBLISHED BY W 
 OLIPHANT ANDERSON 
 UTERRIEREDINBVRGH 
 AND LONDON <& <K* 
 
The designs and ornaments of this 
 volume are by Mr Joseph Brown, 
 and the printing from the press of 
 Messrs Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh. 
 
 September 1899. 
 
GO 
 MRS GARDEN, 
 
 THE SURVIVING DAUGHTER OF THE 
 
 ETTRICK SHEPHERD, 
 
 WITH RESPECT AND FELLOW-FEELING. 
 
NOTE 
 
 The scheme of the Series necessitates the 
 inclusion, in one volume with this sketch 
 of Hogg's life, of brief notices of the minor 
 and more or less contemporary poets, Robert 
 Tannahill, William Motherwell, and William 
 Thorn. 
 
JAMES HOGG 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 If there have been many greater poets than the Ettrick 
 Shepherd, there have probably been few more closely 
 associated with a particular district of the earth's surface, 
 more racy of the soil from which they sprung. Herein, 
 perhaps, lie Hogg's limitations ; for, of course, he is local 
 rather than universal, the poet of a class rather than of 
 humanity, of an epoch rather than of the ages. But, 
 accepting these limitations, herein also lies his strength. 
 For there are few instances of the poetry of a particular 
 people and locality being so completely incarnated in one 
 man, and through him passing so directly into literature. 
 Indeed, so essential is the connexion, that a glance at 
 the locality in question, and at its condition a century ago, 
 is indispensable ere we proceed to bring the poet him- 
 self upon the stage. 
 
 The shire of Selkirk, anciently known as Ettrick Forest, 
 the Arcadia of Scotland and the hunting-ground of Scottish 
 kings, is described by the gazetteer as 'forming part of 
 the eastern declivity of that lofty ridge of mountains which 
 from Northumberland penetrates northward into Clydes- 
 dale.' Its surface is but little diversified, appearing, 
 indeed, to the spectator, now that the ancient wood has 
 been removed, but as 'one assemblage of hills.' It is 
 watered by two principal streams, which, flowing in a 
 north-easterly direction and for some distance almost in 
 parallel lines, unite to empty their waters into Tweed. 
 These rivers are the Ettrick and that most tunefully besung 
 
 9 
 
io FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 of rivulets, the Yarrow. The hills are generally rounded 
 in outline and grassy j but at certain points — as on Minch- 
 muir, or at the pass into Moffatdale — they become more 
 rugged and barren, displaying lines which are more striking 
 to the eye and grander. At Ettrick Pen and Blackhouse 
 Heights they rise respectively to 2200 and 2370 feet 
 above sea level. Excepting Selkirk and Galashiels on the 
 eastern limit of the county, there are no towns ; whilst 
 the villages, few and scattered, might be more accurately 
 described as hamlets. In modern times the character of 
 the district is almost purely pastoral, the agricultural 
 produce of the parish of Ettrick — a square of ten miles 
 — being insufficient, according to the Statistical Account 
 of 1792, for the maintenance of its 400 inhabitants. In 
 1 80 1, the population of the entire county — an area of 
 169,000 acres — was but 5388. Of this wide, sparsely- 
 peopled region, the ideal centre is the ' lone ' Loch of St 
 Mary. 
 
 On such a tract of country Time generally lays his hand 
 but lightly, and to the casual observer its character at the 
 present day may appear little modified by change. But 
 it has in reality participated largely in modern improve- 
 ments. Take, for instance, the item of roads. In 1792 
 the roads of Ettrick parish are described as ' almost im- 
 passable.' The only one that looks like a turnpike is that 
 leading to Selkirk ; ' but even it in many places is so deep 
 as greatly to obstruct travelling. The distance is about 
 sixteen miles and it requires four hours to ride it.' In 
 time of snow, we are told that there was often no inter- 
 course with the outside world for many months ; whilst, 
 when the waters were waxen, the want of bridges would 
 often delay a traveller for hours. 1 All this is altered ; nor, 
 of course, does change end here. The country has been, 
 in addition, thoroughly drained ; the breed of sheep, and 
 1 Statistical Account of Scotland, vol. iii. p. 297. 
 
JAMES HOGG n 
 
 with that their management, has been improved. The 
 building of stells and the stacking of bog hay now obviate 
 the necessity of the shepherd's flight in severe weather 
 for shelter and keep for his flocks to the low grounds of 
 Annandale. The system of cropping has also been re- 
 volutionized, excellent buildings have taken the place of 
 cottages of the older type, and the standard of living has 
 in general greatly risen. Dress is no longer of home pro- 
 duce and manufacture. The solitary carrier, and the single 
 newspaper which formerly passed from hand to hand 
 throughout the valley, now belong to the domain of 
 history. And, side by side with these things, many an 
 old custom has passed away. The ewe-milking, the hog 
 hirsel, the folding of the flocks at night, such picturesque 
 and joyous old usages as those described in The Shepherd's 
 Wedding — the broose for the napkin and the mell, the 
 breaking of a short-cake over the bride's head as she enters 
 her new home — all such have passed or are passing. But 
 in the Forest such survivals lingered longer than elsewhere ; 
 and thus it was to Ettrick that Walter Scott, when collect- 
 ing the old Border ballads, turned as to a happy hunting- 
 ground. It was in Ettrick that the fairies were said to 
 have made their last authenticated appearance to a mortal, 
 choosing as the recipient of this signal favour the celebrated 
 Will o' Phaup, the grandsire of the subject of this work. 1 
 It was in Ettrick also, and in Ettrick of the Shepherd's 
 own day, that, certain young men having met together 
 as members of a debating society, and having hap- 
 pened to hold their meeting upon a night which was 
 signalized by one of the most terrific storms recorded in 
 the locality, a report spread abroad that the debaters had 
 raised the devil, who in his turn had raised the storm. 
 Circumstantial detail was not wanting, His Satanic 
 Majesty being said to have appeared in the form of a 
 1 See Hogg's Shepherd's Calendar-. 'Will o' Phaup.' 
 
12 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 1 great rough dog ' ; and it was long, we are assured, ere 
 the persons implicated lived down the obloquy thus in- 
 curred. 
 
 Storms such as the above, the Shepherd tells us, would 
 constitute the eras of the pastoral life : they were ' the 
 red lines in the Shepherd's manual — the remembrancers 
 of years and ages that are past,' standing 'in bloody 
 capitals ' athwart his uneventful annals. Such was that 
 historic tempest in which the shepherds made use of the 
 bodies of their perished sheep to build up huge semi- 
 circular walls for the protection of the living remnant ; or 
 that in which no less than seventeen Border shepherds died 
 in the snow, and upwards of thirty were borne senseless to 
 their homes ; or that, again, whose conclusion saw nigh 
 upon two thousand carcasses deposited upon the Beds of 
 Esk — the spot, that is, on Solway shore where the tide 
 throws up what has been carried into it by the rivers. On 
 such occasions a shepherd caring faithfully for his sheep 
 would take his life in his hand as literally as does a soldier 
 in presence of the enemy. There is a grave in Ettrick 
 Churchyard — that of one who perished thus — which bears 
 the touching epitaph, ' The good shepherd gives his life 
 for the sheep ' j and we do not wonder at Hogg's observa- 
 tion that the daily feeling impressed on the Scottish 
 Shepherd's mind contributes not a little to that firm spirit 
 of religious devotion by which he is so eminently char- 
 acterized. 
 
 Thus, then, the century has brought its changes even 
 to the secluded vales of Ettrick and Yarrow. And, among 
 these changes, surely none is more remarkable than that 
 by which one who a hundred years ago was an unknown 
 shepherd on its hills has come to be recognized as the 
 presiding genius of the district. For certainly the region 
 had not wanted previously for association with picturesque 
 or heroic characters either legendary or historic, — from 
 
JAMES HOGG 13 
 
 the robber ' King of the Borders,' whose ruined castle may 
 be traced on Tushielaw, to the fair ' Flower of Yarrow ' j 
 from the Outlaw Murray to the Young Tamlane, the tragic 
 combatants of the ' dowie dens,' the ill-fated lover of the 
 1 Douglas Tragedy,' or the wonder-working occupant of 
 the ' Jingler's ' room in Aikwood Tower. But to-day the 
 wide green solitudes of the Forest, with their countless 
 fountains and their countless flocks, speak to us only in 
 the second place of these phantoms of old time; for a 
 nearer, warmer and more human presence dispossesses 
 them — a presence, which, pervading the whole district, 
 haunts especially the wilds of Blackhouse, the lowlands of 
 Altrive and of Mount Benger, and the sequestered Church- 
 yard of Ettrick. It is the presence of one of the most 
 original, most self-reliant and most kindly of Scotland's 
 many gifted peasant sons, who was also the unrivalled 
 teller of the twilight tale of bogle, wraith or fairy, and the 
 deviser of pastoral melodies 
 
 ' More tuneable than lark to shepherd's ear, 
 When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear.' 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 The precise date of the Ettrick Shepherd's birth remains 
 unknown. He himself fixed it on the 25th January (the 
 birthday of Burns) in the year 1772; but he was notori- 
 ously inaccurate in regard to figures, and the record of his 
 baptism on December 9th, 1770, which is preserved in 
 the Kirk Session Records of Ettrick, shows it to have 
 taken place at least some fourteen months earlier, suppos- 
 ing, as is probable from the fact of his birthplace being 
 close to the church, that he was baptized early. A draw- 
 ing by the artist D. O. Hill represents that birthplace as a 
 diminutive, picturesquely situated cottage, of the old ' clay 
 and strae ' type, which has now almost been driven out 
 before buildings of stone and slate. 
 
 James Hogg was the second of four sons of Robert 
 Hogg, a shepherd, who, having saved some money, had 
 taken a lease of the farms of Ettrickhouse and Ettrick- 
 hall. Hogg the elder is described as a man of quite 
 ordinary understanding ; but his wife, Margaret Laidlaw, 
 was remarkable not only for spirit and activity, but as 
 a noted repository of ballad, legend, tradition, and the 
 countless minor what-nots of rustic lore, so that probably 
 the annals of genius — prolific as in this respect they are 
 — present few more plausible instances of the influence of 
 a notable mother upon a gifted son. 
 
 Though occupying a modest grade in the social scale, 
 
 the Hoggs were of old and respectable family. Veitch, 
 
 indeed, remarks that though Scott laid claim to gentle 
 
 blood and prided himself upon it more than was neces- 
 
 14 
 
JAMES HOGG 15 
 
 sary, James Hogg had probably as good a claim as he, 
 notwithstanding the fact that his immediate ancestors 
 had fallen socially lower than those of Scott. The 
 Hoggs are said to have claimed descent from Haug, a 
 more or less mythic Viking. At the least, the existence 
 of a marked Scandinavian element among the inhabit- 
 ants of the Border hill-country has been attested by such 
 writers as Veitch and the author of The Border Elliots^ 
 of whom the former believes that light may thence be 
 thrown on the origin of the poet's genius. But, interest- 
 ing as his theory is, it involves matters altogether too 
 remote and problematical to be accepted without great 
 reserve, whilst it must be admitted that the task of ac- 
 
 1 p. 10. Veitch thinks it probable that, as far back as the ninth 
 century, Norwegian settlers spread northward from Cumberland and 
 Dumfries, penetrating, ' apparently by the vales of the Liddel and the 
 Esk, to the watershed of the Cheviots, and to the heights about the 
 head of Ettrick.' They also, thinks he, found their way up Annan- 
 dale, and diverging by the Moffat Water to the east, passed into the 
 vales of the Yarrow, and even of the southern feeders of the Tweed. 
 He goes on to quote from Worsaae's Danes in England a description of 
 the fair Norse type noticed by that writer in the north of England, 
 adding that, had Worsaae visited the hills about Ettrick and Yarrow, 
 he would have found there ' as perfect types of the fair or Norwegian 
 blood as any to be met with in the north of England.' ' In the begin- 
 ning of this century,' he continues, with some looseness, for Hogg was 
 thirty in 1801, 'there might have been seen any day on the braes of 
 Yarrow a shepherd lad with features, hair, and frame of body as like 
 Worsaae's description of the typical Scandinavian as could well be 
 found. In him, too, there were thrilling ideals and weird imaginings, 
 such as might have moved in the heart of any Skald ; and he bore a 
 name which might very fairly be regarded as indicating the Norwegian 
 blood ; for the Ettrick Shepherd was not named from the hog of the 
 hillside, but from the haug or haig of the old northern tongue, as the 
 lairds of Bemerside carried it honourably through the long centuries 
 of Scottish story. {History and Poetry of the Scottish Border ; vol. i, 
 pp. 83, 84; 87,88.) 
 
1 6 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 counting for nature's marvels is at best an unsatisfactory 
 one, with a general tendency to end in 'arguing in a 
 circle.' Suffice it, then, here to say that the tale of the 
 Norwegian origin of his family appealed to Hogg himself 
 at least in so far as to lead him to celebrate his supposed 
 Viking ancestor in the poem of the Pilgrims of the Sun. 
 
 Coming further down in the centuries, Hogg's ancestors 
 — to quote his own account of the matter — were vassals, 
 under the Scotts of Harden, on the lands of Fauldshope, 
 about four miles south-west of Selkirk. This feudal con- 
 nection lasted more than two centuries, only ending with 
 a change of proprietors, 1 whilst its closeness is expressed 
 in the moss-trooping rhyme — 
 
 1 If ye reive the Hoggs of Fauldshope, 
 Ye harry Harden's gear. ' 
 
 The Hoggs are also said to have held under the lairds 
 of Oakwood — once, according to tradition, a residence of 
 the 'Wizard' Michael Scot. Readers of Scott's Lay of 
 the Last Minstrel will remember the legend of a trial 
 of strength between the Witch of Fauldshope and her 
 neighbour of Oakwood; 2 but Hogg, who certainly had 
 a taste for ornamental genealogy-making, claims to have 
 had several witches among his ancestresses. A far more 
 solid and real personage is his maternal grandfather, 
 William Laidlaw, whose tombstone, erected by his famous 
 grandson. in Ettrick Churchyard, records him as 'the far- 
 famed Will o' Phaup, who for feats of frolic, agility, and 
 strength, had no equal in his day.' On the same stone 
 the place and date of birth of the poet's father are given 
 as Bowhill, 1720 ; those of his mother as Old Overphaup, 
 1730. The former lived to the age of 92 ; the latter to 
 82. Well ! we are all of old descent, but it is only those 
 
 1 Domestic Manners of Sir Walter Scott, p. 20. 
 
 2 See Note Y to the poem. 
 
JAMES HOGG 17 
 
 among us who happen to be rich who have opportunities 
 of substantiating the fact. At the lowest estimate, Hogg's 
 lineage was a thing to be proud of, for it is beyond 
 dispute that he was sprung of peasants of sound physical 
 constitution and of honourable life. His earlier pro- 
 genitors had, at least for many a day, been all shepherds 
 of the country-side. 
 
 We have already seen that the poet's father had raised 
 himself from the degree of shepherd to that of sheep- 
 farmer. For a time he drove large flocks to market on 
 both sides the Border. But his position must have been 
 at all times somewhat of an anxious one, and a heavy fall 
 in prices, coupled with the absconding of his principal 
 creditor, reduced him in a few years to bankruptcy. He 
 was ' rouped,' and with his family turned out of doors, and 
 but for the firm friendship of a neighbour, Mr Brydon of 
 Crosslee, things had gone hardly with them. This gentle- 
 man, however, intervened by taking a lease of Ettrickhall 
 and placing the late farmer there as shepherd, thus giving 
 him the means of supporting his family. Mr Brydon's 
 kindness was gratefully commemorated long afterwards in 
 one of the poems of the ' Ettrick Shepherd's ' first volume. 
 
 The elder Hogg's reverses, happening before his gifted 
 son had reached the age of six, seriously interfered with 
 the boy's education. The fortunate accident that there 
 was a school close to his father's door had enabled the 
 child already to secure a short period of tuition, during 
 which he had advanced to the head of a juvenile class 
 who read the Shorter Catechism and the Book of Proverbs. 
 But, at the Whitsunday following his father's failure, 
 pressure of circumstance set young James, still in his 
 seventh year, to the task of herding a few cows for a 
 neighbouring farmer — a service for which he received the 
 half-year's wage of a ewe-lamb and a pair of shoes. During 
 the following winter-quarter he was again at school, where 
 
 B 
 
1 8 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 he received his first lessons in writing. And here, once 
 and for all, his academic education terminated : whatever 
 else he learnt was studied in the school of the world, 
 and under that best of all possible masters — so he be 
 willing for the task — himself. 
 
 Many years afterwards, as a young man, having occasion 
 to send a note to his brother, he discovered that he had 
 forgotten how to form some of the letters of the alphabet, 
 which he was thus compelled to copy from a printed 
 book. Meantime his own particular bent of fancy drew 
 its sole nourishment from his mother, who (as his brother 
 William has recorded) would often keep her boys quiet, 
 while she got forward with her household work, by telling 
 them stories of kings, giants, knights, fairies, kelpies and 
 brownies. She also tuned their ears to metre by repeating 
 to them the metrical psalms, which she in turn made them 
 repeat to her. Whilst he was herding cows, little James 
 found his favourite recreation in running races against 
 time upon the green hillsides of Ettrick, and as he would 
 often strip to the skin for this exercise, and on one occa- 
 sion lost plaid, bonnet, coat and hosen, he must at times 
 have appeared quite literally in the character of a child 
 of nature. 
 
 After continuing for some years in that humblest of all 
 occupations of rural life, he was at length promoted to 
 keep sheep. But ere this time, and whilst still at the 
 tender age of eight, he assures us that he had already 
 known the influence of the gentle passion. The story, 
 told in his own words, will bear comparison with the 
 pleasing idyll of the first love of Robert Burns: — 'That 
 summer,' as he writes in his Autobiography, ' I was sent 
 out to a height called Broad-heads with a rosy-cheeked 
 maiden to herd a flock of new-weaned lambs, and I had 
 my mischievous cows to herd besides. But, as she had 
 no dog and I had an excellent one, I was ordered to 
 
JAMES HOGG 19 
 
 keep close by her. Never was a master's order better 
 obeyed. Day after day I herded the cows and the lambs 
 both, and Betty had nothing to do but to sit and sew. Then 
 we dined together every day at a well near to the Shiel- 
 sike head, and after dinner I laid my head down on her 
 lap, covered her bare feet with my plaid, and pretended to 
 fall sound asleep. One day I heard her say to herself, 
 " Poor little laddie ! he's juist tired to death," and then I 
 wept till I was afraid she would feel the warm tears trickling 
 on her knee. I wished my master, who was a handsome 
 young man, would fall in love with her and marry her, 
 wondering how he could be so blind and stupid as not 
 to do it. But I thought if I were he, I would know well 
 what to do.' 
 
 By the time he was fifteen, young James had served 
 under a dozen masters ; but, lest the frequent changes 
 implied by this fact be imputed to him for blame, he tells 
 us that these were due to growing strength and powers, 
 which kept ever fitting him for superior employments. 
 He adds that no one of his masters ever refused him a re- 
 commendation ; and that, in recommending him, they were 
 wont to touch especially upon the inoffensiveness of his 
 character — a distinction which he claims to have retained 
 as long as he remained in service. On the other hand, the 
 usage which he received from certain of his masters was 
 hard, — under one shepherd in particular he complains of 
 being often well-nigh exhausted by labour and famished for 
 want, All this we can believe from experiences recounted 
 to ourselves by persons who have served in a like capacity 
 — experiences, it may be, of little acts of rigour, or of 
 generosity withheld, which to a lad make all the difference 
 at the time. And yet it is undeniable that, under such 
 discipline, buirdly chiels and clever hizzies were bred up. 
 His pittance of wage he would carry at once to his parents, 
 who in turn supplied his clothes. But these were often 
 
so FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 extremely ragged — his shirts, of which he had generally 
 but two, hanging down 'in long tassels' to his heels, whilst 
 his trews displayed a tendency to start away from his upper 
 garment. At this time his bed was invariably made in 
 stables and cow-houses. 
 
 During all these years he wrote not at all, and read in 
 no book save the Bible, of which his favourite portion was 
 the Psalms, most of which he got by heart. At fifteen years 
 of age he invested five shillings, saved from his wages, in 
 the purchase of a fiddle, which henceforth afforded his 
 favourite amusement. His hours of practice were, perforce, 
 when the day's work was over, but sleeping as he did in 
 the stable-loft, he needed to be under no apprehension 
 lest his nocturnes should prove a nuisance to his neigh- 
 bours, — his sole hearers, like those of the inspired Gal- 
 wegian, Nicholson on a memorable occasion, being four- 
 footed. One night, however, while he was serving with a 
 Mr Scott of Singlee, there had been a party at the farm- 
 house, at which Hogg, who had been admitted as a spectator, 
 had been much 'taken up' with the dance-music. On retir- 
 ing to his loft, he was loth to close an eye before trying 
 over on his own account some of the tunes to which he 
 had listened. Whilst he was thus engaged, the authorized 
 fiddler, happening to come out of the house, was surprised 
 to hear his tunes repeated, he guessed not by whom. His 
 brain was probably somewhat heated, for he at first inclined 
 to believe that the music of an hour before still beat in 
 his head. But becoming assured of the reality of the 
 sounds, whilst wholly at a loss to account for their exist- 
 ence in the wilderness, he believed himself a dupe of the 
 devil, and fled wildly back into the hall, where his disordered 
 appearance and attire evoked mirth and an explanation. 
 This anecdote, told by the Shepherd himself, shows us 
 that in the Forest of a century ago the devil had not yet 
 parted with his power to terrify. 
 
JAMES HOGG 21 
 
 On leaving Singlee, he took service with a Mr Laidlaw 
 at Elibank, on the Tweed below Innerleithen, on which 
 farm he performed a man's work — thrashing, driving 
 horses and the like — and in consequence found life 
 pleasanter than heretofore. He remained there three 
 half-years — a term longer than usual, and then passed 
 into the employment of his late master's father, at 
 Willanslee, in the parish of Innerleithen, where he stayed 
 two years. The young man had now entered upon the 
 calling which in his family might be regarded as heredi- 
 tary, and the surroundings amid which he exercised it 
 were ideally pastoral ; for the old farm-house of ' sweet 
 Willanslee,' as it is called by the author of Young Ra?idal, 
 is placed at the base of hills high and wide-spreading, 
 green and secluded, freshened by many streamlets which 
 discharge their waters into Leithen. Here the youthful 
 shepherd's means of mental development, though still sadly 
 scanty, were less painfully stinted than before. Here he 
 first read, and grew 'immoderately fond' of, The Gentle 
 Shepherd, and Blind Harry's Wallace, in the version of 
 Hamilton of Gilbertneld. But the immense difficulties 
 by which his studies were attended may be judged from 
 the fact that, having nearly lost the little knowledge of 
 reading he had once possessed, the Scots dialect 'quite 
 confounded' him; and that, much addicted to rhyming 
 as he was later to become, he would often wish that these 
 books had been written in prose, or at least in the metre 
 of the Psalms, that they might be with less fatigue under- 
 stood. He read so slowly as generally to have lost one 
 rhyme before he came to the next, whilst a triplet was 
 quite too much for him, leading him to conclude that 
 the poet — at end of his resources as such — had lapsed 
 willy-nilly into prose. Sometimes he was less fortunate 
 in the books which fell into his hands — among which, 
 Bishop Burnet's TJieory of the Earth's Conflagration, lent 
 
22 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 him by his master's wife, as he says almost turned his 
 brain. All day he pondered on the millennium, and all 
 night dreamed of the stars in horror and the world in 
 flames. The same lady would also lend him an occasional 
 newspaper, which he used to peruse straight through, from 
 headline to printer's name, being often but little wiser at 
 the end. His was, in fact, an extreme instance of the old 
 story of the pursuit of Knowledge under difficulties, and 
 its details would be infinitely pathetic, did not one recall 
 the cheering fact that difficulties are often good for us, 
 and that what has been overcome in the face of difficulty 
 is all the more surely and irrevocably won. It was at this 
 time that he became aware of having forgotten how to 
 write correctly. But, even at a considerably later period, 
 he never sat down to commit a song to paper without 
 first removing his coat and waistcoat, as if for some 
 unusual exertion j whilst the rapid cramping of his wrist 
 prevented his writing more than some four to six lines at 
 a sitting. 
 
 At Whitsunday 1790, when in his twentieth year and 
 still striving to improve his condition, young Hogg left 
 Willanslee, and engaged with a distant cousin of his 
 mother's — a Mr Laidlaw of Blackhouse, on the Douglas 
 burn in Yarrow, whose farm was to be his home 
 for the next ten years. Here he found more of mental 
 stimulus than before, and his mind developed more freely. 
 In the first place, the kindness of his employer was, as he 
 says, more that of a father than of a master ; and in that 
 employer's son, William Laidlaw — now known to fame as 
 the author of Lucy's Flitting, and to history as the trusted, 
 loved amanuensis of Sir Walter Scott — he found that 
 greatest of all treasures to a young poet, a sympathetic 
 and appreciative friend. For, long after he had over- 
 come the early difficulties of scholarship, Hogg had to 
 contend against deaf irresponsiveness on the part of all 
 
JAMES HOGG 23 
 
 around him — of all, that is, save Laidlaw, whose generous 
 belief sustained and supported him, giving reality to the 
 first out-pourings of his muse. For a song has no true 
 birth in the world of realities till it reaches the ear and 
 heart of some sympathetic hearer. 
 
 In the second place, the young student had access to 
 the valuable collection of books belonging to his employer, 
 which included the works of Milton, Pope, Thomson and 
 Young, and to the study of which he now applied him- 
 self, with the result that he soon began to wish to com- 
 pose upon his own account. His first serious attempt 
 to write verse was not made until 1793 1 — in spring, the 
 song-season of the year. But his ' low preamble ' had in 
 it nothing of nature's spontaneity, for, by his own de- 
 scription, it consisted of a laboured and fulsome epistle, 
 abounding in lines and phrases which were borrowed from 
 Dryden's Virgil and Harvey's Life of Bruce, and addressed 
 to a divinity student of his acquaintance. The first 
 rhymes he composed which were really his own were 
 entitled An Address to the Ditke of Buccleuch, i?i behaf o' 
 myseV and ither poor Fock, which, after a world of pains, 
 he followed up, in the same year, with a song called The 
 Way that the World goes on, and an eclogue — Wattie and 
 Geordie's Foreign Intelligence. These, together, made 
 up a year's work; but, as, once started, the poet con- 
 tinued to write upon every occasion — a conversation with 
 a havering old woman from Lochaber of itself sufficing 
 to suggest a ballad and a 'pastoral in four parts' — his 
 compositions now multiplied rapidly. He was at no time 
 addicted to self-depreciation, and as he frankly character- 
 izes these early productions as ' miserably bad,' we need 
 the less regret their disappearance. In 1795 ne began 
 The Scotch Gentleman, a comedy in five long acts, sug- 
 
 1 Memoir prefixed to The Mountain Bard, p. xi. 
 
 \ . OF 
 
24 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 gested by the trial of some fishers for a bieach of the fish- 
 ing-laws, at which he had himself been called as a witness. 
 This was, at any rate, in advance of its time in being 
 ' realistic,' and founded upon ' documents,' to the extent 
 of reproducing word for word many of the questions asked 
 and answers given in Court ; and, whatever its merits, he 
 tells us that at least it never failed, when read aloud, to 
 set an Ettrick audience in a roar, though whether they 
 laughed with the author or at him he professes to be un- 
 certain. 
 
 Much more interesting, however, than the record of these 
 crude beginnings is the picture of the shepherd-poet at 
 his work. His apparatus was of his own devising. Having 
 folded and stitched together a few sheets of paper, he 
 suspended from a buttonhole of his waistcoat a small 
 phial of ink, having the cork attached by a string, and 
 thus equipt went about his pastoral duties, seizing every 
 moment he could spare from the care of his flock for 
 poetical pursuits. Throw in as background to this figure 
 the still summer air and the wide solitary world of hills, 
 soothing the eye with verdure and soft hazes, the ear 
 with bleating of far-off flocks and trickling of hidden 
 streams, and the picture grows as impressive, and for the 
 Border Scot as classic, as that of the young Hesiod keep- 
 ing his flocks upon the slopes of Helicon, or any other 
 whatever in the realm of literature. 
 
 It must not be assumed, however, that, even in the 
 narrow world in which his lot was cast, young Hogg's com- 
 munings with the Muse were altogether singular. The 
 association of the pastoral life with poetry is no mere 
 fiction or convention of Poetics ; and the present writer has 
 been informed by one whose business as a wool-buyer 
 took him, forty or fifty years ago, much into the outlying 
 districts of Tynedale and Liddesdale that, even at that date, 
 it was not uncommon for shepherds to treat their guests to 
 
JAMES HOGG 25 
 
 specimens of the native skill in numbers. 1 The fol- 
 lowing incident, narrated by Hogg himself, shows that 
 emulation in song was not unknown to him. ' In the 
 spring of the year 1796, 2 as Alexander Laidlaw, a neigh- 
 bouring shepherd, my brother William, and myself, were 
 resting on the side of a hill above Ettrick Church, I 
 happened, in the course of our conversation, to drop 
 some hints of my superior talents in poetry. William 
 said that, as to putting words into rhyme, it was a thing 
 which he never could do to any sense ; but that if I liked 
 to enter the lists with him in blank verse, he would take 
 me up for any bet that I pleased. Laidlaw declared that 
 he would venture likewise. This being settled, and the 
 judges named, I accepted the challenge.' Here are we, 
 then, in the midst of Virgil's Third Eclogue. A dispute, 
 however, arising as to the subject of this modern Sanger- 
 streit, lots were cast, which determined the matter in 
 favour of ' The Stars ' — objects of which, as Hogg con- 
 fesses, the rival poets knew little but that 'they were 
 burning and twinkling over us, and to be seen every night 
 when the clouds were away.' Hogg set to work with 
 enthusiasm, and had his poem ready in a week. Laidlaw 
 
 1 Alas, that universal locomotion, together with the influence of 
 a too practical age, have dealt the death-blow to a charming colloca- 
 tion ! At the Annual Dinner of Border Shepherds, held at Yetholm 
 in the Cheviots, the eye is still satisfied by the sight of as fine a 
 gathering of men and dogs as could be desired. But there is no longer 
 any thought of native inspiration ; the songs sung after dinner are of 
 the type familiar in more vulgar localities, and known as ' songs of the 
 day.' Even the old ballads are neglected, and if one would hear 
 them sung— as they should be sung — to the old music, one must 
 cultivate the acquaintance of a yet shyer and less sophisticated set of 
 men — to wit, the fishermen of the smaller fishing-towns. 
 
 2 The date is taken from the edition of the Autobiography published 
 in 1807. The edition of 1832 puts the event two years later. The matter 
 is unimportant, but is pointed out as one of several discrepancies, 
 
26 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 followed a week later, but the dilatoriness of Alexander 
 Hogg delayed the judgment a half-year. Even then his 
 composition was presented in an unfinished state, but, 
 though the matter was never properly adjudged, the 
 balance of opinion inclined to award him the prize. In 
 Hogg's opinion, besides being in bad measure the poem 
 was often bombastical, yet in the sublimity of its ideas 
 it was far superior to either of the others. It was entitled 
 Urania s Tour, whilst that of Laidlaw was Astronomical 
 Thoughts, and Hogg's Re/lections on a View of the Nocturnal 
 Heavens. It is easy to smile over these somewhat heavy- 
 handed endeavours after self-culture, but the smile of the 
 reader who bears the attending circumstances in mind will 
 be at least innocent of derision. After this Hogg tried his 
 hand again against Laidlaw, in a metrical version of the 
 117th Psalm. 
 
 Besides these poetical contests, the young men named 
 above, with the addition of Hogg's elder brother, William, 
 and a few others, had formed together a species of literary 
 society, for the purpose of reading essays and discussing 
 them. In the paper on ' Storms ' in his Shepherd's 
 Calendar, the Ettrick Shepherd has left a graphic account 
 of his own endeavour, on the eve of a great snow-storm, 
 to make his way across the hills to Entertony, nearly 
 twenty miles from Blackhouse, where one of these meetings 
 was to be held. Though most anxious to communicate 
 a bombastic essay which he carried in his pocket, his 
 endeavour had finally to be abandoned. 
 
 These were the halcyon days of James Hogg's life. 
 And think not, reader, that the hard-handed son of toil is 
 of necessity a stranger to the 'deep Sabbath of meek 
 self-content,' or to the highest thought. A few years 
 later, another young Border shepherd, Henry Scott 
 Riddell, who afterwards became a friend of Hogg, kept 
 sheep within the neighbouring district of Buccleuch. Let 
 
JAMES HOGG 27 
 
 me transcribe as typical the passage in which he has painted 
 the feelings and fancies of a thoughtful and poetic shepherd 
 who spends his days alone with nature : — 
 
 1 Owing to the nature of the stock kept on the farm, 
 it was my destiny day after day to be out among the 
 mountains during the whole summer season from early 
 morn till the fall of even. But the long summer days, 
 whether clear or cloudy, never seemed long to me — I 
 never wearied among the wilds. My flocks being hirskd 
 [divided into classes] required vigilance ; but, if this was 
 judiciously maintained, the task was for the most part an 
 easy and pleasant one. I know not if it be worth while 
 to mention that the hills and glens on which my charge 
 pastured at this period formed a portion of what in 
 ancient times was termed the Forest of Rankleburn. 
 The names of places in the district, though there were no 
 other more intelligible traditions, might serve to show 
 that it is a range of country to which both kings and 
 nobles had resorted. If from morning to night I was 
 away far from the homes of living men, I was not so in 
 regard to those of the dead. Where a lesser stream from 
 the wild uplands comes down and meets the Rankleburn, 
 a church or chapel once stood, surrounded, like most 
 other consecrated places of the kind, by a burial-ground. 
 There tradition says that five dukes, some say kings, lie 
 buried under a marble stone. I had heard that Sir Walter, 
 then Mr Scott, had, a number of years previously, made 
 a pilgrimage to this place, for the purpose of discovering 
 the sepulchres of the great and nearly forgotten dead, but 
 without success. This, however, tended, in my estima- 
 tion, to confirm the truth of the tradition ; and having 
 enough of time and opportunity, I made many a toilsome 
 effort of a similar nature, with the same result. With 
 hills around, wild and rarely trodden, and the ceaseless 
 yet ever-varying tinkling of its streams, together with the 
 
28 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 mysterious echoes which the least stir seemed to awaken, 
 the place was not only lonely, but also creative of strange 
 apprehensions, even in the hours of open day. It is 
 strange that the heart will fear the dead, which, perhaps, 
 never feared the living. Though I could muster and 
 maintain courage to dig perseveringly among the dust of 
 the long-departed when the sun shone in the sky, yet 
 when the shadow of night was coming, or had come down 
 upon the earth, the scene was sacredly secure from all 
 inroad on my part.' 
 
 Among scenes and surroundings similar to these it was 
 that the Ettrick Shepherd drank in those powers which 
 were afterwards to make him an unrivalled master of the 
 weird, or eerie, in literature. Nor were his own particular 
 surroundings lacking in traditions of their own — the farm of 
 Blackhouse being itself the reputed scene of the elopement 
 of the beautiful lady Margaret Douglas, with the pursuit, 
 the slaying of her seven brothers, and the subsequent 
 death of her lover, as related in the ballad of the Douglas 
 Tragedy : — 
 
 1 Lord William was dead lang ere midnight, 
 
 Lady Marg'ret lang ere day — 
 And all true lovers that go thegither, 
 
 May they have mair luck than they ! 
 
 1 Lord William was buried in St Marie's kirk, 
 Lady Margaret in Mary's quire, 
 Out o' the lady's grave grew a bonny red rose, 
 And out o' the knight's a briar. 
 
 1 And they twa met, and they twa plat, 
 
 And fain they wad be near ; 
 And a' the warld might ken right weel, 
 They were twa lovers dear.' 
 
 Not idly would appeal to an ear and eye such as the 
 Shepherd's the music of these verses, or the daily sight 
 of the ruined tower, the torrent in the wild and solitary 
 
JAMES HOGG 29 
 
 glen, the broken shrine, and the stones set up on the 
 neighbouring moor to mark the spot where the brothers 
 fell. 
 
 But, in order to complete the picture, it is necessary 
 that we should know what manner of man the poet was 
 outwardly; and, by good fortune, a pen portrait by his 
 friend William Laidlaw exists to show us this : — ' His face 
 was fair, round, and ruddy, with big blue eyes that beamed 
 with humour, gaiety, and glee. And he was not only 
 then, but throughout his chequered life, blessed with 
 strong health and the most exuberant animal spirits. 
 His height was a little above the average size, his form 
 at that period was of faultless symmetry, which nature 
 had endowed with almost unequalled agility and swiftness 
 of foot. His head was covered with a singular profusion 
 of light brown hair, which he usually wore coiled up under 
 his hat. When he used to enter church on Sunday, (of 
 which he was at all times a regular attendant), after lifting 
 his hat, he used to raise his right hand to his hair to 
 assist a shake of his head, when his long hair fell over 
 his loins [shoulders ?], and every female eye at least was 
 turned upon him, as with a light step he ascended to the 
 gallery where he usually sat.' 
 
 It is now that we may suppose him to have reached 
 that stage of early poetic maturity of which he tells us, 
 when the lasses would sing his songs and ballads in 
 chorus, whilst he tasted the pride and delight of hearing 
 the 'rosy nymphs' chanting his 'uncouth strains,' and 
 jeering him by the ' dear appellation of Jamie the Poeter.' 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 In the version of the Autobiography prefixed to his Altrive 
 Tales (1832), the Ettrick Shepherd observes that readers 
 who may desire to read about his youthful love-adventures 
 will find ' some of the best ' of them in those of George 
 Cochrane, a character in the tales which follow. But, 
 having thus whetted our curiosity, he fails to satisfy it ; for, 
 in the tales published, no character of that name appears. 
 Failing health probably prevented the bringing out of 
 a second volume of the series ; but, at any rate, if the 
 amours of George Cochrane were ever committed to 
 paper, they did not see the daylight of publication. 
 Those who incline to such exercises of the fancy may 
 please themselves by believing that they detect some 
 reminiscence of actual speech of Hogg's in the rather 
 pretty passage of the Nodes Ambrosiance (March 1827), 
 where Wilson's ideal Shepherd, speaking of wells, adverts 
 to one well in particular j — ' ae spring there is — in a 
 nook known but to me and anither, a bit nook greener 
 than ony emerald — or even the Queen Fairy's symar, as 
 she disentangles it frae her feet in the moonlight dance, 
 enclosed wi' laigh broomy rocks, amaist like a sheep- 
 fauld. . . .' This nook is introduced as the trysting- 
 place in youth of Wilson's Daphnis and a Chloe whose 
 age was but two months past fifteen, — 'she had haply 
 reached her full stature, and was somewhat taller than 
 the maist o' our Forest lassies, yet you saw at once that 
 she was still but a bairn.' The pure and tender affection 
 of these young lovers who scarcely know themselves for 
 
JAMES HOGG 31 
 
 such is described in an idyllic passage, which is compara- 
 tively free from Wilson's characteristic timidity of style 
 and slight sickliness of sentiment — a circumstance which 
 might perhaps be made to favour the theory of a reminis- 
 cence of Hogg's conversation. But, however this may 
 be, it certainly behoves us to remember that, as a general 
 rule, it is not only misleading, but unjust to the real 
 Shepherd, to confound him with his counterfeit presentment 
 of the ' Nights at Ambrose's.' Before leaving the subject 
 of the tender passion, we may add that the pastoral of 
 Willie and Keatie, published in Hogg's first volume, is 
 acknowledged by the author as being to some extent 
 founded upon a love affair of his own. 
 
 Events, beyond those of mere personal experience, there 
 had so far been few or none in young Hogg's life. The 
 existence in the vale of Yarrow in which he bore his share 
 was an existence apart — peaceful, secluded, self-contained, 
 and almost cut off from the outer world. Almost, as yet 
 not entirely ; for in those days, as for long afterwards, the 
 Border shepherd was still in the habit of making long 
 journeys on foot, to drive his flock to distant markets. 
 Many yet living have described these journeys to the author 
 — with their delights and difficulties, — the housing for the 
 night, it might be upon the top of Minchmoor, with no 
 shelter but a plaid, or the waking in the dales of York- 
 shire, to see the whole green country around turned white 
 with the flocks driven thither to some great sale. The 
 name of the Drovers' Plots, applied to a small wayside 
 field near Yetholm, recall the practice to this day. Ere 
 this, Hogg had made such journeys, having in 1793 
 extended his knowledge of the country by driving a 
 flock of his master's to Strathfillan in Perthshire. Yet, 
 notwithstanding this, how sequestered from the world 
 his life at this time really was is well brought out by 
 an incident which now falls to be recorded. In the 
 
32 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 year 1786 — ten years, that is, before the date at which' 
 our narrative has now arrived — a young peasant, or small 
 tenant-farmer, from the West had, by sheer force of 
 native genius, set Scotland ringing with his name — | 
 being acclaimed and feted in the capital as no man j 
 of his station and antecedents had ever been before. 
 A reaction promptly followed this enthusiasm ; yet, at 
 any time during the ten years which still separated 
 Robert Burns from his miserable end, his name must 
 have been apt to occur in conversation wherever two 
 or three were together. This on the strength of the 
 purely external aspects of the phenomenon; for the 
 number of persons inclined to concern themselves with 
 its inner significance would as yet be, naturally, but 
 small. And yet echoes of the acclamations of literary 
 Edinburgh had failed to travel over the intervening thirty 
 miles or so, even to the comparatively cultivated house- 
 hold of Blackhouse, and it was not until 1797, the year 
 following the Ayrshire poet's death, that Hogg first 
 heard his name. The manner and immediate conse- 
 quences of his doing so were sufficiently dramatic. 
 
 One day when he was keeping his sheep as usual, 
 a certain Jock Scott, who is described as 'half-daft,' 
 came to him on the hill-side — perhaps the dark heathery 
 slope of Blackhouse Heights — and to wile away the time 
 repeated to him the poem of Tarn Sha?iter. The 
 effect upon Hogg was electrical — ' I was delighted ! ' 
 he cries, in his reminiscences, c I was far more than 
 delighted — I was ravished ! I cannot describe my 
 feelings.' And then, in answer doubtless to eager 
 questions, the haverel — who surely himself possessed 
 a touch of power — informed him that the poem had 
 been made 'by one Robert Burns, the sweetest poet 
 that ever was born ' ; but that he had died { last har- 
 vest,' and his place would never be supplied. Other 
 
JAMES HOGG 33 
 
 facts about his life were added, and — the season being 
 summer, when there was no great pressure of work — 
 ere Hogg left the hill he had Tarn d Shanter by heart. 
 It remained his favourite poem during the rest of his 
 life. 
 
 But this was by no means the end of the incident, 
 so far as he was concerned. The revelation of Burns's 
 verses and life-story had come to him in the fulness of 
 time, and with it his own genius entered upon a new 
 phase of development. Hitherto, as Jamie the Poeter, 
 he had sung in the main 'but as the linnets sing' — 
 instinctively, as his brother shepherds did, only perhaps 
 with somewhat more of assiduity and of acceptance. 
 But, henceforth, a deeper purpose underlay his reverie, 
 a more hazardous ambition inspired his life. Every 
 day, as he tells us, he 'pondered on the genius and 
 the fate of Burns.' And then he would weep, and 
 continually think within himself, ' What is to hinder 
 me from succeeding Burns ? ' Anon he recollected 
 that there were some points at which he had the 
 advantage. He had, for instance, much more time to 
 read and compose than any ploughman could have, 
 and could sing more old songs than ever ploughman 
 could in the world. But then, again, his difficulty in 
 writing would depress him. Such were, in his case, 
 the alternating aches and transporting uncertainties of 
 the delicious period of adolescence and the excess of 
 life. Many a young man of talent has known the like. 
 But that James Hogg lived to overcome enormous 
 difficulties, to rise from perfect obscurity to eminence, 
 and to make good his dream of ranking among peasant 
 poets as second to Burns, is enough to entitle him, 
 even in the estimation of such as care only for what 
 is practical, to a place among famous Scots. 
 
 Hogg has left some interesting particulars as to his 
 c 
 
34 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 method of composition, which seems to have remained 
 practically unaltered through life. When writing prose, 
 he tells us that he was powerless to frame a single sentence 
 until he had the pen in his hand, to catch the ideas as 
 they arose, and that having once set down his thoughts, 
 he never made a second copy. When making poetry, on 
 the other hand, his method was — let the piece be of what 
 length it would — to compose and correct it wholly in his 
 mind, or on a slate, ere he put pen to paper, and then to 
 write it off — after which he could rarely be brought to 
 alter a syllable. His friend Laidlaw, whose taste was finer 
 than his, repeatedly represented to him the desirability of 
 revising his pieces ; but Hogg was not to be persuaded. 
 He would reply that he would write the next piece better ; 
 but that this should remain as it was. In 1800, he began 
 and completed the two first acts of a tragedy, bearing the 
 Radclififian title of The Castle in the Wood, which with 
 much self-complacency he submitted to his literary 
 adviser. But Laidlaw, in the tiresome manner char- 
 acteristic of such functionaries, pronounced the effort 
 'faulty in the extreme,' and, on returning it, was found 
 to have scored through several of the most elaborate of 
 its speeches. The poet cursed his friend's stupidity, and, 
 throwing the tragedy aside, never afterwards added a line 
 to it. 
 
 Hogg has told us that, so happy was he at Blackhouse, 
 that, but for external circumstances, he might have passed 
 the rest of his life there. His brother William was now 
 assisting their father in the management of the small farm 
 of Ettrickhouse, in which the old man would appear to 
 have reinstated himself. But, in 1800, William took to 
 himself a wife, and Ettrickhouse not being suited to 
 contain two families, James was recalled to take over 
 his brother's duties. As Robert Hogg was by this time 
 eighty years of age, James became practically the farmer, 
 
OF 
 
 JAMES HOGG ^SdUFOR^u 35 
 
 and this arrangement continued until Whitsunday 1803, 
 or perhaps more probably 1804, when, the lease having 
 expired, the farm was let over the elder Hogg's head. 
 The three years of his second residence at Ettrickhouse 
 were in more than one way eventful in the life of the poet. 
 It was, in fact, at this period that he made what may 
 be described as his first 'hit.' Heretofore he had had no 
 chance of appealing save to an audience of Yarrow hinds 
 and farm-lasses ; but his song of Donald Af c Do?iald, 
 composed upon the prospect of a French invasion, pene- 
 trated beyond the limits of the Forest. It became, in 
 fact, extremely popular, being set to music, engraved, and 
 sung with great applause at social and public gatherings 
 in Edinburgh. Nor was its success confined to Scotland ; 
 for the poet relates that, chancing to visit the theatre of 
 Lancaster, whither probably he had gone with stock, he 
 fount! his own song, in which a variation had been intro- 
 duced, being delivered with great applause from the stage. 
 Not wishing, naturally enough, to lose all credit due to 
 himself as author, he turned to the man who sat next 
 him, and whispered, 'That's ane o' mine's.' But the 
 stranger, a jolly Yorkshireman, beholding in him a man 
 of rugged appearance, swathed in a shepherd's plaid, 
 merely laughed at his assumption and set him down for 
 a Scotsman with a bee in his bonnet. He was by no 
 means the only one to overlook the author's just claims 
 to recognition. At a masonic dinner in Edinburgh, when 
 the song had been sung with loud applause and thrice 
 encored, Lord Moira, who presided, made it the text of a 
 discourse on the utility of patriotic songs at a period of 
 national danger. But it never occurred to his lordship to 
 enquire who was author of this particular song. Worse 
 still was the case of General M c Donald. This gentleman, 
 described as commanding the northern division of the 
 British Army, took such a fancy to the song that he 
 
36 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 caused it to be sung every week-day at the regimental 
 mess, and would snap his fingers and join in the chorus 
 when he heard it. More than this, he believed to his 
 dying day that the song had been made in his honour. 
 And yet he never once asked who had made it ! ' Thank- 
 less,' truly, as Hogg remarks, ' is the poet's trade.' 
 
 But we have already seen that he was not the man to 
 be easily discouraged ; nor was he inclined to submit 
 without an effort to see his claims passed over in silence. 
 Hence his earliest publication. His own account of the 
 circumstances which produced it is that, being constrained 
 to spend the interval between two sales in Edinburgh, in 
 order to dispose of certain unsold sheep, he decided to 
 beguile the tedium of his waiting by having some of his 
 poems put into type. Not having his manuscript with 
 him, he was compelled to select from his compositions 
 those which he best remembered, rather than such as 
 were intrinsically most meritorious, and having consigned 
 these to a printer, and disposed of his sheep, he returned 
 forthwith to his Forest wilds, thinking little more about the 
 matter. This, as has been said, is his own account of the 
 transaction ; but Mr Craig-Brown points out that it was an 
 after-thought, adapted to meet later aspects of the case, 
 and that as a matter of fact the poems had been revised 
 by Laidlaw and another. 1 Early in 1801 2 they duly 
 made their appearance, in a neat volume, bearing the 
 title Scottish Pastorals , Poems ; Songs, etc., Mostly written 
 in the dialect of the South, and the imprint of 'John 
 Taylor, Grassmarket.' This booklet extends to sixty-two 
 pages, and was sold at the price of a shilling. It has 
 been repeatedly described by writers upon Hogg, but 
 
 1 History of Selkirkshire, vol. i. p. 341. 
 
 2 They are referred to, apparently as already published, in the 
 earliest of Hogg's letters which has been preserved, bearing date 
 January 1801. Mrs Garden's Memorials of fames Hogg, p. 36. 
 
JAMES HOGG 37 
 
 copies of it are somewhat rare, and the descriptions 
 mentioned are generally sufficient proof that their writers 
 had never seen what they describe. Of the seven pieces 
 which it contains, the first is a spirited lament for 
 'Geordie Fa',' (evidently one of the Yetholm gipsy 
 Faas), noted in his day as a fiddler and poacher, and for 
 his stout physique and genial manners. The second is 
 an eclogue in which shepherds discuss the times, and the 
 third a pastoral love-tale. These pieces are by no means 
 ill-written, and for vigour, point and spontaneity need not 
 fear comparison with the verse of Ramsay's Gentle Shep- 
 herd. In the Dialogue in a Country Churchyard, written 
 in obvious imitation of Gray, the poet tunes his lyre to a 
 much higher strain, and is less successful in steering clear 
 of bathos, that stumbling-block of rustic singers. 
 
 But innocent, if not positively meritorious, as the little 
 volume was, it became a source of much mortification to 
 poor Hogg, whose venial equivocation as to its origin 
 affords, surely, matter for sympathy rather than censure. 
 In the first place, the printer had not done his work to 
 the author's satisfaction. 1 Then the poet's censorious 
 neighbours chose to take exception to his having styled 
 himself on the title-page a ' tenant-farmer,' when the lease 
 of the farm which he farmed was made out in his brother's 
 name. A sufficiently harmless allusion to Lord Napier, 
 a leading local land-owner, seems to have produced further 
 unpleasantness. Worst of all, the book passed almost 
 unnoticed ; and altogether so disgusted was Hogg with the 
 result of his venture that he himself ' lost conceit ' of the 
 poems, and came to characterize them as 'sad stuff.' It 
 is perhaps the only instance in his career of undue self- 
 depreciation. So acute, indeed, was his chagrin that the 
 1 Hogg speaks of ' typographical errors abounding in every page,' 
 (Autobiography, p. xxiv.), but this is an exaggeration. The Errata 
 mentioned on the fly-leaf are but eight. 
 
38 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 poor poet actually suffered in health, and was constrained 
 to take to his bed. But, if easily elated, easily cast down, 
 Hogg's nature was far too healthy to brood long over the 
 buffets of fortune. The next event in his career was of 
 a far more auspicious character. 
 
 It was in summer of 1802 that he first met Walter 
 Scott, 1 then known to the world chiefly as the author of 
 some ballads and translations from the German, who two 
 or three years earlier had been appointed Sheriff-depute 
 of Selkirkshire. Hogg tells us that he was at work one 
 day in a field on his father's farm, when he received in- 
 timation that some gentlemen desired his immediate 
 presence at Ramseycleuch. One of these was supposed 
 to be the 'Shirra' himself, as Hogg was delighted to 
 hear; for, having seen the first volumes of the Border 
 Minstrelsy^ he had taken down a number of ballads 
 from his mother's singing, and sent them to the editor 
 with a view to their insertion in the forthcoming third 
 volume. But the actual scene of the meeting, like other 
 scenes in his life, can only be done justice to in the words 
 in which he himself describes it : — 
 
 'I accordingly flung down my hoe,' he writes, 'and 
 hasted away home to put on my Sunday clothes, but 
 before reaching it I met the Shirra and Mr William 
 Laidlaw, coming to visit me. They alighted, and re- 
 mained in our cottage a considerable time, perhaps 
 nearly two hours, and we were friends on the very first 
 exchange of sentiments. It could not be otherwise, for 
 Scott had no duplicity about him ; he always said as he 
 thought. My mother chanted the ballad of Old Maitlart 
 
 1 Hogg himself dates the meeting in the summer of 1801 ; but he was 
 generally careless as to dates, and as he says a moment later that he 
 had previously seen the first volumes of the Border Minstrelsy, which 
 were not published until January 1802, we are justified in transferring 
 the incident to the later year. 
 
JAMES HOGG 39 
 
 to him, with which he was highly delighted, and asked 
 her if she thought it ever had been in print. And her 
 answer was : " O na, na, sir, it never was printed i' the 
 world, for my brothers an' me learned it an' mony mae 
 frae auld Andrew Moor, and he learned it frae auld Baby 
 Mettlin, wha was housekeeper to the first Laird of Tushi- 
 law." * This lady was said to have been " another nor a 
 gude ane," about whom many queer stories were told. " But 
 O, she had been a grand singer o' auld songs an' ballads." ' 
 
 Then the clever old peasant-mother, still addressing 
 herself to the Sheriff, went on to say that, 'except- 
 ing George Warton an' James Stewart,' there was never 
 one of her songs printed until he had printed them, and 
 that in so doing he had entirely spoilt them. 'They 
 were made for singing an' no for reading ; but ye hae 
 broken the charm now, an' they'll never be sung mair.' 
 (She was right, for the function of the man-of-letters in 
 regard to tradition is first to kill it, and then to embalm 
 its dead body.) 'An' the worst thing of a',' she added, 
 ' they're nouther right spell'd nor right setten down.' 
 
 ' Take ye that, Mr Scott,' said Laidlaw, to which Scott 
 responded with a hearty laugh. 
 
 Then, says Hogg, ' my mother gave him a hearty rap 
 on the knee with her open hand, and said, "Ye'll find, 
 however, that it is a' true that I'm tellin' ye." ' And he 
 adds, ' My mother has been too true a prophetess, for 
 from that day to this, these songs, which were the amuse- 
 ment of every winter evening, have never been sung more.' 
 
 In this pleasant manner was inaugurated a friendship of 
 which it is pleasing to record that it endured unbroken 
 until the day of Scott's death, nearly thirty years later. Not 
 for a moment is it to be supposed that, during that period, 
 its vitality was not tested, — ay, and pretty severely tested 
 
 1 Mr Craig-Brown explains that the first Anderson of Tushilaw must 
 have been meant. 
 
4 6 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 — by either side. To assert this of any friendship what- 
 ever would probably be to remove it out of the sphere of 
 human things ; but especially must this be the case where 
 two men of such marked individuality as Scott and Hogg 
 were the parties concerned. Be it freely acknowledged, 
 therefore, that on both sides causes of irritation were sup- 
 plied, not once, but repeatedly. But only the more 
 honourable on that account is it to the depth of character 
 and constancy of either party, and through these to human 
 nature, that in the long run these rufflings of the surface 
 were uniformly weathered, and that reciprocal respect for 
 worth and talent triumphantly carried the day. 
 
 But to resume. The interview in the cottage over, Scott 
 and Laidlaw departed to examine some monuments in 
 Ettrick Churchyard — among them, of course, that of ' Four- 
 fold ' Boston. But Hogg met them again in the evening at 
 dinner at Ramseycleuch. During the entertainment, the 
 conversation happened to turn on the rival merits of the 
 Cheviot and the Forest breed of sheep — denominated 
 respectively the long and the short sheep — happened to 
 turn on this subject and to settle there. Now this was not 
 precisely the sort of information that Scott had come into 
 Ettrick Forest in quest of. He grew bored, and, assuming 
 his ■ advocate's manner,' turned to Mr Brydon, the farmer 
 host, and, remarking that he was rather at a loss regarding 
 the merits of this very important question, enquired ' how 
 long a sheep must actually measure to come under the 
 denomination of a long sheep ? ' The farmer fell at once 
 into the trap, and, in all sincerity, hastened to set his 
 questioner right: — 'It's the woo', sir; it's the woo' that 
 mak's the difference. The lang sheep hae the short woo', 
 and the short sheep hae the lang thing, and these are just 
 kind o' names we gie them, ye see.' The simplicity of the 
 reply set the company laughing ; and fourteen years later, 
 when Scott's novel of the Black Dwarf appeared, it was 
 
JAMES HOGG 41 
 
 the discovery of this incident repeated in its opening pages 
 which enabled Hogg to establish for himself the identity 
 of its author. 
 
 Next day the party visited Buccleuch and Mount 
 Comyn — the original possessions, in that district, of the 
 Scott family — where they hoped to discover relics of 
 antiquity. They, however, found nothing, excepting the 
 remains of an old chapel and churchyard, and of a kiln- 
 mill and mill-dam — the latter being inferred by them, as 
 no corn grew in the district, to have been used for grind- 
 ing the tributes in kind brought as 'black-mail' to the 
 chieftain. Among the remains of the chapel a search 
 was made for the blue marble stone — spoken of here as 
 a font — which was searched for at a later date by Scott 
 Riddell. 1 Finding, however, that at the spot where the 
 altar had stood, the debris had been dug out to the 
 foundations, the seekers concluded that someone had 
 forestalled them in their search. The castles of Tushilaw 
 and Thirlestane were also visited. The picture drawn 
 by Hogg of Scott as he appeared at this period is 
 extremely pleasing. The Sheriff, now in the very hey-day 
 of his strength and manhood, brimmed over with life, 
 high spirits and friendliness, and sat well a high-mettled 
 steed which lost no opportunity of availing itself of the 
 natural difficulties of the country. 
 
 However deeply absorbed in poetical thought, James 
 Hogg was too true to his nature as a Lowland Scot to 
 lose sight of the desire to get on in the world, or in other 
 words to better his material condition. By this time he 
 had, as he tells us, made three journeys into the High- 
 lands — one on horseback and two on foot — upon each 
 occasion penetrating further into a district which had at 
 all times a powerful attraction for him ; and it seems that 
 one at least of the objects of these journeys was to estab- 
 1 See above, p. 27. 
 
42 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 lish himself, if not as a farmer on his own account, at least 
 as manager for another. On one of the journeys, having 
 proceeded as far as Harris in the Hebrides, he had been 
 struck by the possibilities of the place as a scene of sheep- 
 farming operations ; x and being about this time cast on 
 the world, through the letting of Ettrick-house over his 
 head, 2 he resolved to invest his capital — consisting of 
 ^200 saved during his ten-years' service at Blackhouse — 
 in taking and stocking a farm in the island. A neighbouring 
 small farmer, who also possessed some capital, became his 
 partner in the speculation, and, in view of his approaching 
 departure, in the spring or early summer of 1804 he penned 
 his Farewell to Ettrick. 
 
 In this poem he dwells fondly on recollections of his 
 childhood, on the aspirations of his early life, and on the 
 many happy moments he has spent in the Forest, and, 
 anticipating the constancy of his attachment to that locality, 
 declares his resolve, if it be denied him to revisit it in life, 
 at least to lay his bones there after death. This conception 
 is, of course, in the main conventional ; yet, as summing up 
 impressions of the writer's early life, the poem is not without 
 biographical interest. An undertone of reproach runs 
 through it, too — like that of a man who feels himself to 
 have been hardly dealt by, or neglected ; and the lines — 
 
 1 Ye'll maybe cherish some at hame 
 Wha dinna just sae weel deserve 't — ' 
 
 1 His Shepherd's Guide, 1807, includes an Essay on encouraging 
 Sheep-Farming in some districts of the Highlands. He describes one 
 of these journeys, made in July and August 1802, in a series of letters 
 
 addressed to S W Esquire [Walter Scott, (?)] and published 
 
 in the Scots Magazine, October 1802, June 1803. See also Lockhart's 
 Life of Scott, p. in. 
 
 2 Hogg fixes the date of his supersession in the farm of Ettrick- 
 house as Whitsunday 1803. His parents seem still to have occupied 
 the cottage. 
 
JAMES HOGG 43 
 
 have the accent of complete sincerity — it might almost be 
 said of sincerity in spite of the writer. Though uneven in 
 execution, the verses contain sweet and tuneful passages. 
 The poet's tried friend, William Laidlaw, comes in for a 
 word of grateful and affectionate remembrance. 
 
 The remoteness of Hogg's proposed place of exile must 
 be judged, of course, by the standards of his own day, and 
 it then becomes a point of coincidence between his life 
 and that of Burns that either poet had been on the eve 
 of emigrating — an intention which, in either case, was at 
 the last moment abandoned. As to the motives which 
 determined the sudden abandonment of Hogg's cherished 
 scheme, his Autobiography is provokingly reticent. Ob- 
 serving that it would be ' tedious and trifling ' were he to 
 enter into details, he is content to tell us that his scheme 
 was 'absolutely frustrated.' 
 
 From Thomson's Memoir of the poet, we gather that 
 the title to the Harris farm was not clear. It became the 
 subject of litigation in the Court of Session, and in July 
 1804 Hogg was served with a notice prohibiting him from 
 taking possession. Having invested his savings in the 
 purchase of stock for the farm, he became a heavy loser 
 over the transaction. Of an expansive nature, he had 
 talked freely of his project, and in order to avoid ques- 
 tions and remarks which could not fail to be disagreeable 
 to him, he now withdrew into Cumberland, where he spent 
 the remainder of the summer. On returning to Scotland, 
 he found himself very much in the same position whence 
 he had started thirteen years before. His savings — the 
 fruits of a steady and hard-working life — were gone, and 
 it says a good deal for his philosophy and native good 
 spirits that he was able c cheerfully ' again to engage him- 
 self as a shepherd. His employer on this occasion was a 
 Mr Harkness, of Mitchelslack, in Nithsdale. 
 
 Here he led a life of great loneliness, herding his sheep 
 
44 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 upon Queensberry Hill, and sheltering himself from the 
 rain in a tiny bothy, which had to be entered on all fours, 
 and did not admit of his standing upright within it. Judge 
 of the cheering effect in his solitude of a visit which he 
 now describes. He was keeping his sheep as usual, one 
 autumn day, when he caught sight of two men coming 
 towards him, who were strangers, and from their walk 
 evidently not shepherds. Calling off his dog, Hector, 
 who was inclined to dispute their passage, Hogg awaited 
 their approach, and found that one was a pleasant-looking 
 man of about forty, and the other a dark ungainly youth, 
 'with a boardly frame for his age, and strongly marked 
 manly features — the very model of Burns.' After making 
 sure of Hogg's identity, the elder of the new-comers seized 
 him by the hand, saying, ' Then, sir, I am glad to see you. 
 There is not a man in Scotland whose hand I am prouder 
 to hold ! ' And such is the poet's nature that doubtless 
 these words went far towards consoling Hogg for his recent 
 misfortunes ! He could not say a word in reply, but glanced 
 downward at his ragged coat and bare feet, as if to remind 
 the man whom he was addressing. 
 
 Meantime the youth stood modestly at a respectful 
 distance, while the elder went on to explain that they 
 were brothers, and that the younger's name was Allan 
 Cunningham, the greatest admirer that Hogg had on 
 earth, and himself an aspiring poet of some promise. 1 
 Allan had heard of Hogg's presence in the neighbour- 
 hood, and would give his brother no peace until he 
 consented that they should go forth together and visit 
 him. Then Hogg stepped down the hill, and shaking 
 the brawny hand of the young mason made him warmly 
 welcome. After this the three adjourned to the bothy, 
 to feast on Hogg's frugal fare and on what the Cunning- 
 
 1 The younger Cunningham, born Dec. 1784, was fourteen years 
 Hogg's junior. 
 
JAMES HOGG 45 
 
 hams had brought with them, whilst the two whose names 
 were afterwards to become widely celebrated recited their 
 poems. This incident proves that, though Hogg's 
 Pastorals had fallen flat, the reputation as a song-writer 
 which he had already won was spreading. 
 
 Hogg seems to have remained two or three years at 
 Mitchelslack, for it was from that place that he published 
 his second volume, which is dated 1807. The idea of 
 this collection of poems had been suggested by Scott's 
 Border Minstrelsy. For, whilst astonished and delighted 
 by the exactness with which its old ballads had been taken 
 down and the accompanying traditions and superstitions 
 had been recorded, Hogg tells us that he was less satis- 
 fied with the ' Imitations of the Antient Ballad ' which 
 complete the volumes, and indeed it may be acknowledged 
 that, whether judged as poetry or simply as imitations, the 
 efforts of Leyden, Kirkpatrick Sharpe, and even Scott him- 
 self, often leave a good deal to be desired. Animated to 
 rivalry by this feeling, Hogg set about collecting traditions 
 suited to his purpose, which he proceeded to fashion into 
 ballads, and the result was the make-up of the volume 
 entitled The Mountain Bard. Scott, who meantime had 
 not lost sight of him, lent him assistance in getting the 
 book subscribed for, and recommended it to the book- 
 seller Constable, by whom it was published. The poems 
 were prefaced by a short autobiography of the author, and 
 the whole was fitly dedicated to Scott. 
 
 It was in reference to this book that Hogg paid that 
 visit to Scott in Edinburgh of which a description by the 
 satirical Lockhart has obtained only too wide a currency. 
 Lockhart states that, being invited to dinner, Hogg made 
 his appearance in the ordinary dress of a shepherd — no 
 great wonder, surely, under the circumstances — and that, 
 on entering the drawing-room, he proceeded to stretch him- 
 self at full length upon a sofa — an unconscious breach of 
 
46 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 decorum which he afterwards justified by explaining that 
 he had merely followed the example of the lady of the 
 house, who happened to be ailing at the time. During 
 dinner, his songs, jests and anecdotes enlivened the 
 company ; but, as the evening wore on, he seems to have 
 been betrayed into a sort of crescendo of familiarity in his 
 forms of address, which rose from the formal ' Mr Scott,' 
 through 'Sherra,' 'Scott,' and 'Walter,' to 'Wattie'— a 
 climax which he contrived to cap by addressing Mrs Scott 
 as ' Charlotte.' All this is scarcely of a piece with what 
 we have seen so far of the demeanour of our pensive Child 
 of Nature ; but we have to remember that high animal 
 spirits were not less characteristic of him than contem- 
 plation. An extant letter of apology 1 shows that, in 
 his own opinion, Hogg had gone rather too far that night.. 
 On the other hand we must not forget that Lockhart was 
 yet a child when the scenes which he so pungently describes 
 took place, and that it is sometimes not difficult to con- 
 struct a ' good story ' out of very slender materials. 
 
 Hogg had been very successful in his search for tradi- 
 tions, and such stories as those of the Ettrick Pedlar, of 
 1 Muckle-mou'd Meg,' and of the murder of the heir of 
 Thirlestane, afford excellent foundations on which to 
 rear a weird or romantic ballad. Unhappily the bard 
 failed to do justice to his materials, his verses exhibiting 
 little poetic power, and, what in him is more surprising, 
 no real power in representing the supernatural. Very 
 much of his volume is indeed composed of doggerel un- 
 redeemed. The ballads have nothing of the terseness 
 and nerve of their models, being expanded, by otiose 
 
 1 Printed in Lockhart's Life of Scott, chap. xii. It bears date 
 December 1803, which shows that, probably by Scott's advice, 
 Hogg delayed the publication of his book. The time occupied in 
 getting the necessary number of subscribers would account for a 
 part of the delay. 
 
JAMES HOGG 47 
 
 passages, to a tedious length. The explanation of so 
 complete a failure seems to be that the ballad-form did 
 not suit Hogg's talent, and it is a fact that he was never 
 really successful in it, his undoubted and remarkable 
 narrative gifts requiring apparently the greater latitude 
 afforded by the less formal ' tale ' in verse or prose. The 
 interest of the book is thus mainly concentrated in the 
 Notes, which still form a valuable and little-known re- 
 pository of local folk-lore and tradition. It is noticeable 
 also that, in such a story as that of the phantom Pedlar, we 
 have a foretaste of Hogg's matured manner, as seen in 
 the stories of the Shepherd's Calendar; whilst, in the 
 ballad of Mess John (Binram), we find the germ of the 
 still famous story of the Brow?iie of Bodsbeck. For their 
 insight into dog-character, and rendering of the sympathy 
 between dog and man, the homely and heartfelt verses 
 addressed by the poet to his 'auld touzy trusty tike,' 
 Hector, deserve a place in any collection on the subject 
 which, in this age of anthologies, may be made or to make. 
 
 Simultaneously with The Mountain Bard, Constable 
 published for Hogg The Shepherd's Guide, a Practical 
 Treatise on the Diseases of Sheep, with observations on 
 the most suitable farm-stocking for the various climates of 
 the country. The author's modest claim for the book is 
 merely that it is written by a shepherd for shepherds, and 
 incorporates the results of his own observation and daily 
 conversation among men of the calling, — from which he 
 goes on to discourse in straightforward and thoroughly 
 business-like style upon 'braxy,' 'sturdy,' 'pelt-rot,' 'cling,' 
 1 wild-fire,' and the like ailments, into which we are not 
 called to follow him. 
 
 Ballad verse was the order of the day, and notwith- 
 standing shortcomings The Mountain Bard was suc- 
 cessful, Lockhart in his Life of Scott 1 attesting its 
 1 Chapter xvii, 
 
48 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 popularity, as well as the fact that the author was now 
 beginning to be generally known and appreciated in 
 Scotland. Continuing his kindly exertions on Hogg's 
 behalf, Scott in 1808 exchanged many letters with the 
 Earl of Dalkeith and his brother, Lord Montagu, touch- 
 ing a provision for the poet. Hogg's own fancy at this 
 time was for an ensigncy in a militia regiment, from which 
 Scott discouraged him, preferring the less showy situation 
 of a berth in the Excise. Neither scheme, however, came 
 to anything. But Hogg was at this time by no means 
 entirely dependent on the help of friends. 
 
 Before publishing the ballads, Constable had informed 
 their author that his poetry would not sell j to which 
 Hogg had characteristically replied that he thought it as 
 good as any he had seen. On this, Constable said that, 
 as Hogg appeared to him 'a gey queer chiel,' if two 
 hundred subscribers to it could be obtained, he would 
 publish the book, and pay as much for it as he could. 
 By one means or another Hogg procured no less than 
 five hundred subscribers, and Constable on his part 
 having acted, as the author says, 'on the whole with 
 great liberality,' the latter found himself possessed of 
 nearly ^300, of which jQ%6 had been paid him on 
 account of The Shepherd's Guide. There had, however, 
 been great disparity in the treatment which he received 
 from his subscribers, some of whom paid him double, 
 treble, and even ten times what was due, whilst a third 
 of the number did not pay him at all. 
 
 Elated by the comparative ease with which what was 
 for him a large sum of money had been earned, and 
 doubtless feeling himself entirely independent of his 
 friends, Hogg now set up on his own account as a 
 farmer. But by his own confession success had driven 
 him 'perfectly mad.' Accordingly his first venture was 
 to lease a sheep-farm in Dumfriesshire for exactly half 
 
JAMES HOGG 49 
 
 as much again as it was worth. By his own account 
 he had been cheated into this transaction by a rascal 
 who meant to rob him of all he was worth, and who 
 within a year effected this purpose. But, in the mean- 
 time, Hogg had further involved himself by taking 
 another farm, of such dimensions that he tells us it 
 would of itself have taken more than three times his 
 capital to stock it. So he now ' got every day out 
 of one strait and confusion into a worse.' To our- 
 selves the history of the next year or two is a blank, 
 as to which we only know that, between his two 
 farms he 'blundered and struggled on,' 'giving up all 
 thought of poetry and literature of every kind.' The 
 words quoted are in each case his own, and we shall 
 probably do well to remember that there may have 
 been more than one side to the story of his farming 
 misadventures. When next he emerges into view, he 
 is once more penniless. ' Finding myself, at length, 
 fairly run aground,' he says, 'I gave my creditors all 
 that I had, or rather suffered them to take it, and came 
 off and left them. I never asked for any settlement, 
 which would not have been refused me.' Thus at thirty- 
 nine years of age (1809), he found himself called upon 
 to make a fresh start in life, and it is really not until 
 now that his career in the capacity in which he chiefly 
 interests ourselves — in the capacity, that is, of a pro- 
 fessional man of letters — may be said practically to 
 begin. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 Failure is not popular anywhere — least of all, perhaps, 
 among the intensely practical natives of the Scottish Low- 
 lands, and accordingly, when Hogg returned to Ettrick 
 Forest after being ' sold up,' it was to find himself ' cold 
 shouldered.' ' I found the countenances of all my friends 
 altered,' he writes, 'and even those whom I had loved 
 and trusted most disowned me, and told me so to my 
 face.' Let us here allow something for the exaggeration 
 natural to the poetic temperament, and, among poets, by 
 no means least natural to Hogg. With, possibly, a touch 
 of excess in the opposite direction, he had boasted ere- 
 while that his ruin had wholly failed to depress him — ' I 
 was generally most cheerful when most unfortunate.' But 
 there are lines, not only in his Farewell to Ettrick^ but in 
 perhaps the best poem he had so far published, his verses 
 addressed to his dog, which prove that he was keenly 
 sensitive to the unkindness, if not of Fortune, at any rate 
 of his fellow-creatures, and that, real or fancied, this had 
 driven him to something like a quarrel with his kind. 
 But, if he was sensitive, sensitiveness was in him no source 
 of weakness ; it braced him to resolve to show his fickle 
 friends that they were in the wrong. 
 
 His position in Ettrick was, however, now greatly worse 
 than it had ever been before. Hitherto he had always 
 had his trade to fall back on ; but he tells us that, since 
 he had appeared as a poet and had been himself a farmer, 
 he no longer found any farmer willing to engage him as 
 a shepherd. And so, having had his services declined 
 
JAMES HOGG 51 
 
 even by some of his old masters, he was compelled to 
 spend the winter in idleness, and consequently in penury. 
 Readers of Mr Hardy's pastorals will recall the parallel 
 case of Gabriel Oak, who remains unhired in the market- 
 place of Casterbridge, when to the enquiries of successive 
 farmers as to whose farm he had worked on last, he was 
 compelled to reply 'My own.' In an ideal world the 
 duties and responsibilities of a master would form a good 
 training for the lighter burdens of servitude, but in a 
 mere everyday world we are somehow not inclined to 
 believe that this holds good. 
 
 The present state of matters could not go on, and 
 accordingly, in February 1810, the poet, by this time 
 reduced to * utter desperation,' wrapped his shepherd's 
 plaid about him, and set out for Edinburgh, determined, 
 ' since no better could be,' to push his fortunes as a literary 
 man. It was, indeed, the best thing he could have done, 
 and in a letter addressed to a friend some four years later, 
 he, with a humorous detachment and dispassionateness 
 which were characteristic of him, fully recognizes it as 
 such : — ' It pleased God,' he writes, ' to take away by 
 death all my ewes and my lambs, and my long-horned 
 cow, and my spotted bull, for if they had lived and if I 
 had kept the farm of Corfardin, I had been a lost man to 
 the world, and mankind should never have known the 
 half that was in me.' In another place he tells us that, 
 had circumstances been favourable, he would have used 
 his poetical talent as a 'staff,' but never as a 'crutch.' 
 
 This, as has been said, is the turning-point of Hogg's 
 career, and as he leaves it behind him a change comes 
 over himself. Hitherto we have delighted to picture him 
 as a simple-minded shepherd, compelled by the necessity 
 of his calling to dwell apart in his hill-fastnesses, and there 
 communing with Nature, dreaming dreams, musing on 
 old traditions, and nursing in his breast a high ambition. 
 
 [ UN/v L 
 
 \ OF 
 
52 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 During this period he comes, perhaps, as near to the 
 character of the ideal shepherd of poetry as any man has 
 ever done. It is only natural that we should be loth to 
 divest him of that character, and yet the time has now 
 arrived for doing so. From henceforth his lot is cast, 
 though not consistently in the city, at least amid the throng 
 and push of life's mele'e, and the attributes and qualities 
 developed by his new environment are of the service- 
 able rather than of the ideal order. And yet, after all, is it 
 not true that a time comes to most of us when the qualities 
 which we most admire and love are chosen among the 
 former? But to the point. If, then, for the sake of 
 contrast, it be permitted us to draw the line of demarca- 
 tion somewhat sharply, we may here say that, passing at 
 one step from the penumbra of romance into the sun- 
 light of a work-a-day world, the Daphnis of our Border 
 Oaristys is straightway transformed into a shrewd homely 
 Scottish peasant, possessed of plenty of 'grit,' and of a 
 gift from Nature which he is much bent on turning, ac- 
 cording to the recognized methods, to the best possible 
 profit and account. Or, to vary the expression, it might be 
 said that the bygone forty years of the Shepherd's life were 
 those in which he lived poetry, the five-and-twenty to come 
 those in which he wrote it. And no doubt the period 
 of transition brings with it a sacrifice of something more 
 than mere picturesqueness, or mere sentiment. Hence- 
 forward, for instance, in our hero's life, the spirit of con- 
 templation is not much in evidence j whilst, on the other 
 hand, amid fostering surroundings, his high animal spirits 
 are somewhat apt to become uproarious, his belief in him- 
 self to degenerate into a loudly-expressed, though always 
 as we believe half-humorous, self-assertiveness. Well ! 
 and if this be so, what then ? Happy is the man — above 
 all, the man tried as Hogg was tried, by so many ups and 
 downs of fortune — against whom nothing worse than this 
 
JAMES HOGG 53 
 
 can be alleged. And it will be our pleasant task to ex- 
 hibit him to the end, not only upright and virtuous in the 
 greater essentials, but throughout his moral being sound, 
 honest, pure and wholesome — in native steadfastness of 
 character a shining contrast to his more divinely gifted 
 predecessor. Indeed, were we to judge him only as one 
 who by perseverance in the face of superhuman difficulties 
 lived to realize his ambition, and among Scottish peasants 
 to rank second to the poet Burns, his life would yet be 
 fruitful of instruction and example to succeeding genera- 
 tions. 
 
 Hogg had ground for believing that his position in 
 Edinburgh would be, at the worst, not quite so bad as it 
 had now become in Ettrick. As we know from Lockhart, 
 his three published volumes had already won him some- 
 thing of a name ; whilst to his literary friends, such as 
 Scott and Constable, he doubtless felt that he might 
 confidently look for a less sorry reception than had 
 awaited him in his native valley. But, with the best will 
 in the world, it is not always possible to befriend budding 
 talent, and the new-comer, who even now, in his own 
 words, 'knew no more of human life and manners than a 
 child,' must have been grievously disappointed, on reach- 
 ing the capital, to find his poetical talent rated nearly as 
 low there as his shepherding had been at home. It was 
 in vain that he applied for employment to newsmongers, 
 booksellers, and editors of magazines. They were willing 
 enough to accept and publish his contributions, but then 
 1 there was no money going — not a farthing ! ' And this, 
 as he observes, did not suit him. We are prepared to 
 believe it, and but for the generous friendship of a certain 
 Mr John Grieve, son of a Cameronian minister of Cacra- 
 bank in Ettrick, who had known him from childhood, it 
 had doubtless gone hardly with the Shepherd at this time. 
 But Grieve, who was now comfortably established as a 
 
54 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 hatter in the capital, was in fact as true a friend to him as 
 William Laidlaw had been formerly ; and, indeed, if the 
 power of attracting staunch friends be taken, as it almost 
 always may be, as a test of inherent worth, then the posses- 
 sion of these two strong and disinterested friendships in 
 the days of his obscurity must be allowed to speak volumes 
 in favour of Hogg's character. Associated with Grieve in 
 this friendship was his partner in business, a Mr Scott ; 
 and with these two, during the first six months of his 
 stay in Edinburgh, the Shepherd made his home. They 
 watched over his welfare with the kindest care, suffering 
 him to want for neither money nor clothes, whilst their 
 delicacy, by forestalling his wants, saved his pride the 
 pain of mentioning them. The three friends, as Hogg 
 tells us, spent many happy evenings together; and, 
 indeed, when circumstances permitted, were seldom apart. 
 Then Grieve, who was a man of cultivated tastes, exercised 
 a beneficial influence over his guest, not only by firm 
 belief in his powers, but by stimulating him to work ; and, 
 besides this, having many literary acquaintances in the 
 town, was doubtless able to be of practical service to him 
 in furnishing introductions. 
 
 At length, rather against his will, the publisher Constable, 
 who is described as having ' a sort of kindness ' for his 
 wholesome rustic client, agreed to bring out another 
 volume for him, and The Forest Minstrel saw the light. 
 The edition consisted of iooo copies, to sell at five 
 shillings each, Hogg being to receive half profits. But 
 he tells us that, having reason to suspect that the concern 
 had proved a losing one, he never applied for his share, 
 and consequently received nothing. The Countess of 
 Dalkeith, to whom the book was dedicated, and the 
 praises of whose family were sung in it, presented him, 
 however, with ^ioo. 
 
 Hogg has been so often twitted with self-complacency, 
 
JAMES HOGG 55 
 
 not to say self-gloriousness — a charge not groundless but 
 too much insisted on — that one is not sorry to be able to 
 point to his extremely modest estimate, not merely of his 
 Pastorals, but of the songs composing his new volume. 
 Of these he says frankly that 'in general they are not 
 good,' alleging as a reason that he has inserted among 
 them every ranting rhyme made by him in his youth to 
 please the circles about the firesides in the country. The 
 last is as it may be, but as to the merit of the songs we 
 must take leave to differ from him entirely. He is far 
 nearer the mark when, later on, with no less modesty he 
 describes himself as 'a sort of natural songster, without 
 another advantage on earth.' His avowed or ostensible 
 object in his present collection was that it should take the 
 place of certain alien songs which, since the death of 
 Burns, had begun to oust the native product in Scotland. 
 This was, perhaps, a somewhat ambitious programme, 
 but, at least as regards the unsophisticated portion of the 
 community, there can scarcely be imagined a book more 
 competent to realise it than the Forest Minstrel. It is, 
 indeed, almost the ideal of a Song-book for Shepherds, 
 and in that class of composition which is most apt 
 to degenerate into the monotonous or the conventional, 
 furnishes scarce a feeble example — nay, scarcely an 
 example which is not at once spirited and poetical. 
 Its contents are divided into four classes — namely, Love- 
 songs, Patriotic, Humorous, and Pathetic Songs — and 
 their outstanding characteristic is that they have what 
 is the first essential quality in a song — they are each 
 and all eminently singable. On every page the author 
 gives unmistakable proof of the possession of that native 
 tuneful impulse, which, rare in almost any age, has in 
 our own day characterised, for one, Mr Joseph Skipsey, 
 the Northumbrian collier poet. His lines and verses are 
 like happy children just escaped from school — they won't 
 
56 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 walk orderly, they must dance. Take for instance, from 
 among the love-songs : — 
 
 1 Sing on, sing on, my bonnie bird, 
 
 The sang ye sang yestreen, O, 
 When here, aneath the hawthorn wild, 
 I met my bonnie Jean, O.' 
 
 or, 
 
 or, 
 
 ' The wild-rose, blushing on the brier, 
 
 Was set wi' draps o' pearly dew ; 
 As full and clear the bursting tear 
 That row'd in Ellen's een o' blue.' 
 
 ' Oft has the lark sung o'er my head, 
 
 And shook the dew-drops frae his wing ; 
 Oft hae my flocks forgot to feed, 
 An' round their shepherd form'd a ring. . . .' 
 
 or, yet again, 
 
 * I'll pu' the gowan off the glen, 
 
 The lily off the lea, 
 The rose and hawthorn bud I'll twine 
 To make a bob x for thee. ' 
 
 or yet once more, 
 
 ' A bramble shade around her head, 
 A burnie poplin' by, O ; 
 Our bed the swaird, our sheet the plaid, 
 Our canopy the sky, O.' 
 
 or, lastly, 
 
 * When she and I to rest are gane, 
 
 May shepherds strew our graves wi' daisy, 
 And when o'er us they make their maen, 
 Aye join my name wi' bonny Leezy.' 
 
 But there are, indeed, a hundred passages as fresh, as 
 1 Nosegay. 
 
JAMES HOGG 57 
 
 tuneful, and as unstudied, as the trills and gurgles of the 
 thrush's song at eve. When the poet sings, 
 
 1 The lammie to the ewe is dear, 
 But Peggy's dearer far to me,' 
 
 or the lover's ecstasy finds expression in the words, 
 
 * O weel's me on my happy lot ! 
 O weel's me on my dearie ! ' 
 
 we feel that the images and the language of nature are 
 here in their place ; the field flowers bloom in the Shep- 
 herd's line as in their native wilds. The shepherd lover 
 of ' Bonnie Mary ' is worthy of Longus ; whilst, in such a 
 verse as that which follows, the incidents and feelings of 
 rustic courtship are touched off with charming naivete 
 and point : 
 
 ' The little doggie at the door 
 Into his arms he caught it, 
 An' hugg'd an' sleek'd it o'er and o'er, 
 For love o' them that aught 1 it.' 
 
 The less fervid songs also have the merit appropriate to 
 their class ; whilst the patriotic ones, if necessarily some- 
 what more declamatory, are stirring and genuinely inspired. 
 Besides Hogg's songs, the Forest Minstrel contained Laid- 
 law's well-known poem of Lucy's Flitting, and a number 
 of songs by Allan Cunningham's brother Thomas, with 
 which we are not here concerned. 
 
 Hogg's next scheme was to start a weekly journal of 
 his own, to be devoted to belles-lettres, morals, and criti- 
 cism — a project on which Constable and other printers 
 and booksellers did their best to pour cold water. ' D — n 
 them,' was the terse comment of the belated Grub-streetite, 
 as he ran from one to the other, ' the folks are all combined 
 
 1 Owned. 
 
5 8 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 in a body.' At last, such were his perseverance and his 
 belief in that which Napoleon in his own case called his 
 'star,' that he induced one James Robertson, an honest 
 bookseller of Nicolson Street, to take up his plan. The 
 result was that, on September ist, 1810, the first issue of 
 The Spy made its appearance, priced at fourpence. It had 
 a brisk sale, and a few shillings with an immense number 
 of half-pence, brought to Hogg by the newspaper-boy, 
 constituted the first money he had earned since his 
 arrival in Edinburgh six months before. This boy, by 
 the way, had his own plan for swelling receipts, for he 
 demanded payment for several hundred copies of the 
 paper which were marked to be delivered free, explaining, 
 if objections were raised, that he did not ask anything 
 for delivery, but must be paid the price of the article 
 delivered. 
 
 The new enterprize had begun hopefully; but a 
 thoughtless breach of decorum in the third or fourth 
 issue at once lowered the circulation by seventy-three, 
 and made enemies for the paper, the literary ladies of 
 the town in particular declaring with unanimity that the 
 author would never write a sentence deserving to be 
 read. Hogg's gallantry — sufficiently robust on most 
 occasions — was not proof against this trial, and he re- 
 lieved his feelings with these further expletives, ' Gaping 
 deevils ! wha cares what they say ! If I leeve ony time, 
 I'll let them see the contrair o' that.' Plebeian perhaps 
 on the surface, but there is the right spirit behind it. 
 
 His own frank account of the hatching of his articles 
 for The Spy has about it a racy flavour of Grub Street 
 and La Basse-Boheme. c My publisher,' he writes, ' was 
 a kind-hearted, confused body, who loved a joke and a 
 dram. He sent for me every day about one o'clock, to 
 consult about the publication; and then we uniformly 
 went down to a dark house in the Cowgate, where we 
 
JAMES HOGG 59 
 
 drank whisky and ate rolls with a number of printers, 
 the dirtiest and leanest-looking men I had ever seen.' 
 
 Hogg's habits hitherto had been so regular and temper- 
 ate that he soon found this course of life injurious, and, 
 resolving thereupon to have nothing more to do with it, 
 he transferred the printing of The Spy to another firm. 
 But the change, though morally salutary, was not pecuni- 
 arily fortunate. At the end of the year, the new printers, 
 Aikman by name, instead of handing in profits, claimed 
 for losses incurred, as they alleged, over the paper. These 
 claims Hogg refused to pay, unless furnished with an ac- 
 count of the disposal of the numbers of the paper printed, 
 and the upshot of the matter was that, being somewhat in 
 Robertson's debt, he found himself at the end of a year 
 of literary drudgery a loser rather than a gainer. It was 
 thus high time to discontinue The Spy, which he brought to 
 a conclusion with a farewell passage in which he once more 
 drew the attention of the public to the singularity of his 
 own story. 
 
 In supplying the weekly material for the paper he had 
 had some assistance from Mr Robert Sym, an uncle of 
 Professor Wilson, who was later to become known as the 
 1 Timothy Tickler ' of the Nodes, and from his friends Mr 
 and Mrs James Gray, the former of whom had married as 
 his first wife a sister of the lady who was eventually to 
 become Mrs Hogg. Probably Jeffrey is right when he 
 says of The Spy x that, though it exhibits ' frequent indica- 
 tions of a vigorous and aspiring mind,' the defects of 
 Hogg's education, and his late and limited intercourse with 
 society, are more apparent there than in the Mountain 
 Bard. There is evidence in Hogg's correspondence 2 that, 
 during the year 1 81 1, he had some employment as a factor 
 and land valuator, but it does not seem to have lasted long. 
 
 1 Edinburgh Review, vol. xxiv., p. 160. 
 
 2 Memorials, p. 50. 
 
60 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 The next undertaking in which we find our hero 
 interested was a Debating Society, established by him- 
 self and a few young men of his acquaintance, under 
 the name of The Forum. Their meetings were held 
 once a week, in a church in Carrubber's Close, the 
 public — of whom sometimes as many as a thousand 
 were present — being admitted on payment of sixpence 
 a head. Hogg's friends had at first been unanimous 
 in trying to dissuade him from coming forward as a 
 public speaker, and, having regard to his rusticity and 
 inexperience, there was certainly something to be said 
 from their point of view. But there are times in life 
 when to be wisely rash, and Hogg's native talent and 
 originality now pulled him safely through the ordeal. He 
 spoke at least once at every meeting, and we have his 
 own complacent assurance that, though occasionally in- 
 curring pointed disapprobation, he was in general a 
 1 prodigious favourite.' No doubt this same self-com- 
 placency would stand him in good stead by preserving 
 him from any undue sensitiveness to ' chaff' or ridicule, 
 of which the author of an avowedly hostile pamphlet 1 
 informs us that there was at times not a little. The 
 young men, who got on admirably together, had ap- 
 pointed Hogg their Secretary, at a salary of ^20 a- 
 year; but this was never paid. But, if in a pecuniary 
 sense he gained nothing from the Society, there were 
 other respects in which he assures us that he owed it 
 much. To its discipline, indeed, he freely attributes 
 a share of his subsequent success in life, saying 
 that it was practically the first schooling he had ever 
 received. He adds, in reference to private debating 
 
 1 The Life of the Ettrick Shepherd Anatomized in a Series of 
 Strictures on the Autobiography of James Hogg prefixed to vol. i. 
 of the Altrive Tales, by an Old Dissector [Dr James Browne], Hunter, 
 Edinburgh, 1832. 
 
JAMES HOGG 61 
 
 societies — of which it will be remembered that he had 
 had experience in his early Ettrick days — that these 
 'signify nothing. But a discerning public is a severe 
 test, especially in a multitude, where the smallest depar- 
 ture from good taste, or from the question, is sure to 
 draw down disapproval, and where no good saying ever 
 misses observation or applause. If this do not assist in 
 improving the taste, I know not what will.' 
 
 Notwithstanding benefits received from it, the Society 
 was not without a ludicrous side, on which Hogg's strong 
 sense of humour would be quick to seize. The result 
 was The Foru??i, A Tragedy for Cold Weather — a musical 
 farce in three acts, in which the debates were satirized, 
 whilst the members, not excepting the author himself, 
 were broadly ' taken off.' This piece pleased Hogg himself 
 well ; but feeling that some of its portraits were rather 
 severe, he with more than his usual discretion in these 
 matters kept the enjoyment of it to himself. At about 
 the same time he also wrote another musical drama, 
 which was submitted to his friend Mr Siddons, who in 
 the main approved it highly. But it was not produced 
 upon the stage. 
 
 The vogue of the Forum continued for three years ; 
 but considerably before that period had expired a most 
 important event in Hogg's life had taken place — to wit, 
 the publication of The Queen's Wake. His own account 
 of the production of that poem, which was to prove not 
 only his first real success, but the work by which his 
 name was to be best remembered, assigns among his 
 motives a singular degree of importance to what is purely 
 casual. He remarks that the recent successes of Scott 
 and Byron had turned public attention strongly in the 
 direction of poetry, and that hence his friend Mr Grieve, 
 having formed a very high opinion of certain pieces 
 which he had published in The Spy, now did his best 
 
62 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 to persuade him to take the field once more as a poet, 
 and try his luck with the others. Having some metrical 
 tales by him, and not wishing them to be lost, Hogg 
 accordingly devised the plan of The Queens Wake, so 
 as to include them. With his happy facility of execution, a 
 few months then sufficed for the carrying out of his project. 
 
 Having read the poem to Grieve, who declared that 
 1 it would do,' Hogg wished to have further opinions as 
 to its merits ; but his friends showed no alacrity in 
 meeting his wishes. He was living at Deanhaugh at 
 the time, and thither he invited Mr and Mrs Gray, to 
 drink tea and read s part of the poem. But he had 
 not read half a page when the lady took exception to 
 a word, which Grieve, who was present, defended. An 
 argument thereupon arose, which diverted attention ; and 
 notwithstanding that the poor poet gave vent to some 
 very broad hints, he found no opportunity of proceeding 
 with his reading. His chagrin being made known, the 
 Grays, with a view to making amends, fixed another 
 meeting, appointing him to bring his manuscript to their 
 house. But his second experience was even more 
 mortifying than his first ; for, ere Mr Gray had well 
 reached the bottom of the third page, he was called 
 out to listen to a mendicant bard reciting verses of his 
 own in the lobby. The new attraction quite eclipsed 
 Hogg, who, whilst the company flocked to hear the 
 maunderings of a crazy beggar, found himself left with 
 but a single companion, to read or not as he might 
 think fit. Surely it speaks volumes for his good-nature, 
 that, in spite of this, his friendship for the Grays suffered 
 no abatement ! 
 
 His next task was to find a publisher. Constable 
 received him coldly, declining to take any steps in the 
 matter until he should have seen the manuscript. To 
 this Hogg would not accede, enquiring pertinently, what 
 
JAMES HOGG 63 
 
 skill had he (Constable) about the merits of a book ; to 
 which the publisher replied that at any rate he knew 
 how to sell a book as well as any man, which should 
 be some concern of the author's, and that he knew how 
 
 to buy one, too, by ! In the sequel an arrangement 
 
 was made by which Hogg was to procure two hundred 
 subscribers to the book, whilst Constable on his part 
 would pay ^100 for the right of printing a thousand 
 copies of it. But ere preliminaries were concluded, the 
 poet received a much better offer, from a Princes Street 
 bookseller named Goldie who had been a member of 
 the Forum, and who, having seen the poem in manu- 
 script and conceived a high opinion of it, offered Hogg 
 not merely ;£ioo for it, but the proceeds of the sub- 
 scriptions — which were by this time promised — as well. 
 The poet was loth to part from Constable, but happening 
 to find him in a bad humour next time he called, he felt 
 justified in closing with Goldie's offer, and in the spring 
 of 18 1 3 The Queen's Wake made its appearance. 
 
 In consequence partly of the breaking down of the 
 readings, nobody had so far seen the poem, and on the 
 day following its publication Hogg patrolled the streets 
 of Edinburgh in a fever of anxiety, reading the title of his 
 book in the booksellers' windows, but not daring to enter 
 the shops. He, indeed, compares the state of his mind 
 to that of a man between life and death, who awaits the 
 sentence of the jury. The first encouragement he received 
 was from a countryman of his own, a bluff spirit-merchant 
 by name Dunlop, who, catching sight of him across the 
 High Street, went over and accosted him in words which, 
 though very unrefined, made a strong impression on the 
 Shepherd, knowing as he did that the speaker possessed a 
 'great deal of rough common sense.' On Hogg's enquiring 
 his meaning, the spirit-dealer proceeded as follows : — ' D — n 
 your stupid head, ye hae been pestering us wi' fourpenny 
 
64 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 papers an' daft shilly-shally sangs, an' bletherin' an' speakin' 
 i' the Forum, an' yet had stuff in ye to produce a thing like 
 this.' — Hogg then asked if he had seen the new book. 
 1 Ay, that I have, man ; and it has lickit me out o' a 
 night's sleep. Ye hae hit the right nail on the head now. 
 Yon's the very thing, sir.' — 'I'm very glad to hear you 
 say sae, Willie,' replied the author, ' but what do ye 
 ken about poems ? ' — ' Never ye mind how I ken ; I gi'e 
 you my word for it, yon's the thing that will do.' And 
 after some more to the same effect, the whisky-merchant 
 turned on his heel, and went his way laughing, and mis- 
 calling the poet over his shoulder. Thus, at least, Hogg 
 reports the conversation. Dunlop denied the truth of 
 the story, which, one way or the other, is not of much 
 importance. But it is obviously quite possible that a 
 man of such rough-and-ready utterance may have for- 
 gotten his lightly-spoken words, whilst Hogg, as the party 
 much more deeply interested, would treasure them in his 
 memory. 
 
 In any case the world was prompt to endorse the 
 verdict attributed to the whisky-merchant. Facing his 
 acquaintances one by one, Hogg heard nothing but praises 
 on all sides. ' The reading public,' writes his daughter, 1 
 'was taken by storm.' 'Who/ they asked, 'was this poet 
 who sang the beautiful lay of Kilmeny, and the incom- 
 parable Witch of Fife ? Under what bushel has he been 
 hiding his talents all these years ?' In a word, from the hour 
 of the appearance of the poem, ' James Hogg was acknow- 
 ledged as a man of genius.' He was introduced to the 
 leading literary celebrities of the town ; great men and 
 great ladies sought his acquaintance, and it became the 
 fashion in Edinburgh to have the bard of The Queen's 
 Wake at the supper-table. The little writing-table in the 
 poet's lodgings, adds the same authority, was now usually 
 1 Memorials, p. 55. 
 
JAMES HOGG 65 
 
 covered with notes of invitation. Such are, indeed, some 
 of the outward and visible signs of literary success ; but 
 the poet was too shrewd a man to be uplifted overmuch 
 by such straws in the wind, or to allow himself to be 
 carried away by the tide of popular favour. We have his 
 word that, at this time, excepting to a few intimate friends, 
 he made himself ' exceedingly scarce.' 
 
 It must not, however, by any means be concluded that 
 the success of the poem was either purely or mainly one 
 of fashion. In a cordial letter to the poet, dated from 
 Keswick, December 181 4, 1 Southey employs these words: 
 — ' I will not say that The Queen's Wake has exceeded my 
 expectations, because I have ever expected great things 
 from you, since in 1805 I heard Walter Scott by his own 
 fireside at Ashiestiel repeat Gilmansckuch? . . . But 
 the Wake has equalled all that I expected.' At about 
 the same time, Jeffrey, that ' prince of critics ' of his own 
 day, devoted an article in the Edi?iburgh Review 3 to a 
 notice of the third edition of the poem. From this we 
 gather, with something of surprise, that its success so far 
 is not to be understood as having penetrated beyond the 
 'narrow sphere to which the personal influence of the 
 author and publisher extends.' At the same time the 
 reviewer, after supplying with not more than his wonted 
 irony an account of Hogg's previous career, admits that 
 the new work affords good ground for thinking that the 
 poet ' is yet doomed to justify his early election, and 
 in some measure to realize the proudest of his early 
 anticipations.' The writer adds a tribute to the disinter- 
 estedness and independence of character of one who, as 
 he verily believes, ' would rather starve upon poetry, than 
 accept of ease and affluence on condition of renouncing it. 
 Delighting still more in the pursuit itself,' continues the 
 
 1 Memorials, p. 73. 
 
 2 One of the ballads of The Mountain Bard. 3 Vol. xxiv. p. 157. 
 
 E 
 
66 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 critic, ■ than in the glory to which he no doubt thinks it 
 is to conduct him, he is resolute, we are persuaded, to 
 serve the Muses, even without the appropriate wages of 
 fame. ... It ought also to be recorded to his honour, 
 that he has uniformly sought this success by the fairest 
 and most manly means ; and that neither poverty nor 
 ambition has been able to produce in him the slightest 
 degree of obsequiousness towards the possessors of glory 
 or power.' The panegyric is quoted as not less well- 
 deserved by Hogg than honourable to Jeffrey, and at the 
 same time as greatly more generous in tone than most of 
 the verdicts which we are now accustomed to associate 
 with the name of the Edinburgh Aristarchus. 
 
 But it is high time to turn to the poem itself. It 
 is divided into three ' Nights ' — each of these having 
 several tales allotted to it, — and has besides a metrical 
 Introduction, Conclusion, and connecting narrative. The 
 Introduction opens with an eloquent, appealing, and 
 highly" ' personal ' strophe, addressed by the Shepherd to 
 his visionary harp, his true friend through all the slights 
 and sorrows of his chequered career, the associate of his 
 youth, the confidant of his early love-dreams, and now, 
 amid the cold winds of adversity, his consolation and sole 
 stay. Much has been said of the Ettrick Shepherd's self- 
 sufficiency — an attribute which in his case might fitly be 
 considered as a happy provision of Nature to carry him 
 over the immense difficulties of his carrer ; but to turn to 
 such a passage as the following is enough to wake our 
 sympathy with the true inward nature and condition of 
 the man : — 
 
 Unknown to men of sordid heart, 
 What joys the poet's hopes impart ; 
 Unknown, how his high soul is torn 
 By cold neglect, or canting scorn : 
 
JAMES HOGG 67 
 
 That meteor torch of mental light, 
 A breath can quench, or kindle bright. 
 Oft has that mind, which braved serene 
 The shafts of poverty and pain, 
 The Summer toil, the Winter blast, 
 Fallen victim to a frown at last. 
 Easy the boon he asks of thee ; 
 O, spare his heart in courtesy ! ' 
 
 The poet now passes to the landing at Leith, amid 
 a nation's hopes and rejoicings, of the long-exiled Queen 
 of Scots. Amid crowds and pageants, through scenes 
 unfamiliar, the young Sovereign — a ' maiden ' in the 
 Shepherd's phrase — is borne by her airy palfrey, a vision 
 of beauty, a veritable cynosure. But by a strange freak 
 of woman's nature, what touches the fancy of the girl- 
 queen most is neither the novelty nor the splendour of 
 her surroundings, but the thrilling refrain of a chance- 
 heard minstrel's melody, — 
 
 1 Thy beauty is but a fading flower ! ' 
 
 Captivated by this strange new poetry, the queen decrees 
 that a Wake be held at Holyrood at Eastertide, at which 
 the minstrels of the kingdom shall sing before her for a 
 prize — a first exercise of her royal prerogative which, taking 
 precedence as it does of the cares of State, is not only 
 in dramatic keeping with Mary's character, but, viewed in 
 the light of subsequent events, has a pathos all its own. 
 
 Easter arrives, and with it come the minstrels. The 
 Court is hushed, and the contest is inaugurated by Rizzio, 
 who leads off with a sentimental poem, to which an effec- 
 tive contrast is supplied by the tale of sin and terror re- 
 counted by the second bard. It is by no means necessary 
 to follow the minstrels categorically, and indeed it may 
 be at once admitted that for critical readers in the present 
 day the bulk of the poems have lost their interest. Nor 
 in this respect do they compare to any great disadvantage 
 
68 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 with the contemporary Eastern Tales of Lord Byron or 
 of Moore's Lalla Rookh. It is enough that they should 
 have delighted the public of their own day ; they have 
 failed to withstand the changes of fashion and the wear 
 and tear of a century. For us of to-day The Queen's Wake 
 lives by its two contrasted essays in the supernatural : 
 Kilme?iy and The Witch of Fife. 
 
 From the age of Horace's Epodes and The Golden Ass 
 to that of Albertus, witchcraft has exercised a powerful 
 fascination over the poetic mind; but The Witch of Fife 
 is the poem par excellence of its kind in our own or any 
 other language. One may say of it, indeed, that it lays 
 bare the soul of witchcraft. Already with the opening 
 sentences of its abrupt and agitated dialogue, we are trans- 
 ported, as it were, into an alien and unearthly atmosphere. 
 The hush of midnight, the mute reproach of moonlight, 
 and the sense of evil are about us. The galloping move- 
 ment of the metre hurries us, will-we nill-we, on. The 
 birds of heaven and the brute creation share in our as- 
 tonishment, and demean themselves in a manner which 
 is contrary indeed to nature, but most true to the nature 
 reversed and revolutionized of the magic world into which 
 the poet has misled us. And all the while his knowledge of 
 Nature — the intimate unconscious knowledge of one who 
 has never lived but with her — steads him well ; for the 
 howlet hunted out of breath and forced to yield herself a 
 prisoner, that shy bird the gray curlew flying not away from 
 man but to meet him, the weazels dancing on the hill, and 
 the trouts, ravished with melody, leaping from the loch, 
 are just such objects and incidents as tend to heighten the 
 effect of the picture and the tension of the hour. When 
 at last the witch describes her mounting of the ' humloke 
 schaw ' — 
 
 ' A stout stallion was he ' — 
 
 and her flight through the whistling moonless air, she, in 
 
JAMES HOGG 69 
 
 the literal sense of the words carries us with her, and for 
 the moment — sober students as we are — we are forced to 
 participate in the wild, the mad, intoxication and exhilara- 
 tion of some heretofore unknown and unimaginable orgy 
 or debauch. 
 
 ' The second nychte, when the new moon set, 
 
 O'er the roaryng sea we flew ; 
 
 The cockle-shell our trusty bark, 
 
 Our sailis of the grein sea- rue. 
 
 1 And the bauld windis blew, and the fire flauchtis flew, 
 
 And the sea ran to the skie ; 
 And the thunner it growlit, and the sea-dogs howlit, 
 As we gaed scouryng bye. 
 
 ' And aye we mountit the sea-grein hillis, 
 
 Quhill we brushit throu the cludis of the hevin ; 
 Than sousit dounright like the stern-shot light, 
 Fra the liftis blue casement driven. 
 
 ' But our taickil stood, and our bark was good, 
 
 And se pang was our pearily prowe, 
 Quhan we culdna speil the brow of the wavis, 
 We needilit them throu belowe. ' 
 
 But to quote from The Witch of Fife is no case of the 
 artful exposure of a ' purple patch.' From first verse to 
 last there is no shock or stumble to startle us back into 
 our senses, or drop us sheer back to common earth. For 
 the perfect and spontaneous accomplishment of a literary 
 tour-de-force ; there is but one other poem with which this one 
 may be compared — the Aikendrum of William Nicholson. 
 
 But one more point and we have done. There is just 
 one thing still wanted in the poem, — namely, the touch of 
 humour, or of human interest, which shall keep the be- 
 witched world in its place, and anchor it from completely 
 drifting away from all relation to human affairs. By a 
 stroke of true art, none the less to be admired for being 
 purely unconscious, this lien or bond is supplied in the 
 
7 o FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 grotesquely tragic figure of the old man, the witch's hus- 
 band — with the unregenerate spirit dormant beneath his 
 righteous upbraiding, and to be roused by the first breath 
 of temptation which to him is temptation — and the story 
 of the one night of rapture and of revelling for which he 
 pays so dear. 
 
 Kilmeny, the remaining poem, represents the obverse 
 side of the supernatural, as it is known in the superstitions 
 of the Scottish peasantry, — the Paradiso of that Inferno. 
 The story is one which, in a slightly different form, had 
 been current in the poet's native valley. It tells of a 
 beautiful and virtuous maiden, who goes walking in the 
 greenwood : — 
 
 * It was only to hear the yorlin l sing, 
 And pu' the blue cress-flower round the spring ; 
 The scarlet hip and the hyndberrye, 
 And the nut that hung frae the hazel tree : ' 
 
 Nevertheless she fails to return, and her mother, 
 having sought her sorrowing and in vain, is fain at last 
 to give her up for lost. But this is premature. 
 
 1 When many lang day had come and fled, 
 When grief grew calm, and hope was dead, 
 When mess for Kilmeny's soul had been sung, 
 When the bedesman had pray'd, and the dead bell rung : 
 Late, late in a gloamin' when all was still, 
 When the fringe was red on the westlin hill, 
 The wood was sere, the moon i' the wane, 
 The reek o' the cot hung o'er the plain, 
 Like a little wee cloud in the world its lane ; 
 When the ingle lowed wi' an eiry leme, a 
 Late, late in the gloamin' Kilmeny came hame ! ' 
 
 The girl is visibly altered in manner and aspect ; her 
 beauty has assumed a yet more spiritual cast, a strange 
 stillness has come over her. Where has she spent the 
 1 Yellow-hammer. 3 Gleam. 
 
JAMES HOGG 71 
 
 intervening seven years ? Amid the soft air and impending 
 silence of the wood, she had yielded to slumber, to be 
 waked, by unfamiliar sounds, to gaze on the unfamiliar 
 sights of ' a far countrye.' In other words, in virtue of the 
 surpassing purity of her nature, she has been spirited away, 
 as Thomas the Rhymer had been before her, to dwell with 
 fairies in Fairyland. It is a fairyland calm and holy as 
 Paradise itself. But, in the midst of its more than earthly 
 beauties and wonders, her heart yearns to her home. 
 Then the spirits lull her once more to sleep ; she wakes 
 in the greenwood where she had lain down, her bosom 
 decked with flowers, and thus it comes about that 
 
 ' When scarce was remember'd Kilmeny's name, 
 Late, late, in a gloamin' Kilmeny came hame.' 
 
 But she is not destined to remain among her kindred, and 
 when a ' month and a day have come and gone ' she returns 
 to her lair in the wood, and laying her down on the green 
 leaves, is ravished away — this time to return no more. 
 
 Hogg is a poet who, generally speaking, addresses 
 himself rather to the ear than to the eye, though in 
 this respect the passage quoted above cannot be called 
 characteristic. But undoubtedly the crowning merit of 
 Kilmeny lies in the ideal marriage of the music and the 
 theme. Speaking on the favourable side, Hogg's narrative 
 verse in general may be described as possessing the sweet- 
 ness of Moore's without its tendency to cloy, and the 
 fluency of Praed's without his triviality. But here the 
 Shepherd rises to a higher strain, and the characteristic of 
 his melody is wistfulness — the wistfulness of a gentle and 
 tender heart which strains towards a purer world, and anon 
 looks back with yearning upon the warm and beating hearts 
 left far behind. And thus, whilst conceived on a far higher 
 plane of moral feeling, Kilmeny is no less a success of 
 unstudied art than the poem considered just previously. 
 
72 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 No doubt the allegorical and prophetic visions of the 
 death of Queen Mary, the religious wars, and the French 
 Revolution — suggested probably by the old poem of 
 Thomas of Erceldoune^ and exhibited to Kilmeny in fairy- 
 land, as in a glass — are a somewhat bold experiment. 
 But they are justified by success. The picture of the 
 various unfriendly animals drawn round the maiden 
 whilst she sings, and herding together in a concord as 
 of the fabled infancy of a world, is in fine contrast to 
 the lurid study of animal life in The Witch of Fife — a 
 Savery beside a David Teniers. The poem ranking next 
 in interest to the two here discussed is probably the fairy- 
 tale entitled Old David. The prize in the contest, how- 
 ever, is awarded to Gardyn, the second bard. 
 
 To return from the book to the author. Notwith- 
 standing the success — great in degree, if, as yet, limited 
 in extent — which had at once greeted The Queen's Wake, 
 three or nominally four editions of the poem would seem 
 to have been published without putting money into the 
 author's pocket. This was principally due to the com- 
 mercial failure of the publisher, Goldie. At the time 
 when the third edition was called for, that disaster being 
 imminent, Hogg had sought to save himself by privately 
 transferring the book to Constable, justifying his conduct 
 upon the ground that, as the book was his property, he had 
 a right to do with it as he liked — a plea best adapted to a 
 world exempt from preconceived notions. But when the 
 Shepherd's glorious inexperience is considered, in con- 
 junction with other circumstances of the case, a breach 
 of professional etiquette on his part will not be too 
 severely censured. In the sequel, the energetic protests 
 of Goldie, who got wind of the scheme, prevented its 
 taking effect. The new edition was published in his 
 name, and less than a week afterwards he failed. ' Thus,' 
 
 1 Edited by Dr J. A. H. Murray for the Early English Text Society. 
 
[ UNIV 
 
 OF 
 
 JAMES HOGG 
 
 73 
 
 says Hogg, ' all the little money that I had gained, which 
 I was so proud of, and on which I depended for my 
 subsistence, and the settling of some old farming debts 
 that were pressing hard upon me, vanished from my grasp 
 at once.' 1 This, it will be seen, is the poet's own account 
 of the matter ; but Mr Craig-Brown assures us that his 
 profits were not so much reduced as he, ' with characteristic 
 inaccuracy,' asserts. 2 The Messrs Blackwood now came 
 to his rescue, taking over the copies of the book which 
 had remained unsold by Goldie, and giving them out as 
 a 'fourth edition.' But still by his own account the 
 poor poet profited nothing. 3 Nor did a bid for the favour 
 of the Princess Charlotte, made through the dedication of 
 the fifth edition, prove more successful. It is only fair, 
 however, to say that there exists another version of the 
 story of the dealings with Goldie — the hostile pamphlet 
 already more than once referred to, which publishes a 
 statement signed by him, denying on his authority cer- 
 tain of the assertions of Hogg. It thus appears that the 
 grounds of complaint were not on Hogg's side only. It 
 would seem that, over the abortive Spy, he had already 
 alienated one publisher, as we have seen that for good 
 reasons of his own he had deserted another; and it is 
 quite probable that, as an Ishmaelite in the world of 
 letters, with excepting Scott no trusty friend to back him, 
 he may have failed to recognise or at least to practise 
 that prudence which generally prompts the struggling 
 author to use every menage??ie?it with his publisher. It 
 is even possible that he may have been yet more 
 seriously at fault. Certainly that genial egotism and 
 indiscretion of tongue of his would not make him 
 the friend of all. And thus, as has been suggested, 
 
 1 Autobiography, p. xlv. a History of Selkirkshire, vol. i. p. 344. 
 
 3 Autobiography, p. xlvii. 
 
74 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 there may have been extenuating circumstances on the 
 side of Goldie, whom Hogg flatly accuses of having 
 used him very badly. 1 Still the hardship to Hogg 
 remains undiminished. And in our desire to be per- 
 fectly impartial, we are by no means sure that we have 
 not assigned too much weight to the statements of a 
 publication of obviously virulent hostility — one which does 
 not scruple to make what capital it can out of such low 
 witticisms on the poet's name as are contained in the 
 words and allusions ' porcine,' ' swineherd ' (for shepherd), 
 'related to Bacon.' Such gutter literature is generally 
 best left in its native obscurity; but in the present 
 instance it actually serves our purpose, for, with the 
 best will in the world, with one notable exception it 
 wholly fails to bring forward anything against Hogg 
 which tends in any respect to lower him in our estima- 
 tion. That one exception is the regrettable fact that in 
 later times he forfeited the esteem of Grieve, who, during 
 his early days in Edinburgh, had stood so heroically his 
 friend, but who afterwards came to speak of regarding 
 his character (we learn not why) with 'unmingled con- 
 tempt.' 2 'Alas! they had been friends in youth.' On 
 the other hand it is pleasant to quote the testimony of 
 Mr James Gray, who writes of Hogg as ' not only one of 
 the most original poets, but one of the most worthy men 
 this country ever produced.' 3 
 
 1 Scott, in the course of a kind and wise letter to the Shepherd 
 {Memorials, p. 137), says that Goldie 'certainly had reason to 
 complain.' 
 
 2 The Life of the Ettrick Shepherd Anatomized, p. 21. 
 
 3 Letter quoted in Memorials, p. 62. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 Pecuniary disappointments were, however, but April clouds 
 in the habitually serene weather of the Shepherd's life. 
 For, first and last, James Hogg was a happy man. And 
 perhaps only those who have written many biographical 
 sketches will realize how rare a thing it is to find a poet 
 of whom this may truly and consistently be said. No 
 doubt, by way of compensation, some strings of the perfect 
 lyre were in his case mute or missing, and those — strings 
 of deepest tone and most prolonged vibration. But in a 
 world where ' most men ' are cradled out of misery into 
 song, we may almost count the loss as gain. 
 
 Among Hogg's healthy enjoyments at this period was 
 an annual tour in his well-loved Highlands, where he com- 
 bined the pleasures of travel with those of visiting a circle 
 of friends now increasing in size and social importance. 
 During the summer of 1814, whilst he was visiting at 
 Kinnaird House in Athole, his hostess, the wife of 
 Mr Chalmers Izett, made a graceful use of her feminine 
 influence to incite him to poetical production. He 
 objected that he had nothing to write about. But she 
 would not hear him. * How can you be at a loss for 
 a subject,' she returned, ' and that majestic river rolling 
 beneath your eyes?' Accordingly it was arranged be- 
 tween them that Hogg should write a poem on the 
 Tay. Two years later, in a letter written from Meggernie 
 Castle 1 in Glen Lyon, he speaks of having traced the 
 Tay and some of its tributaries to their sources, and 
 
 1 Memorials, p. 69. 
 
 75 
 
76 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 having now 'fixed all the scenery for his next and 
 greatest poetical work.' Combining the practical with 
 the speculative, he had in the meantime taken 'nearly 
 a hundred dozen of trouts,' wading, at a moderate com- 
 putation, at least a hundred miles to do so. The poem 
 thus originated and studied was published later under 
 the title of Mador of the Moor. But, despite elaborate 
 preparations, the poet was hardly destined again, in a 
 long composition, to touch the poetical high-water-mark 
 reached in the best of the component parts of The 
 Queens Wake. During the same period, he planned 
 a volume of poetical tales which were to bear the title 
 of Midsummer Nighfs Dreams, one of which was after- 
 wards published as The Ti'/grims of the Sun. 
 
 It is pleasant to record that in the meantime he had 
 begun to reap, in tangible form, the fruits of his poetic 
 labours. In their humble cottage at Ettrick-house, his 
 father and mother had reached a very advanced age, 
 and he, being a dutiful son and anxious that they 
 should share in his improving circumstances, 1 had made 
 more than one effort to obtain a small holding under 
 the Duke of Buccleuch, with a view to providing a 
 home for them. Unfortunately, his mother — to whom 
 his genius owed so much — passed away, in her eighty- 
 third year, before his plans for her benefit could be 
 realized. He had, however, succeeded in enlisting the 
 interest of the Duchess of Buccleuch, whose bounty, 
 when Countess of Dalkeith, he had already experienced. 
 In her last illness, this lady, who died in 1814, recom- 
 mended the care of the poet's welfare to the Duke. 
 The bereaved husband did not neglect her charge, and 
 the result was that Hogg, writing to his old friend 
 Laidlaw in the commencement of 1815, was able to 
 
 1 He had ere this obtained work on at east one magazine. Auto- 
 biography, p. xlvi. 
 
JAMES HOGG 77 
 
 announce the receipt of a letter from his Grace, which 
 granted him, on 'a nominal rent,' the occupancy of 
 the farm of Altrive Lake on Yarrow. 'Never,' says 
 he, 'was a more welcome boon conferred on an un- 
 fortunate wight, as it gave me once more a habitation 
 among my native moors and streams, where every face 
 was that of a friend and each house was a home.' 
 This description may strike the reader as contrasting 
 somewhat sharply with the writer's strictures on the 
 district at the time of his departure for Edinburgh. 
 But the contrast only tends to show that the poet's 
 gloom and sunshine proceed from within; whilst, in 
 Hogg's case, as has been already said, the clouds were 
 not long in blowing over. He further gratefully ac- 
 knowledges the fact that his father is now provided 
 with a home for the remainder of his life. The elder 
 Hogg is said to have died at Altrive Lake in the ninety- 
 third year of his age. 1 
 
 In the spring of 1815, the poet entered upon possession 
 of the little farm, which was to be his home for many 
 future years : better had it been for him if he had never 
 had another. The farm-house stood pleasantly on the 
 right bank of Yarrow, the wide open hillscape around it. 2 
 Here John Wilson, whose acquaintance — productive of 
 such remarkable results — had been eagerly sought by 
 
 1 Memorials, p. 83. There is a discrepancy here, for the tomb- 
 stone in Ettrick Churchyard records that Robert Hogg, born in 1720, 
 died in the ninety-third year of his age, i.e. not later than 1813. 
 It is also said that Margaret Hogg, born in 1730, died in her eighty- 
 third year. But the letter of Hogg to the Duchess, quoted in Thom- 
 son's Memoir, p. xxxvii., shows that they were both alive in 1814. 
 
 2 Some remains of it, including the kitchen and the study — the 
 room in which Hogg died — have been incorporated in a modern farm- 
 house, the name of which has been changed to Eldinhope. The Lake 
 ^-probably never more than a ' moss ' — has been drained. 
 
78 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Hogg after the publication of The Isle of Palms * — visited 
 him in the following June, finding him attired in pastoral 
 garb, his occupation of the moment the bottling of whisky. 
 The situation of the farmhouse Wilson describes as good 
 and capable of being made very pretty, but the house itself 
 he calls ' not habitable.' 2 This is borne out by the Shep- 
 herd's biographer, who speaks of the ' auld clay biggin ' as 
 so accessible to the winds that every available plaid had 
 to be hung up before the door as a screen from draughts. 
 None the less we are told that many a happy hour was 
 spent there, and we can well believe it. The Shepherd 
 had ' those feelings of a gentleman which are found natur- 
 ally associated with genius,' and his disposition being 
 hospitable even to a fault, he dispensed most appetizing 
 cheer, among which oat-cakes, Yarrow mutton and trout, 
 grouse and fried parr, are especially mentioned as figuring. 
 Here, too, he received some of the best company in the 
 land, meeting Wordsworth when the latter paid his de- 
 ferred visit to Yarrow, and acting as his guide. The 
 painter Wilkie he greeted with what Scott described as 
 the 'finest compliment ever paid to man.' 'This is no 
 the great Mr Wilkie ? ' said he, and, on being assured that 
 his visitor was no other, grasping his hand and with eyes 
 glistening with pleasure, he exclaimed, ' Mr Wilkie, I 
 cannot tell you how proud I am to see you in my house, 
 and how glad I am to see you are so young a man ! ' A 
 single servant-maid attended to his wants, and here it may 
 be mentioned that an aged woman, Margaret Scott by 
 name, who had acted in this capacity, died quite recently 
 in Selkirk. She was of a good Scottish type of character, 
 supporting herself in decent poverty to the last ; and to the 
 last her favourite theme of conversation was Hogg, whose 
 praises she was never tired of singing. He was the idol 
 of her memory ; the period she had spent in his service 
 1 In 1812. 2 Memoir of Christopher North, vol. i. p. 186. 
 
JAMES HOGG 79 
 
 was the proud historical episode of her poor old life. 
 Another old woman, Tibby Shiels, the landlady famous 
 in her day of the neighbouring cottage-hostel on St Mary's 
 Loch, spoke always in the present writer's memory with 
 dignity of ' Mr Hogg,' though it is said that her practical and 
 uncompromising Scottish mind would sometimes qualify 
 her praise of him with the words, ' for a' the nonsense that 
 he wrait, Hogg was a gey sensible man — in some things.' 1 
 
 In course of time, the poet's literary earnings enabled him 
 to erect a substantial new cottage on his farm. 2 In giving 
 his orders for the same, his principal instruction to the 
 architect was that he should so arrange the apartments 
 that ' a' the reek should come out at ae lum.' The object 
 of this was to avoid giving any external indication as to 
 whether the master were at home or not ; for, lonely as 
 were his surroundings, his reputation was already beginning 
 to attract more visitors to Altrive than were at all times 
 convenient. As years went on, this tax on his time and 
 resources grew heavier; but his genial, sociable nature 
 made him incapable of denying himself to those who asked 
 for him. 
 
 The first literary scheme he had undertaken at Altrive 
 had not succeeded quite in the way he had intended. 
 Having been placed in a farm, he found that the next 
 thing was to stock it ; and, as he had no money for the 
 purpose, it occurred to him how this might also be done 
 at the expense of his friends. Nothing so serviceable as 
 a friend ! The plan he had imagined was to get each of 
 the leading poets of the day to contribute a poem to a 
 recueil, which should then be sold for his profit — certainly 
 for ingenuity, if that were all, a suitable plan enough. 
 With characteristic energy, he speedily obtained poems 
 
 1 Craig-Brown's Selkirkshire, i. 392. 
 
 2 The outlay on building it is alluded to as a cause of impecuniosity 
 in a letter of August 1819. {Memorials, p. 121.) 
 
8o FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 from Wordsworth, Southey, Wilson, Lloyd, Pringle and 
 others, besides promises from Byron and Rogers. But 
 Scott, feeling perhaps that the virtue of perseverance is 
 not exhibited to best advantage in the practice of asking 
 favours, refused to send him even so much as a single verse, 
 and probably emphasized his refusal with the dry Scots 
 proverb, ' Let every herring hing by its ain heid.' That 
 occasional lack of fineness of perception which was an un- 
 doubted characteristic of Hogg's was now further displayed 
 in the insistency with which he pressed his request, basing 
 it partly on what to him appeared the sufficient ground, 
 that Scott had never in his life refused him anything be- 
 fore. Finding, however, that he was not to attain his 
 object, he yielded with almost childish impulsiveness to a 
 fit of temper and sent his friend what he himself describes 
 as ' a very abusive letter.' Without Scott's co-operation 
 he felt that his scheme must fall to the ground. But now 
 is seen the ready resource of the man. In the waving of 
 a wand, he has transformed his plan of action, and, as he 
 cannot have the assistance of one of the leading poets, he 
 resolves to be altogether independent. Within the space 
 of three weeks he has produced the bulk of a volume of 
 ' poetical imitations,' in which the style of the chief living 
 poets is taken off, and three months later, and still within 
 the year 1815, The Poetic Mirror is published, of which 
 a first edition is sold off in six weeks ! 
 
 Remarkable as is the history of its production, the new 
 volume need scarcely detain us. All readers of the de- 
 lightful Rejected Addresses will agree that the frank parody 
 has its place in literature, though it is a place which ought 
 never to be a large one. But the ' poetical imitation ' — a 
 thing, at the best, of sheer barren cleverness and the 
 weariness bred thereof — has no place in literature at all. 
 And the poems in this volume — though innocent, of 
 course, except as indicating some lack of respect in the 
 
JAMES HOGG 81 
 
 author for his calling — are simply unblushing forgeries. 
 One of them — that on Byron — when read aloud by 
 Ballantyne to a large literary gathering, is said to have 
 imposed on everybody but the reader. But the only 
 one which possesses any interest for ourselves is Hogg's 
 imitation of his own archaisms and 'witch poetry,' en- 
 titled The Gude Greye Katte. The author was probably 
 quite content that his book had served the purpose for 
 which it was intended ; so we may be the same, and thus 
 dismiss it. 
 
 Hogg's literary interests were now rapidly multiplying. 
 An illustrated fifth edition of The Queen's Wake, planned 
 for the author's profit, was published by Blackwood, x 
 whilst an English edition was issued by John Murray. 2 
 The prose novelette of The Brow?iie of Bodsbeck 3 was pro- 
 bably in hand after 1816, but, at least up to that year, 
 Hogg, who was working steadily, seems still to have 
 looked to poetry as his mainstay. In 1 8 1 5 he brought 
 out the long and elaborate poem, already alluded to, 
 which he entitled The Tilgrims of the Sun. It may per- 
 haps be described as an attempt to reincarnate Kilmeny 
 — that ' standard of despair ' which he had himself set up 
 for himself, and which — in words put into his mouth by 
 Wilson 4 — he carried for ever in the arms of his heart. 
 The heroine of the new poem is Mary Lee, a lovely girl 
 of pensive nature, who, being visited by an angelic form, 
 rises from earth in the spirit in his company, her body 
 remaining prostrate in a trance. But here Hogg's fluency 
 runs away with him ; the need of that scholarship which 
 would have taught him the value of the labor limae is 
 fatally felt. The choice of subject, too, is for him a 
 peculiarly unhappy one, for restraints were what for his 
 own advantage he should have sought, whereas instead 
 
 1 Autobiography , p. 48. 2 Memorials, p. 103. 
 
 3 Published 1818. 4 Nodes A mbro stance, January 27th, 1831. 
 
82 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 he leaves them behind him, and expatiates at large in 
 air. The result is a poetic chaos, amid which scattered 
 images of beauty — for these are not wanting — lose almost 
 all their value. Even Shelley, a many times greater poet, 
 as his Witch of Atlas proves, was not more than half 
 successful in a similar attempt; and without undue dis- 
 respect it may be confessed that the final impression left 
 by the Pilgrims of the Sun is not altogether unlike that 
 left by the poem which Christopher Smart wrote in the 
 mad-house : we are not quite sure whether we have been 
 reading a rhapsody of an unusually sublime cast, or — 
 something very different indeed. The publishers Con- 
 stable and Murray had both fought shy of it, and even 
 Hogg himself at a later date poked some sly fun at it. 
 
 Before the month of May of 1816, Mador of the Moor, 
 another poem of very considerable dimension, had issued 
 from the press. Its inception has been already touched 
 on. But the present pace, which might have put even 
 Gait to the blush, was impossible to sustain. The author 
 of The Provost, it is true, would produce a three-volume 
 novel in a tour de main ; but here was Hogg dashing off 
 epics. And as Gait did somewhat later in his historical 
 novels, so Hogg in this poem seems to have set himself 
 up in deliberate rivalry with Scott, with special reference 
 to the Wizard's Lady of the Lake. The new work deals, 
 through the vehicle of the Spenserian stanza, with a story 
 of the gallantry and marriage of one of the errant lover- 
 kings of Scotland. But it is a thankless task to attempt, 
 except with very strong motives, to resuscitate what the 
 world has been content to forget. The age we live in 
 is an overcrowded one, and the responsibility of merely 
 cumbering a reader's mind is not to be lightly entered 
 upon. Our object, then, in a sketch such as the present, 
 is not so much to present a catalogue raisonne of a writer's 
 works, as, so far as may be, to set in high relief such of 
 
JAMES HOGG 83 
 
 these as may deserve that eminence — the works, that is, 
 by which Hogg really won and deserved his reputation. 
 We have no fear that the happy reader who reads for love 
 or idleness will be deterred by us from dipping in these 
 not too pellucid depths for such pearls as they may conceal. 
 And we may add that it is the fortune and reward of such 
 well-graced adventurers that they seldom dip entirely in 
 vain. But this being premised, and always excepting 
 Hogg's later lyrics — to be afterwards dealt with — there 
 now remains but one metrical production of his which 
 need here be named — Queen Hynde^ a massive poem, 
 concerned with the earliest ages of our country and 
 many strange things that then befell. After this, Hogg's 
 muse, who now found herself a good deal neglected by the 
 public, expired of sheer over-exercise and loose guidance. 
 'From that day to this/ says he, 'save now and then an 
 idle song to beguile a leisure hour, I have never written 
 another line of poetry.' 1 
 
 For all his unquestioned talent and sincere devotion 
 to poetry, the Ettrick Shepherd was not a strong 
 enough man to rise to the conception or the enter- 
 prise of a great career in literature. At that day 
 there was certainly more of hap-hazard writing to 
 keep him in countenance than there would be say in 
 ours, for new canons of criticism were still a-wanting, 
 which should take the place of those of the Eighteenth 
 Century, now rapidly being discredited. But if he had 
 indeed laid aside his singing-robes for good, and 
 that with scarcely a sigh, there were now other literary 
 interests to occupy Hogg's attention. The publisher 
 Blackwood has been already mentioned as having come 
 forward to assist him at the time of Goldie's failure. That 
 extremely shrewd and able gentleman was now pushing 
 fast to the front, and, among the distinguished men with 
 1 Autobiography, p. lxii. 
 
84 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 whom he became associated, the Ettrick Shepherd was in 
 point of time the first. 1 The Shepherd has indeed claimed 
 the honour of having been the ' beginner and almost sole 
 instigator ' of Blackwood's Magazine 2 ; but it seems more 
 exact to say that the idea of the new periodical arose 
 simultaneously in the minds of Hogg, Thomas Pringle, 
 and the proprietor. The Edinburgh Monthly Magazine 
 was started with Pringle as joint-editor with one Cleghorn, 
 and Hogg, who objected to Cleghorn's partnership, by his 
 own desire as mere 'occasional contributor.' But a dis- 
 agreement quickly arising between Blackwood and his 
 editors, in October 1817 the magazine was placed on a 
 new footing, and from this period Hogg comes forward 
 much more prominently in connexion with it. 
 
 His principal associates in the enterprize were, of course, 
 John Wilson — whose visit to Altrive Hogg returned in 
 Westmorland — and John Gibson Lockhart; and it re- 
 quires but small penetration to see that, neither in 
 character nor literary reputation, did the Shepherd profit 
 by the connexion. At once greatly his juniors in age and 
 his superiors in station and education, the redoubtable 
 ' Scorpion ' and ' Leopard ' were in a position to exercise 
 great influence over him, and that influence — during this 
 the period of their intellectual intoxication, the seed-time 
 of their literary wild-oats — was anything rather than a 
 fortunate one. For in Hogg — side by side with so much 
 that was simple-hearted, good-natured, lovable, side by side 
 also with what we may almost describe as a blind upward 
 aspiration — there was undeniably a certain tendency to loud- 
 ness, a certain self-complacency which when it ceased to be 
 naif became tiresome ; and this which his residence in Edin- 
 burgh had done not a little to foster. These constituted 
 the reverse side of his character, that is all ; and happy, 
 
 1 William Blackwood and his Sons, vol. i. p. 35. 
 
 2 Autobiography, p. lxiii. 
 
JAMES HOGG 85 
 
 we repeat, is the man who has no greater cause to fear 
 exposing that reverse side. But this reverse side, better 
 kept in subordination, the influence of the irresponsible 
 1 North ' and his brilliant congener undoubtedly tended to 
 educe into prominence. So much for their effect upon 
 his character ; now as to reputation. Mrs Gordon, in 
 her Life of her Father, 1 after remarking that Hogg was a 
 very frequent contributor to the new magazine, goes on 
 to say that ' in addition to his own genuine compositions, 
 he got the credit of numberless performances, both in 
 prose and verse, which he had never beheld till they 
 appeared under his name.' This, it appears, forsooth ! 
 was a part of a system of mystification practised in the 
 management of the magazine, which has never been carried 
 so far in any other publication. But this also at once 
 shows us Hogg in the character of souffre-douleur, and 
 reveals to what extent his easy good-nature was imposed 
 on. And when the, in a literary sense, notoriously 
 licentious character of Blackwood in its early days is 
 recalled, it must at once be acknowledged that the 
 word 'credit,' italicized by ourselves above, is double- 
 edged. 
 
 Mr Andrew Lang, having had access to documents 
 not available to Mrs Gordon, inclines in his Life of 
 Lockhart' 1 to lay the heavier share of Blackwood's early 
 indiscretions at Wilson's door, and it was certainly 
 Wilson who took the greatest liberties with Hogg's name. 
 Lockhart was content with ' quizzing ' him upon all 
 occasions, or, as the Shepherd himself puts it, never 
 telling him the truth ' a' his days but aince, an' that was 
 merely by chance.' 3 In the course of the next few years, 
 the Nodes Ambrosiance became the chief feature of the 
 
 1 Memoir of Christopher North, vol. i. p. 268. 
 
 2 Vol. i. pp. 135, 136. 
 
 3 Note on Lockhart appended to the Autobiography. 
 
86 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 magazine, and in these celebrated dialogues the principal 
 part was borne by the Shepherd. The situation thus 
 brought about was probably unique in literature, for here 
 was a writer of established reputation made to figure 
 month after month as the mouth-piece of remarks and 
 opinions of which he had generally as little previous 
 knowledge as any other member of the public. ' His own 
 account of the matter was that the Nodes were contrived 
 for the sole purpose of putting into his mouth all the senti- 
 ments which the writers durst not express in their own 
 persons. 1 It may be suggested that, since the Shepherd 
 submitted to this treatment, no one else had grounds to 
 complain of it. And no doubt Hogg's child-like vanity 
 was gratified by the notoriety it afforded him. Yet, this 
 notwithstanding, he came to loggerheads with Wilson over 
 the matter. 2 The genial Christopher did not, however, 
 take his friend's tantrums very seriously, and seems on the 
 whole to have regarded him as a man with whom it was 
 scarcely possible to 'go too far.' On the other hand, he 
 claims in a letter to Hogg that the Nodes have spread the 
 fame of the latter over the four quarters of the globe. 
 There are persons, doubtless, who would not have cared for 
 fame of that particular kind ; but the Shepherd was not nice 
 in such matters. It is undeniable that a warm and scarcely 
 interrupted friendship subsisted between the two men all 
 the time, and certainly nothing is further from our wishes 
 than to exaggerate the extent, or misrepresent the kind, 
 of the injury done to Hogg by the Nodes. In a world 
 where high spirits and intellectual horse-play ruled, the 
 every-day standards cannot fairly be applied. Our point, 
 then, is simply that the Nodes Ambrosiancz tended to 
 send abroad a very false impression of Hogg, and have 
 to some extent tended to perpetuate it. Hear on this 
 
 1 Note on Lockhart appended to the Atifobiography. 
 
 2 See Memoir of Christopher Norths vol. ii. p. 217. 
 
JAMES HOGG 87 
 
 matter an authority no less unbiassed — or, at least, un- 
 biassed in our favour — than the editor of the standard 
 edition of North's Works. After stating that there were 
 about Hogg a 'homely heartiness of manner,' and a 
 ' Doric simplicity ' of address which were ' exceedingly pre- 
 possessing,' and after admitting that he was * in all respects 
 a very remarkable man,' that writer continues — ' In his 
 social hours, a naivete and a vanity which disarmed dis- 
 pleasure by the openness and good-humour with which it 
 was avowed, played over the surface of a nature which at 
 bottom was sufficiently shrewd and sagacious; but his 
 conversational powers were by no means pre-eminent. 
 He never, indeed, attempted any colloquial display, al- 
 though there was sometimes a quaintness in his remarks, 
 a glimmering of drollery, a rural freshness, and a tinge of 
 poetical colouring, which redeemed his discourse from 
 commonplace, and supplied to the consummate artist 
 who took him in hand the hints out of which to construct 
 a character at once original, extraordinary, and delightful 
 — a character of which James Hogg undoubtedly furnished 
 the germ, but which, as it expanded under the hands of 
 its artificer, acquired a breadth, a firmness, and a power 
 to which the bard of Mount Benger had certainly no pre- 
 tension.' x So, then, it is acknowledged by the advocate of 
 the other side that the real and ideal Shepherds are two 
 very different persons. That writer's object is, of course, 
 to do full justice to Wilson's creative power. An en- 
 thusiastic appreciation of Wilson's creation follows, with 
 which we have already dealt, in a somewhat summary 
 manner, in another place. 2 It is the editor's opinion that 
 Hogg's ' surest passport to immortality is his embalmment 
 in the Nodes Ambrosiance? But here, surely, is one of 
 those literary prophecies against indulging in which a critic 
 
 1 Professor Ferrier's Preface to the Nodes Ambrosiance, p. xvii. 
 
 2 See The Blackwood Group (Famous Scots Series), pp. 44, 45. 
 
88 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 can scarcely be too much upon his guard. Emitted in 
 1855, it is in 1899 already falsified. Hogg's work, ravaged 
 by time as in parts it is, has nevertheless withstood wear 
 and tear much better than Wilson's ; but, to leave that 
 side of the question altogether out of consideration, I 
 fancy that, judging his character on its merits, there are few 
 to-day who will not set the simple, kindly, unsophisticated 
 farmer of Yarrow — as he stands, ' in his rights of a man,' 
 owing nothing to art, his imperfections on his head — very 
 high above the sham Arcadian, the fatuous amorist of 
 his own eloquence, the maudlin retailer of tirades ad 
 libitum over whisky-punch in a tavern. 
 
 It is possible that our own opinion here may be at 
 fault, but there is one whose judgment in this matter is 
 bound to command respect — the true and loving wife 
 whom a few years later the Shepherd was to bring home 
 to Altrive. Mrs Hogg, says her daughter, survived her 
 husband thirty-five years, but, 'to the last day of her 
 gentle life,' the recollection of certain of the Nodes would 
 make ' her pulse beat faster and her eye sparkle with a 
 wife's indignation.' 1 Evidently the loyal lady had no 
 conceit of the fine feathers derived from Wilson, and said 
 to have been sported for her husband's benefit. Was she 
 wrong, or was the world to be credited with clearer vision 
 than she supposed? There are other testimonies tend- 
 ing to the same result. The Shepherd of the Nodes, 
 says his daughter, in gentle remonstrance, was not ' the 
 Shepherd his own home knew.' Many of his friends 
 endeavoured to incite him to resent the travesty, but 
 having never, with one exception, discovered any evil 
 design in the matter, he was content in his own 
 simple and good-natured way, to regard it all as 
 'excellent sport.' 2 
 
 We have, however, allowed this digression to carry us 
 
 Memorials, p. 139. 2 Ibid., pp. 139, 140. 
 
JAMES HOGG 89 
 
 far ahead of our story. The disagreement between Hogg 
 and Professor Wilson did not occur until after 1829; 
 but it was in the seventh issue of the new magazine that 
 the celebrated Translation of an Ancient Chaldee Manu- 
 script saw the light. Such credit as belongs to the 
 authorship of that much-canvassed jeu d' esprit was claimed 
 by Hogg. This does not, however, amount to much, 
 and his friends should be more concerned in insisting 
 on the fact that the paper, after leaving his hands in 
 Yarrow, received various additions from others who were 
 not wont to be scrupulous. This literary bombshell con- 
 stituted a veiled attack upon the rival magazine now 
 conducted by Blackwood's discarded editors, and was 
 made the vehicle of some gross personalities. Hogg 
 protests that he never dreamed of giving offence by his 
 share in the article, in proof of which he mentions that 
 he did not even keep it a secret from the amiable 
 Thomas Pringle, who — to his own credit be it said — 
 continued on terms of warm friendship with him at a 
 much later date. 
 
 About this time he published, in a two-volume collec- 
 tion, his best known prose tale, The Brownie of Bodsbeck. 
 The action of this story is located at the farm of Chapel- 
 hope on the Loch of the Lowes, at Gameshope above 
 Loch Skene, and at other places in the author's native 
 district; the period is the reign of James the Second, 
 when the 'despot's champion,' Claverhouse, is endeavour- 
 ing to dragoon the Covenanters into conformity. A 
 notorious misdoer, Mass John Binram, the 'curate' of 
 St Mary of the Lowes, has been mysteriously shot — a 
 summary act of justice which brings the arch-persecutor 
 in person into the neighbourhood. The story then turns 
 upon the concealment of a remnant of Covenanters in a 
 cavern among the hills, where their material needs are 
 ministered to by the daughter of the farmer of Chaphl- 
 
9 o FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 hope, a high-spirited and devoted lass, who in this manner 
 brings herself under suspicion of trafficking with the powers 
 of darkness. Unlike the majority of Hogg's stories, the 
 merit of this one lies less in the treatment of supernatural 
 incident than in humorous delineation of rustic character. 
 The honest and burly Goodman of Chapelhope, with 
 ' strength of airm ' as his resort in the difficulties of life ; 
 the two shepherd bodies — Davie Tait with his truly 
 astounding gift of prayer, and old John of Muchrah — 
 and the Highland serjeant Macpherson, are all capital 
 sketches of character ; whilst Jasper, Old Nannie, Maron 
 Linton, and others are scarcely, if at all, less life-like. 
 There is a good humorous scene, which we regret to be 
 unable to quote, when the supposed Brownie has created 
 a panic at Riskinhope, and the inmates of the house 
 exchange terrified comments whilst crouching in a con- 
 fused heap in the nearest available place of safety. But, 
 indeed — 'Whatever faults the author may commit — he 
 seldom fails to tell his story with conviction, or to make 
 his characters express themselves in the most natural 
 manner in the world, as well as in the raciest of Border 
 Scots. Where he does fail is in the conduct of his 
 narrative, which is rambling to the point of perplexity, 
 if not indeed of actual incoherence. In later work this 
 defect was corrected. 
 
 The Brownie of Bodsbeck was the occasion of a little 
 scene between Hogg and Scott, which, as recounted by 
 the former, serves to illustrate the relations between them. 
 On the day following its publication, Hogg, calling on his 
 friend on the pretence of asking advice, but in reality to 
 hear his opinion of the new work, found the novelist's 
 shaggy eyebrows hanging low over his eyes, which he 
 knew to be an ominous sign. And, in fact, Scott did not 
 wait long to inform him that he liked the story ' very ill 
 indeed,' considering it to be an unfair and exaggerated 
 
JAMES HOGG 91 
 
 picture of the times and historical characters represented. 
 Hogg defended himself by urging, plausibly enough, that 
 it was the picture he himself had received from tradition, 
 protesting that there was no one incident in the tale which 
 he could not prove out of history to be literally and 
 positively true. To meet the exigencies of his plot, he 
 might have ' changed situations ' — by which we ought 
 probably to understand ' shifted localities ' ; but he declared 
 that that was all. And then, carrying the war into the 
 enemy's country, he added that this was more than could 
 be said for Old Mortality. But Scott, whose authorship 
 of the novels was still unavowed, was too wide-awake to 
 be drawn into this trap, and the Shepherd — lest there 
 should be any suspicion of a debt on his part — proceeded 
 to announce the actual priority of composition, though 
 not of publication, of his own story. Scott had not 
 much to say on this point, but contented himself with 
 repeating that, excepting the character of Old Nanny, he 
 disliked the tale exceedingly, and that as a picture of 
 the Royalist party it was 'distorted, prejudiced, and un- 
 true.' Here Hogg's temper must certainly have gotten the 
 better of him, for he had nothing more effective to say in 
 reply than that his story was ' a devilish deal truer ' than 
 the other, after which he was leaving the room in a huff 
 when Scott stopped him, crying, ' No, no ! you are not 
 to go and leave me again in a bad humour. You ought 
 not to be offended with me for telling you my mind 
 freely.' 'Why, to be sure,' answered the Shepherd, 'it is 
 the greatest folly in the world for me to be sae. But 
 ane's beuks are like his bairns, he disna like to hear 
 them spoken ill o' — especially when he is conscious that 
 they dinna deserve it.' The matter ended by his re- 
 maining to dinner. There is something particularly 
 human and genial about this little scene of passing 
 irritability, and, though Scott may come the best out 
 
 UN 
 
 OF 
 
92 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 of it, I think that its effect is to make us like both men 
 the better. 1 
 
 Hogg was now busy with his Jacobite Relics of Scotland, 
 a collection of old Jacobite songs, the two volumes of 
 which saw the light respectively in 1819 and 182 1. The 
 undertaking had owed its origin to a suggestion made at 
 a Meeting of the Highland Society in London, and 
 various collectors of old songs — among whom the chief 
 was Scott — had placed their portfolios at the disposal 
 of Hogg, who had been chosen to act as editor. His 
 method of procedure was to choose or to construct from 
 among the various readings of each song one which 
 pleased himself, adding the music — which he had sought 
 out from old manuscripts or from rural musicians — and 
 illustrating the whole with copious notes. The First 
 Series of the Relics consists of songs dating earlier than 
 the battle of Sheriff-muir, and the editor, referring to that 
 period, remarks on its scarcity of Scottish Whig songs 
 worthy of preservation. 2 His method of editing was 
 rightly not so rigidly historical as to exclude the Hame, 
 hame, liame, and other ' forgeries ' of his old acquaintance, 
 Allan Cunningham. 
 
 Before the publication of the second volume of the 
 Relics, Hogg had entered the married state. At first 
 sight it is a matter for surprise that so ardent and loyal an 
 admirer of the sex should have reached his fiftieth year 
 before taking this step. But that is a dutiful old custom 
 among the Scottish peasantry which keeps at least one 
 member of a family single until his or her parents require 
 caring for no longer. Hogg's father and mother were 
 now dead; he was comfortably settled in his farm, and 
 ' in a fair way of doing ' with his pen ; the vigour of his 
 frame, the elasticity of his step, and the buoyancy of his 
 
 1 Domestic Manners of Sir Walter Scott, pp. 36, et seq. 
 
 2 Jacobite Relics, Introduction. 
 
JAMES HOGG 93 
 
 spirit were, as Mr Craig-Brown remarks, unabated, and it 
 was in every way fit that he should take a wife. Favour in 
 wooing was not in his case ' fashious to seek,' and, within 
 recent years, his well-wishers had more than once looked 
 him out a suitable mistress for his household. Their solici- 
 tude was, however, thrown away. In these matters the 
 prudent Scot is wont to keep his own counsel, and it 
 seems that for about ten years past the poet had been 
 carrying on some sort of courtship of the lady who now 
 became his wife. This was Miss Margaret Phillips, the 
 younger daughter of a farmer belonging to a good family 
 which had been long established in Annandale, — a lady 
 of social standing superior to his own, and some twenty 
 years his junior, whom Hogg had met frequently at the 
 house of her brother-in-law, his friend Mr Gray, in Edin- 
 burgh. Miss Phillips, who is spoken of as a ' belle,' had 
 had plenty of suitors in her own neighbourhood ; but we 
 judge that Hogg had occupied the ground before them, 
 and her instinct guided her truly. A few of his love- 
 letters have been preserved, and the following passage, 
 quoted from one of them, shows that, however thoughtlessly 
 high his spirits might run at times, he could be tenderly 
 grave and sensible when the occasion required it : — 
 
 1 Some things that you said to me set me a-thinking,' he 
 writes in November 1819, 'and that very seriously, and I 
 am not yet convinced of the prudence of our marriage, 
 considering my years and the uncertain state in which I 
 hang, as it were between poverty and riches. For God's 
 sake consult further with your father, for I have no one 
 to consult on the subject, and have got some very urgent 
 remonstrances against it. Indeed, your father is the only 
 man whom I would consult, knowing that he has your 
 happiness at heart, and would, I am sure, advise what he 
 judges best.' 1 When we remember the circumstances of 
 1 Memorials, pp. 124, 125. 
 
94 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 the correspondents, the spirit of this letter strikes us as 
 wisely loving and disinterested. The correspondence is 
 interspersed with more matter-of-fact passages; which, 
 however, is no bad augury for future happiness. The 
 course of the true love of Hogg and his sweetheart did 
 not run perfectly smooth, and, as we see, grave doubts 
 were entertained as to the wisdom of their marriage. But, 
 in spite of these, it took place, being celebrated in April 
 1820, at the old mansion-house of Mousewald, in Dumfries- 
 shire, the residence of the bride's father. It was a love- 
 match, and, in its own way, a romance, and it is pleasant 
 to record that it proved a perfectly happy union. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 At his marriage the Ettrick Shepherd entered upon what 
 may be described as the second period of tranquillity in 
 his life. His domestic existence was smooth and happy, 
 and the little ones soon began to grow up and run about 
 around him. His correspondence testifies to the pleasant- 
 ness of his friendships ; whilst of visitors come out to look 
 upon the man, there were probably more than was quite 
 good either for his pocket or his productive powers. For, 
 though Hogg had chosen to make his habitation in the 
 wilderness, he had about him nothing of the De Senancour. 
 He joined eagerly in the amusements of the neighbourhood; 
 his advent was hailed with delight at local gatherings, and, 
 besides being a keen sportsman, he was in particular an 
 ardent votary of the ever-popular 'roaring game.' Lockhart 
 also gives a pleasing picture of him, attired in the doublet 
 of Lincoln green and broad blue bonnet which formed the 
 club costume of the Bowmen of the Border, presiding as 
 Captain at the St Ronan's athletic games at Innerleithen, 
 and carrying off prizes for agility and prowess up to the 
 age of three-score. On the other hand, he enjoyed an 
 equal immunity from that no less morbid symptom, the 
 absentee's craving for the pressure and stimulus of the 
 great world, — in proof of which it is enough to relate that 
 he declined an invitation to the Coronation of George IV. 
 because it would have prevented his attending St Boswells' 
 Fair. In a word, he was perfectly content in the place 
 where his lot was cast — as, of a surety, well he might be. 
 His pen, besides being abundantly and lucratively occupied 
 
 95 
 
9 6 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 in contributing to BlackivoocPs and Eraser's Magazines, 
 was busied with an aftermath of verse, to which he gave 
 the name of A Queer Book} and with two volumes of 
 Winter Evening Tales, and was also in high request among 
 editors of the literary ' Annuals ' so much in vogue at that 
 time. Then, as a relief from literary labour, he had plenty 
 of out-door occupation and recreation, and indeed, but for 
 a single factor in his circumstances, his lot, so far as we 
 can judge, ought to have been as near perfect happiness 
 as any given to a mortal. 
 
 But as the itch of official employment spoilt Gait's life, 
 so the Will-o'-the-Wisp in Hogg's case was farming specula- 
 tion. And now, no longer content with the seventy acres 
 of Altrive, he must needs lease in addition to it the neigh- 
 bouring farm of Mount Benger, — where for the next seven 
 or eight years his life was to be a struggle against adverse 
 circumstances. For the failure in which this struggle 
 ended, various causes have been assigned. Professor 
 Veitch attributes it to the rent of the farm being too high ; 
 but as to this, Hogg, a practical man, who had lived so to 
 speak next-door for the last five years had the best means 
 of judging ; and, if he judged that the farm could not be 
 made to pay, he ought surely to have left it alone. Next 
 it is said that, during his tenancy, seasons were bad and 
 prices low j whilst it is certain that, by the inability of his 
 father-in-law, owing to severe losses, to pay Mrs Hogg's 
 marriage-portion, the capital on which he calculated was 
 reduced by ^iooo. But, this notwithstanding, there ia 
 probably something to be said for the view of the case 
 expressed by Mr Borland, the present minister of Yarrow, 
 when he states that, as a matter of fact, Hogg, though 
 skilled in the management of sheep, ' never gave any in- 
 dication of being able to farm successfully. He failed 
 
 1 Published by Blackwood in 1822, and quaintly dedicated to 
 Christopher North and Timothy Tickler. 
 
JAMES HOGG 97 
 
 every time he tried.' 1 Extravagant expenditure, not 
 indeed upon himself, but on his too numerous guests, 
 together with absorption in literary work, doubtless also 
 contributed towards the final result. 
 
 It was probably at Mount Benger that most of Hogg's 
 prose tales were written. To unearth each of these from 
 the back numbers of Preiser's Magazine, or other places 
 where they first appeared, would be a work of considerable 
 interest as well as of considerable research ; but perhaps 
 all readers, save a few Hogg-enthusiasts, will be satisfied 
 with the selection presented in the six-volume illustrated 
 edition of Tales a?id Sketches by the Ettrick Shepherd? 
 For, as has been already hinted, Hogg belonged to that 
 bounteous family of makers who, following Ovid, have left 
 us rather too much than not enough of their work. Taking 
 the above edition, then, as our text-book, the tales and 
 sketches may be divided into three main classes : — namely, 
 stories dealing with the occult or supernatural — such as the 
 tales of dreams, or apparitions, fairies, witchcraft, and the 
 like, in the Shepherd's Calendar and elsewhere ; historical 
 tales in the manner introduced by Scott, such as The 
 Brow?iie of Bodsbeck or The Siege of Roxburgh ; and lastly, 
 tales and sketches illustrative of local and contemporary 
 pastoral life, such as The Shepherd's Wedding, and the 
 papers on Sheep, Sheep-dogs, Storms, and so forth. 
 Besides these, and perhaps less noticeable or less 
 numerous, there are such novelettes of country life as 
 the pleasant love-tale of The Wool-gatherer, or the more 
 farcical Window Wat's Courtship; adventure tales, as 
 that of Captain John Lochy in the Altrive Tales, and 
 fantasy-pieces in the manner of Defoe, such as the ac- 
 count of Allan Gordon's wonderful experiences in the 
 arctic regions. Indeed, Hogg's versatility as a tale-teller 
 
 1 77*i? Eth-ick Shepherd Memorial Volume, Lewis, Selkirk, 1898, p. 20. 
 a Blackie & Son, Glasgow and Edinburgh. 
 
 G 
 
9 8 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 was almost on a par with his fertility ; he tried his hand 
 at almost every known style. The powerful Private 
 Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, as they were 
 first published in a separate volume, and have also been 
 most recently reprinted, 1 though not differing in kind 
 from the other stories of the supernatural, are to some 
 extent marked off from them. 
 
 Amid such wealth of stories, to particularize is im- 
 possible \ we must be content with a few remarks on the 
 various classes of story. It is undoubtedly on his tales 
 of the supernatural, whether told in prose or verse, that 
 Hogg's chief claim to distinctive remembrance rests \ and 
 in respect to this he may be considered as the ( comple- 
 ment ' of Sir Walter Scott. Both Scott and he were born, 
 most opportunely, at a period of social transition — most 
 pat at the meeting-point in time of the old order and 
 the new. Scott, by a touch of his magic wand, or, to 
 drop a trivial metaphor for the naked and much more 
 moving fact — by the severe and life-long application of 
 almost superhuman mental powers, effected the passage or 
 the transfusion — clean and neat almost as in a chemist's 
 experiment — of what must otherwise have perished in the 
 world around him into the library which constitutes his 
 works. Old Scottish song, old Scottish manners, Scottish 
 tradition, Scottish legend — these he preserved j and to 
 him, we, as Scotsmen, owe it that our sense of the Past 
 is probably richer than that possessed by any other nation. 
 But beside this vast field reclaimed and salvaged, there 
 lay one department which was comparatively neglected 
 — at any rate it lay open to receive and to repay more 
 labour than Scott had time to give it. This was the 
 department of the supernatural, in which — though he 
 had selected it for his first essay in literature — Scott was 
 never at any time an adept. Hogg came forward to 
 1 Shiells & Co., 1895. 
 
JAMES HOGG 99 
 
 supply the deficiency, and it is in this sense that his 
 work may be looked on as complementary to Scott's. 
 
 We have seen that his early education had exactly 
 fitted him for this work. In his case, books would have 
 been but so many impediments; and, accordingly, the 
 atmosphere in which he grew up was one unvitiated by 
 literature, and yet — thanks to his mother — permeated by 
 tradition. To tradition his hungry young imagination 
 found itself restricted ; tradition he assimilated or made 
 part of himself, and it is not until that process was 
 complete that we hear of his bookish education beginning. 
 And thus it seems quite possible that what he had looked 
 on as the great hardship or misfortune of his life was, in 
 reality, the very thing to which he owed most. The 
 locality in which he grew up was also in his favour ; for 
 in no other part of Scotland, as Sir Walter Scott points 
 out, 1 had the belief in fairies held its ground so per- 
 tinaciously. Indeed, as we have seen, the Shepherd's 
 grandfather, Will o' Phaup, was even credited with 
 having conversed with them, and with being the last 
 in that wild region who did so. The question for 
 us here to consider, however, is this : what was the 
 literary effect on Hogg of these now extinct influences ? 
 The answer, as we conceive, is, in the simplest language, 
 that Hogg tells a 'ghost-story' as no other man has 
 told one. Nature had gifted him with a singularly large 
 share of what in literature we may denominate the 
 Defoe quality — the power, that is, of feigning, or making 
 real in narrative that which has never been so. Others 
 have, of course, possessed this power — every writer of 
 fiction must in some degree possess it ; but it is Hogg's 
 peculiar distinction that he extends it beyond the limits 
 of the world that is. And the power never fails him. 
 By its success the Gil-Martin of the Justified Sinner ranks 
 1 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, vol. ii. p. 226. 
 
ioo FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 as a unique attempt in our literature to incarnate the 
 Fiend amid realistic surroundings ; but in Hogg's work 
 Gil-Martin does not stand alone. For, in their own kind 
 and degree, the Old Man of the Hu?it of Eildon — he whom 
 every one remembers to have seen before, but whom none 
 identifies — the ' jottery-man ' of the Black Haggs, Tibby 
 Johnston's wraith, the unknown figure who engages Adam 
 Bell in sword-play behind Holyrood, and a score of others 
 are all equally successful. Neither, again, is Hogg's success 
 restricted to those scenes in which actually supernatural 
 characters are brought upon the stage. It is the atmo- 
 sphere of eeriness, that is of the supernatural, which he has 
 always at command, and this is shown in at the least a 
 hundred instances — of which the glamour, or deceptio visits 
 of the charming and pathetic fairy-tale of Mary Burnet, 
 and the wonderful game-birds falling a prey to the sports- 
 man of the Strafige Secret, and directing reproachful glances 
 upon him as they fall, may be cited, not as the most strik- 
 ing, but simply as the first that happen to occur to our 
 recollection. What Hogg has done then, so far, is to 
 endow with a permanent literary form the singularly rich 
 and varied creations of the Scottish peasant's fancy, in so 
 far as that fancy has applied itself to its favourite field 
 of the supernatural ; and, by thus endowing them, to pre- 
 serve them when upon the brink of oblivion. 
 
 We have dwelt at length on this, the most important, 
 group of tales ; the others may be much more rapidly dis- 
 missed. In the present age of realism, such ' documents ' 
 as the papers in which the Shepherd discourses of traits of 
 affection displayed by sheep, and other incidents of the 
 shepherd life, are perhaps likely to appeal to a wider circle 
 of literary readers than any others among his works. The 
 historical tales, though excellent in their way, and espe- 
 cially noticeable for the success with which the author's 
 courage carries him over difficulties, are less distinctive of 
 
JAMES HOGG 101 
 
 the man than those of the other groups. Others, that is, 
 have written similar tales of not less merit, but, as a poet of 
 the supernatural, and perhaps also as a shepherd author, 
 Hogg stands alone. In reading his history, it is desirable to 
 be on one's guard against the ' false document ' — as, for in- 
 stance, when he speaks of a trial for witchcraft of the reign 
 of James V. as being recorded in the Melrose Chronicle — a 
 record which closes in the year 1270. This is a mannerism 
 to which he resorts to obtain verisimilitude, and, whether 
 legitimate or not, it was not in his day counted reprehensible. 1 
 We have spoken of Hogg in relation to Scott; there 
 are other writers with whom he invites comparison. First, 
 then, his peasant tales are much more interesting than 
 those of his friend Allan Cunningham, whose work in this 
 kind owes its literary value to other considerations rather 
 than to pure skill in story-telling. Next, if we compare him 
 with Hoffmann, we are at once impressed by the fact that, 
 unlike the German's, Hogg's ' weird ' is seldom or never 
 morbid, fevered, hectic ; his wild imaginings are those of a 
 healthy man not of delirium ; he does not habitually revel 
 in studies of the diseased or the abnormal, as does Hoff- 
 mann, for instance, in his long-drawn study of the malady 
 of the Capuchin Medardus, 2 or, again, in the marvellous and 
 characteristic Sandmann, where tragic terror and a monkey- 
 like satire and grotesqueness are set off and foiled by the 
 masterly-sketch of a charming and affectionate girl. The 
 story-teller, however, with whom to us Hogg most readily 
 suggests comparison is Robert Louis Stevenson, with whose 
 work his own presents several striking points of similarity 
 and of contrast. 
 
 1 He was conscious of abusing it, for he himself says, ' I have now 
 given so many tales of perfect truth [his own italics] to the public, 
 many of them with not one word of truth in them, that I know I 
 shall not be believed in this. . . . Preface to Lay Sermons, 1834. 
 
 2 In Das Elixir des Teufels. 
 
102 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Their similarity is perhaps mainly noticeable in a strongly 
 national colouring, and in identical predilections in the 
 choice of subject ; their difference might also be chosen 
 as the typical difference between the intuitive and the 
 self-conscious artist. Both, then, are strongly Scottish — 
 Hogg from the necessity of the case, but Stevenson, who 
 had seen the world, from election ; in their choice of 
 subject both turn readily to the weird — Hogg intuitively, 
 Stevenson from the preference of a fastidious and some- 
 what blase artist. And, besides weirdness, a thing which 
 attracts either is adventure, in which field their parity of 
 limitation is also most noticeable. Hogg, who does not 
 select, has a much greater natural fertility than Steven- 
 son, but in both an almost pagan distaste for anything 
 bordering on the problems of life is apparent. Allied 
 to this, and arising doubtless from the same aversion 
 from deep thinking in the authors, is a poverty of char- 
 acterization ; and in this same poverty, be it said in pass- 
 ing, lies perhaps the bane or ultimate death-seed of the 
 adventure-tale. For, sooner or later, adventure of itself 
 will pall ; whilst if we care but little for the adventurer, 
 we can scarcely be much interested in his fate. In re- 
 spect to this common weakness, Stevenson, the younger 
 man, is a greater defaulter than Hogg, who can, indeed, 
 generally place a personality before his reader, but fails, or 
 does not attempt, to exhibit it in a state of growth or 
 development. An instance may be noted from The 
 Bridal of Tolmood, where, in the courtship and marriage 
 of the impulsive and admiration-loving but innocent- 
 minded Elizabeth and the elderly uncourtier-like and 
 formidable Polmood, the author presents a really interest- 
 ing dramatic situation. But, in the sequel, he simply shies 
 away from developing it ; and the same may be said of 
 an equally promising situation in Welldean Hall. Com- 
 pare with this Stevenson's failure to turn interest of a 
 
JAMES HOGG 103 
 
 similar kind to account in The Beach of Fales^ where a 
 strong psychological possibility is simply dissipated in the 
 smoke of gunpowder. Neither to Hogg nor Stevenson, be it 
 understood, is this imputed by way of blame. For, though 
 we may not incline to place them in the higher ranks 
 among novelists, we may still find plenty to recognise and 
 to enjoy in their work as tellers of adventure-stories. 
 
 So much for resemblance. As to contrast, when we 
 remember Hogg's abounding humour, we can scarcely do 
 otherwise than characterize his more fertile talent as also 
 more genial than Stevenson's. For this it is possible that 
 physical constitution may have been to some extent 
 responsible. But, if Hogg's narrative, full, free, and 
 flowing as it is, is apt occasionally and unconsciously 
 to drop to commonness, that of the exile of Vailima, 
 cramped and laboured at its worst, maintains in a general 
 way an altogether higher level of distinction. 1 Hogg, in 
 a word, might draw from a richer mine ; but Stevenson 
 was master of an infinitely finer art in cutting and polish- 
 ing his gems. The first owed little to literary culture, or 
 to any of his predecessors ; there is hardly a writer of 
 distinction from whom the work of the second does not 
 bear, at some point or other, some visible trace of imitation. 
 Hogg has greater skill, or better fortune, in surmounting 
 difficulties or concealing defects — or perhaps we ought to 
 say that, as the surrounding level of his work is lower, a 
 casual falling- off does not strike us so much. At any rate 
 his writing shows no such ecroulement as the latter portion 
 of the Master of Ballantrae. But Hogg, on the other 
 hand, has left us no scenes approaching in clear and 
 brilliant perfection of literary execution to, for instance, 
 the shrubbery scene in the novel above-named, or the 
 diving-scene in The Merry Men. It will of course be 
 
 1 • I never in my life re- wrote a page of prose,' says Hogg. {Re- 
 miniscences of Former Years.) 
 
io4 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 understood that these observations are applied to either 
 writer only in his capacity as a story-teller. 1 
 
 Hogg's literary earnings during the first two years of 
 his tenancy of Mount Benger amounted to upwards of 
 ^750; but when the time came for him to return to 
 Altrive, he found himself the poorer for his farming 
 venture by no less than ^2000 — 'a respectable sum,' 
 as he remarks, ' for an old shepherd to throw away.' 
 The fact was that, his capital at starting being insufficient, 
 1 Before dismissing Hogg's fiction, it remains finally to dispose of a 
 mistaken impression regarding the authorship of the Private Memoirs 
 and Confessions of a Justified Sinner to which currency has been given. 
 Basing his theory on internal evidence, and on the fact that the contri- 
 butors to 'Maga' would at times collaborate without acknowledgment 
 — Hogg, for instance, furnishing an occasional song for the Nodes — 
 Mr Andrew Lang, writing in the Illustrated London News of Novem- 
 ber 24th, 1894, expressed the opinion that John Gibson Lockhart had 
 had a hand in the composition of the above novel. This opinion 'as far 
 as internal or external evidence goes' he has since revoked (Athenceum, 
 November 30th, 1895), a fact the mention of which ought of itself to 
 be enough for our present purpose. But as the opinion has since 
 been repeated in at least one authoritative quarter, it may be as well 
 here to place on record the following facts : First, that the manuscript 
 of the book in question, clearly and neatly written in Hogg's hand, 
 and showing no mark whatever of having been corrected or added to 
 by Lockhart, exists and is in the possession of Hogg's surviving 
 daughter, Mrs Garden ; secondly, that the tale, under its later title, 
 as the Confessions of a Fanatic was corrected by Hogg, along with 
 the rest of his works, just before his death. (Letter of Mrs Garden 
 to the Atketueum, November 16th, 1895.) Finally, that there exists 
 not a jot or tittle of documentary or external evidence to support the 
 theory of a mixed authorship ; whilst, though the power of developing 
 character shown in the work under consideration is perhaps unique 
 in Hogg's writings, most readers will be inclined to agree with his 
 daughter when she writes that she sees the ' mark of Hogg's pen in 
 every line.' (Letter quoted above.) Lockhart was certainly a more 
 accomplished man-of-letters than Hogg ; but of Hogg's genius he had 
 nothing. 
 
JAMES HOGG 105 
 
 at no time during his tenancy had he been clear of diffi- 
 culties j and, notwithstanding desperate efforts to extricate 
 himself, 1 he had sunk but deeper and deeper into the 
 mire, until, at the termination of his lease — stock having 
 by this time declined one half in value — he was left 
 1 without a sixpence in the world.' And at the age of 
 sixty, as he observes, it was fully late enough to begin 
 anew. It might naturally be concluded that his mis- 
 fortunes would exercise a depressing tendency upon him. 
 Not at all : he assures us that none of these reverses ever 
 in the smallest degree affected his spirits. . . . ' As long 
 as I did all for the best, and was conscious that no man 
 could ever accuse me of dishonesty, I laughed at the 
 futility of my own calculations, and let my earnings go 
 as they came amid contentment and happiness. . . . 
 Indeed so uniformly smooth and happy has my married 
 life been, that on a retrospect I cannot distinguish one 
 part from another, save by some remarkably good days 
 of fishing, shooting, and curling on the ice.' To the 
 making of fortitude such as this, there goes perhaps some 
 degree of insensibility, perhaps only a happy tendency to 
 forget what is best forgotten. 
 
 It was, indeed, with a feeling of relief that Hogg, with 
 his wife and children, returned to the humbler home of 
 Altrive. His daughter, Mrs Garden, tells us that he was 
 a ' domestic man,' and her assertion is amply borne out by 
 such of his letters to his wife as have come down to us. 
 Indeed, if the Hogg of Blackhouse had already succeeded 
 in exciting our interest, it is the Hogg of Mount Benger 
 and of the later years at Altrive who wins a place in our 
 affection. The intervening years of victorious struggle in 
 Edinburgh and elsewhere, though they certainly command 
 
 1 The two three-volume novels entitled respectively The Three 
 Perils of Man and The Three Perils of Women had been dashed 
 off, 'as if in desperation,' in the hope of mending matters, 
 
106 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 our admiration, do little to bring Hogg nearer to our 
 hearts; indeed, it would be remarkable if they did not 
 exercise some temporary hardening effect upon the poet 
 himself. During that time, then, he has appeared to us 
 somewhat too much like one of his own fairies — a brilliant 
 being, gifted at once with marvellous powers and with 
 perennial happiness, but on the whole somewhat lacking 
 in human warmth, somewhat alien from human kinship. 
 We would not forget that, all the while, he was a dutiful 
 son, a good friend and brother, a faithful lover even j all 
 we can say is that, so far as it is given us to-day to study 
 his life, these things seem scarcely sufficient. At any rate 
 these years are in contrast with the later development of 
 his character. For, when once he becomes a husband and 
 a father, all this is changed. A reflex, as it were, of the 
 all-pervading geniality of Walter Scott seems to be set up 
 within him, and the care of ' Margaret and the bairns ' 
 draws him back, like his own Kilmeny, from fairyland, 
 but not like her to return thither. 
 
 We have already had evidence of his passion for field- 
 sport ; but the following humorous protest relating to that 
 topic, and illustrative both of his skill as a letter-writer and 
 of his life at this period, is too good not to be quoted. It 
 is dated from Mount Benger, August nth, 1829, and is 
 addressed to Wilson in reply to an invitation to Elleray. 
 
 ' My dear and honoured John, — I never thought 
 you had been so unconscionable as to desire a sportsman 
 on the nth or even the 13th of August to leave Ettrick 
 Forest for the bare scraggy hills of Westmoreland ! Ettrick 
 Forest, where the black cocks and white cocks, brown 
 cocks and grey cocks, ducks, plovers, and peaseweeps and 
 whilly-whaups are as thick as the flocks that cover her 
 mountains, and come to the hills of Westmoreland that 
 can nourish nothing better than a castril or stonechat ! 
 
JAMES HOGG 107 
 
 To leave the great yellow-fin of Yarrow, or the still larger 
 grey-locher for the degenerate fry of Troutbeck, Esthwaite, 
 or even Wastwater ! No, no, the request will not do j it 
 is an unreasonable one, and therefore not unlike yourself; 
 for besides, what would become of Old North and Black- 
 wood, and all our friends for game, were I to come to 
 Elleray just now ? I know of no home of man where I 
 could be so happy within doors with so many lovely and 
 joyous faces around me \ but this is not the season for 
 in-door enjoyments ; they must be reaped on the wastes 
 among the blooming heath, by the silver spring, or 
 swathed in the delicious breeze of the wilderness. Elleray, 
 with all its sweets, could never have been my choice for 
 a habitation, and perhaps you are the only Scottish 
 gentleman who ever made such a choice, and still persists 
 in maintaining it, in spite of every disadvantage. Happy 
 days to you, and a safe return.' 
 
 Alas ! amid the peaceful surroundings sketched above, 
 the flight of time was now making itself felt. Scott's 
 friendship for the Shepherd had of course been extended 
 to Mrs Hogg, who, being duly introduced at Abbotsford 
 after her marriage, had called forth warm congratulations 
 to the Shepherd — the host remarking, with his usual 
 playfulness where Hogg was concerned, that he wondered 
 that the latter had had the good sense to make such a 
 choice. Mrs Hogg returned the Wizard's admiration 
 with something approaching adoration, in illustration of 
 which the Shepherd tells this pretty anecdote. One day 
 as the great man was leaving Mount Benger, after dining 
 there, he caught up one of Hogg's little girls, kissed her, 
 and, laying his hand on her head, said, ' God Almighty 
 bless you, my dear child ! ' at which Mrs Hogg was 
 affected to tears. On his return from escorting his guest 
 to the carriage, her husband enquired, 'what had ailed 
 her ? ' to which the good mother replied, ' O, I thought if 
 
108 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 he had but just done the same to them all, I do not know 
 what in the world I would not have given ! ' The power 
 and charm exercised by Scott's personality among those who 
 knew him could scarcely be more pleasingly illustrated ; 
 and there are other examples of his kindness to Hogg's 
 family which, did space permit, one would not leave untold. 
 But Scott's days were now numbered. There is sincere 
 feeling in the Shepherd's description of their last meeting. 
 Scott, who was to pass through Yarrow on his return 
 journey from Drumlanrig Castle to Abbotsford, and had 
 not time to diverge from the road to visit Altrive, had 
 sent word to Hogg, who met him at the wayside inn now 
 known as the Gordon Arms, and assisting him out of the 
 carriage, walked with him down the valley towards Mount 
 Benger burn. Scott walked with difficulty, for his crippled 
 limb had now become almost useless, so that he had to 
 lean on his companion's shoulder, remarking as he did so 
 that he had never leaned on a firmer or a surer. Thus 
 proceeding, these two old friends ' talked of many things, 
 past, present and to come.' But the sad change which 
 had come over Scott was only too apparent to his friend. 
 Both his memory and his power of looking forward were 
 impaired; he often changed the subject abruptly, and 
 never laughed. Yet still he expressed the deepest con- 
 cern for his companion's welfare and success — more so 
 even than Hogg had ever heard him do before — together 
 with sympathy in his financial troubles. The Shepherd, 
 reared as he had been in the superstitions of the peasantry, 
 must have felt that his old friend was 'fey.' Both of 
 them had had recent cause for distress or annoyance — 
 though Hogg, as was his wont, took his share lightly 
 enough ; and it would seem that the present meeting was 
 itself not quite exempt from the old incurable tendency to 
 differ or to wrangle. " You are still the old man, Hogg, 
 careless and indifferent as ever," said Scott, with a coun- 
 
JAMES HOGG 109 
 
 tenance as gruff and demure as could be, and went on 
 to speak of all things, literature in particular, as going 
 down-hill to destruction and ruin. We must remember 
 that, if great his happiness, his trials had been scarcely 
 less. And thus parted for the last time these two old 
 friends and friendly antagonists, who had in truth so 
 much in common, who so intuitively recognized each the 
 worth and power of the other, who had so often differed 
 and so often been appeased. In striking the balance 
 between them, posterity, easily made captive by Scott, has 
 been perhaps a little hard on Hogg. But one likes to 
 conceive of the relation between them as of that of 
 brothers — boys, for there survived in either much that 
 was boyish. Then Scott becomes the elder and greater — 
 instinctively watching over and protecting the somewhat 
 petulant younger, patient of his foibles, yet occasionally 
 seeming to delight in irritating them, admiring, and yet 
 not sparing provocation. For so it is that with boy brothers 
 we sometimes see the surface all discord. But we know 
 that their affection lies deeper and is out of sight, that each 
 is united to the other by something stronger than himself, 
 never, in spite of himself, by any means to be alienated. 
 The nature of Hogg's offences has perhaps been made 
 pretty plain. His principal grounds of irritation against 
 Scott were the consistent abstinence of the latter from re- 
 cognizing him in any of his published writings ; his some- 
 what gratuitous and unhelpful criticism of the prose pieces, 
 his refusal to contribute to Hogg's proposed Miscellany, 
 and his rather inconsiderate recommendation of Hogg to 
 the post of head shepherd to Lord Porchester, the condi- 
 tions of that appointment being that he should put his 
 1 poetical talent under lock and key for ever ' — * a condi- 
 tion which to a man with the Shepherd's good conceit of 
 his own powers could not fail to be particularly galling. 
 1 Domestic Manners of Sir Walter Scott, p. 60. 
 
no FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Had matters ended here, however, we have seen 
 that all would have been well. Unfortunately they were 
 carried one stage further. Scott having died in 1832, 
 Hogg two years later produced the book which he entitled 
 Domestic Manners and Private Life of Sir Walter Scott. 
 This booklet forms excellent reading, and was sincerely 
 intended, as we have no doubt, as a glorification of Sir 
 Walter. Nor, though written with somewhat less than the 
 customary reserve, does it contain more than two passages 
 which could reasonably be expected to give pain or 
 offence. The first is the somewhat unfeeling, but no 
 doubt thoughtless, comparison of Scott's last lethargy to 
 the condition of a drunken man ; the second is the in- 
 discreet and indelicate expression of curiosity as to the 
 parentage of the late Lady Scott. From this error, 
 breeding would have preserved Hogg; but surely some 
 faults of breeding must be pardoned, nay, must be looked 
 for, in one who is peasant born. Lockhart, however, took 
 a different view of the case. To one affecting airs of 
 hauteur and posing as an aristocrat — an aristocrat of 
 1830 — it was doubtless wormwood to find himself and 
 his family familiarly discussed in print by a man of Hogg's 
 antecedents ; but Hogg, be it said in passing, was ever 
 greatly less of a respecter of persons than Scott had been. 
 Again Lockhart himself had been served with rough 
 justice in the brochure. But, to be just, one must 
 acknowledge the latter as a man of deep affections, if of 
 uncertain temper and overstrained nerves. Probably he 
 was wounded in his tenderest part. At any rate, in the 
 Life of Scott, Hogg is dismissed in these bitter words : — 
 ' It had been better for his fame had his end been of 
 earlier date, for he did not follow his best benefactor until 
 he had insulted his dust.' 
 
 From this regrettable misunderstanding, we must go back 
 a few years. Improvident though he might be on his own 
 
f UMi 
 
 OF 
 
 JAMES HOGG X£V 
 
 account, Hogg had given many an anxious thought to the 
 future of his increasing family. Having himself felt the 
 want of early mental training, he was determined, as 
 Scott had advised, c at every risk and at every sacrifice ' to 
 give his little ones a good education. With this object 
 he engaged a young man of good attainments to act as 
 tutor in his house, generously admitting the children of 
 the neighbourhood to share with his own in the school- 
 ing. 1 But schooling was not everything. Towards the 
 close of 1 83 1, a London publisher, Cochrane by name, 
 had a plan on foot for publishing an edition of the poet's 
 collected prose works. The plan promised to be lucrative, 
 and with the object of furthering it, Hogg was persuaded 
 somewhat against his will to go to London, where he 
 landed, after a tedious voyage, on the last day of the year. 
 His fame, which the detested Nodes had doubtless greatly 
 helped to spread, had preceded him, and during the three 
 months which he spent in the capital he was a literary 
 lion of the first magnitude. The Morning Chronicle of 
 January 2nd, 1832, had announced his arrival in flattering 
 terms, and he soon found himself, in his own phrase, 
 1 like to be eaten up with kindness.' Indeed, as his 
 daughter remarks, the account of his reception seems 
 at the present day almost incredible. A list of his 
 entertainers includes, among personages, the Duke of 
 Sussex, Macleod of Macleod, and Lord Saltoun, among 
 celebrities, Gait, George Cruickshank and Neil Gow, and 
 among clubs and societies, The Beefsteak, The Literary, 
 and The Highland. To a man of his temperament, 
 all this could not fail to be gratifying, yet doubtless it 
 came late enough in life to have lost something of its full 
 charm. Writing to his wife on January 10th, he is by no 
 means carried away by his success, but complains of the 
 
 1 After Hogg's death, the school which had thus been founded by 
 him was maintained by the Duke of Buccleuch. 
 
ii2 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 inroads on his time which never allow him to reach home 
 until three o'clock in the morning. I cannot describe 
 to you,' he adds, 'how cheerless and desolate I feel so 
 far separated from my family. If it were not absolutely 
 necessary to make a struggle, in order to better our 
 fortunes a little, I could not bear it.' Absence has 
 brought out the home feelings in their strength, and his 
 enquiries are very tender for his daughters — ' dear Maggie, 
 poor little Hetty (the delicate one), and sweet Mary.' 
 He has a joke for the boy James, and concludes, ' I am 
 very helpless, and would require putting to rights almost 
 every day — my stockings all full of holes, nor do I know 
 where to get them mended.' Soon afterwards he sent to 
 each of the children a copy of a little manual of hymns 
 and prayers, drawn up by himself for their use, and entitled 
 A Fathers New Year's Gift. His lament over the piles of 
 dead larks observed by him when sight-seeing in one of 
 the London provision-markets — a sight, as he says, which 
 almost broke his heart — is also characteristic. He remem- 
 bered that when he had read, in his young days, in Bruce 's 
 Trave/s, that the larks sing the same notes in Abyssinia as 
 they do here, his thought had been that that must be ' a 
 tolerable country after a'.' In this connexion the tuneful 
 ' Bird of the wilderness' — the song with w r hich he had hailed 
 the flock of larks as it rose from Ettrick Pen toward the 
 1 broad blue sky of Scotland ' — will recur to all lovers of 
 his lays. 
 
 The festivities in Hogg's honour culminated in a grand 
 dinner at the Free Masons' Hall, at which his distinguished 
 countryman General Sir John Malcolm presided. It took 
 place on the anniversary of Burns' birthday ; two of Burns' 
 sons were present, and Hogg after dinner brewed punch 
 in a bowl which had belonged to the Ayrshire poet and 
 had been brought to London for the occasion. He met 
 with a perfect ovation. After this he writes of receiving 
 
JAMES HOGG 113 
 
 something like three hundred invitations to dinner in 
 three days, and makes a description of one of these 
 functions which he attended serve as a sample of the 
 others. Having accepted his invitation on condition that 
 there should be no party, he would find that, ere dinner 
 was well over, a rapping at the door would begin, which 
 was to continue without intermission for an hour and a 
 half. 'Then we go upstairs, and find both drawing- 
 rooms crammed as full as ever you saw sheep in a fold. 
 And then I am brought in and shown, like any other 
 wild beast, all the ladies courtseying, and flattering, and 
 begging for one shake of my hand.' 
 
 How did the Shepherd comport himself amid these 
 unusual surroundings? Admirably, we may feel sure. 
 Time had smoothed the ruggedness of his manners since 
 his early Edinburgh days, and he had a native gallantry 
 and independence of spirit which would stand him in 
 good stead. The apparition of a son of nature in a world 
 of artificiality is always interesting, and even Carlyle, little 
 inclined as he was to be merciful in his judgments, was 
 fain to acknowledge that Hogg behaved ' easily and well,' 
 and, recognising his ' charm ' — as he went along ' cheerful, 
 mirthful, and musical,' — to speculate as to whether it may 
 not be chiefly due to this : ' that he is a real product of 
 nature, and able to speak naturally, which not one in a 
 thousand is.' 1 Meantime Mrs Hogg's advice to her 
 husband is this : ' Leave before you are threadbare. I 
 do not exactly mean your coat, but leave the Londoners 
 something to guess at.' More truly sensible counsel 
 could scarcely have been given, and what serves to re- 
 commend it still more is the fact, plainly apparent in 
 the correspondence, that the good wife was extremely 
 anxious to get her husband soon and safely home again. 
 
 All these doings might be pleasant enough, but from 
 1 Froude's Life of Carlyle, vol. ii. p. 234. 
 H 
 
ii 4 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 the very first Hogg's mind had misgiven him as to the 
 success of that which had been his real object in coming 
 to London. His forebodings were but too well justified, 
 for after the publication of the first volume of the A Itrive 
 Tales — chiefly remarkable for the spirited Adventures of 
 Captain John Lochy — the publisher, Cochrane, became 
 insolvent. Here was the death-blow to all Hogg's recent 
 hopes ; and he had already had more than his share of 
 similar experience. ■ No author,' says indeed Professor 
 Veitch, ' ever suffered more from this source than Hogg.' 
 Even spirits so elastic as were his did not at once recover 
 from the blow, and his health came to be affected. 
 During this and the following year he produced no new 
 work, and in a letter of this time to his friend Grieve he 
 observes sadly that he feels that the best days of his 
 writing are over. 
 
 Meantime he lacked sympathy neither at home nor at 
 a distance. At home, the great London dinner in his 
 honour was imitated or repeated at Peebles, under the 
 presidency of his old ally and enemy Professor Wilson, 
 many persons of distinction being present. In replying 
 to the toast of his health, the Shepherd, who had a pretty 
 turn for compliments, declared that, though he had sought 
 Fame first among the mountains and afterwards in the 
 city, it was not until that moment — when he saw so 
 many notable men met together on his account — that he 
 felt that he indeed had found her. He has been accused 
 of vanity and of boasting, but his detractors must allow 
 that, if his estimate of his own powers was high, he lived 
 to see it endorsed, not only in the capital, but likewise in 
 that very part of the country in which it is proverbially 
 hardest for a prophet to obtain recognition. In April 
 1835 he received a letter from Sir Robert Peel which 
 placed the Royal bounty at his disposal. In accepting 
 it, for the benefit of his family, after a playful allusion to 
 
JAMES HOGG 115 
 
 his ' particular facility in accepting of money,' he speaks 
 of himself as ■ always poor and always most happy.' x 
 
 He had lived to realise his ambition, but the end was 
 now not far off. In 1834 he produced his Lay Sermons 
 on Good Principles and Good Breeding, and in spring of 
 the next year two volumes of Montrose Tales — entrusted, 
 as their predecessors had been, to Cochrane, and strange 
 to say with no better fortune, though the Shepherd did not 
 live to know this. His health had given some cause for 
 anxiety, but on the 12th August, 1835, he was able to go as 
 usual to the moors about Birkhill, at the head of Moffat- 
 dale, to shoot. After seeming for a time to have derived 
 benefit from the change, he presently became worse, and 
 by the end of October was confined to bed. His com- 
 plaint — at first supposed to be jaundice — developed the 
 symptoms of a serious affection of the liver, and from 
 hence the progress of the disease was rapid. On the 
 morning of the 17th November he became speechless, 
 and at noon on the 21st he ceased to breathe. His re- 
 mains were laid in Ettrick Churchyard, little more than 
 a stone-cast from the humble cottage where he had first 
 seen the light — the chill wintry wind playing about the 
 mourners who followed the funeral, and lifting the leonine 
 mane of Christopher North as he stood by the grave and 
 wept. On the stone which marks the Shepherd's resting- 
 place is carved the figure of a harp, whilst, to cover in the 
 grave, daisied turf was fetched from a distance, so that in 
 summer that one spot might stand out in flowery contrast 
 to its green surroundings — an appropriate memorial of the 
 pastoral singer who sleeps beneath. More ambitious memo- 
 rials have, however, not been wanting. In the year i860, 
 at the head of St Mary's Loch, in presence of a great 
 concourse of spectators, a statue of the Ettrick Shepherd — 
 the work of the talented local sculptor, Andrew Currie — was 
 1 Parker's Sir Robert Peel, vol. ii. pp. 309, 310. 
 
n6 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 unveiled : whilst in 1898, under the auspices of the Border 
 Counties' Association, an obelisk with medallion portrait 
 was erected at Ettrick-hall to mark Hogg's birthplace. 
 
 In person the Ettrick Shepherd in his maturer years 
 is described as an 'excellent specimen of our stalwart 
 Scottish peasantry.' His height was five feet ten and a 
 half inches, and he has himself told how once when at 
 some national gathering the chests of the company were 
 measured, his own was found to be second only to that 
 of Sir Walter Scott. His hair in later life became dark 
 brown mixed with grey, his eyes were blue and lively, his 
 complexion ruddy. In the portrait in Mr Blackwood's 
 gallery, which represents him swathed in his plaid, he 
 looks the very type of a 'wyce-like' Border farmer or 
 shepherd, of shrewd and kindly disposition, — and that I 
 think is exactly how a lover of his writings would wish him 
 to have looked. The estimation in which he was held 
 by his neighbours may be stated in the words of a cor- 
 respondent l who gathered it from survivors among them, 
 when he says that ' in the Forest all who knew him well 
 respected him, and many loved him.' His widow survived 
 him for the long period of thirty-five years. 
 
 It now only remains to sum up the achievement and 
 the character of one of the sweetest of our national singers, 
 one of the most robust and kindly figures in our literature. 
 Hogg's songs lack the passion and rich humour of the 
 best of Burns's ; neither have they the pathos or the artistic 
 finish of those of Lady Nairne. Yet the best among them 
 — When the kye comes ha?ne, or, inspired by the poet's 
 Jacobite researches, Cam 1 ye by Athol, . and Flora Mac- 
 Donald's Farewell — have won and kept a place side by 
 side with the above in the hearts and memories of the 
 
 1 The well-known Border antiquary, Mr James Smail, late Secretary 
 to the Commercial Bank, Edinburgh. 
 
JAMES HOGG 117 
 
 Scottish people. And this is a far surer and truer im- 
 mortality than any to be conferred by critics or academies. 
 On the other hand Hogg's epics, or metrical romances, 
 have no structural inspiration, and are failures and for- 
 gotten. It is by the most popular of his songs, then, by 
 two or three of the tales of The Queen's Wake, and by the 
 best of the prose tales, that Hogg's name lives. In these 
 prose tales he has incorporated the whole body of the 
 floating popular mythology of Scotland — a fact which, 
 should the day ever come when the stories fail to charm as 
 stories, will still command for them the regard of students 
 of history and folk-lore. That day at present seems far off 
 — in token of which we may mention that we have before us 
 the written testimony of the most popular of living Scottish 
 novelists to the effect that, in Scottish literature, the Ettrick 
 Shepherd's books are his most constant reading. 
 
 As others had been before him, Hogg has been severely 
 assailed since his death, the most powerful among his assail- 
 ants being Lockhart and the late Mrs Oliphant, from both 
 of whom he has suffered by misrepresentation. For had 
 he shown himself in society the overgrown enfant terrible 
 described by Lockhart, is it likely, one may well ask, that 
 he would have become and continued, I don't say the 
 literary lion of Edinburgh and London, but a visitor at 
 Floors, a favoured guest at Abbotsford and Bowhill? 
 The object of a biographer is, however, rather to under- 
 stand than to judge his subject ; and, with this object in 
 view, it appears to us that much light is thrown on Hogg's 
 so-called weaknesses by the following passages from the 
 Memoirs of one who knew him intimately. ' Be it here 
 observed once for all,' says R. P. Gillies, 1 ' that the good 
 Shepherd's vanity differed from that of all other authors, 
 
 1 Memoirs of a Literary Veteran, vol. ii. p. 128. If Hogg was 
 sometimes self-complaceDt, he was also often hard on his own works, 
 and sometimes much too hard on them. ' I cannot take any hand in 
 
n8 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 inasmuch as it was avowed and undisguised, and he him- 
 self laughed at it objectively as such. It never for one 
 instant appeared to me as arrogance or self-conceit j on the 
 contrary it was mere native eccentricity, or, in better words, 
 decision of character. He had great power and facility of 
 composition after his own manner ; was naturally conscious 
 of this power and of course placed reliance on himself. As 
 to Fortune's smiles or frowns he little needed to care.' 
 
 Mrs Oliphant's Steen-like picture of the Shepherd's 
 interior at Altrive is evolved, not from documents, but 
 from the authoress's inner consciousness, and, as so being, 
 does not concern us. More to the purpose, however, is 
 her estimate of Hogg's character, formed after an examina- 
 tion of a correspondence with his publisher which ex- 
 tended over many years. 1 Yet, here again, the good lady 
 is at fault ; for, having studied the Shepherd exclusively 
 in his relations with Mr Blackwood, she has received an 
 altogether one-sided and misleading impression. We have 
 already acknowledged that his relations with the Black- 
 wood coterie brought out the commoner side of his 
 nature. Suppose, then, that we admit that in his deal- 
 ings with his publishers generally, and in particular 
 with Mr Blackwood — in many respects a kind and long- 
 suffering friend to him — he did not on all occasions 
 demean himself with perfect grace, or in perfect accord- 
 ance with established custom, that he possessed in 
 a peculiar degree the characteristic faults of the genus 
 author — rated his own productions too high, and failed to 
 understand why his books did not sell or his articles were 
 rejected, laying the blame at other doors than his own, 
 . . . pushing the sale of my own works,' he writes to Blackwood, 
 who wished him to come to Edinburgh. ' If delicacy even permitted 
 it, I am the worst hand in the world to do such a thing.' William 
 Blackwood and His Sons, vol. i. p. 325. 
 
 1 See William Blackwood and His Sons, vol. i. chap, vii., 'The 
 Ettrick Shepherd.' 
 
JAMES HOGG 119 
 
 that he ■ dunned ' for what was due to him or what he be- 
 lieved to be so, and in short was in many ways and in a 
 high degree troublesome. Well, admitting all this, we are 
 still bound in common fairness to remember that Hogg as 
 an author was not ' to the manner born,' and that it was 
 only in the nature of things that he should import into the 
 book-market a little of the methods of the sheep-fair. Yet, 
 supposing that he did do this, we are still inclined to believe 
 that the balance of grievance remains upon his side. For 
 what liberties had not been taken with him by his fellow- 
 contributors to Blackwood's Magazine ? The freest use had 
 been made of his name, 1 his signature had been abused, 
 sentiments and verses not his own had been put into his 
 mouth, 2 and lastly an article had been sent to press which 
 was so 'shockingly offensive ' in its tone regarding him 
 that the very printer (James Ballantyne) risked his con- 
 nexion with the magazine rather than set it up. 3 Verily 
 there are two ways of looking at the question of rights 
 and wrongs in this case ! 
 
 Our point, however, is not so much to defend Hogg in 
 his relation with his publisher as to show that anyone who 
 attempts to judge him solely or chiefly from that point of 
 view is quite incapable of doing him justice. For Hogg 
 resembled his much greater contemporary, Scott, in this — 
 that he was a man first, and afterwards a poet ; and, if we 
 wish to do him that justice which hitherto has been but 
 scantly meted out to him, it is the man first and the poet 
 afterwards that we must try to see. And, viewed in this 
 way, how much more is he than the mere poet of the 
 Queen's Wake and the Forest Minstrel '! In the first 
 place, he rises before us, as, by the common consent of 
 
 1 Ibid., p. 337. 2 P. 326. 
 
 3 P. 338. The article was subsequently much modified; but 
 it had reached the printer's hands in its original form. But for 
 Ballantyne's protest, would it have been altered ? 
 
120 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Gillies and Carlyle, a product of Nature at first-hand, a 
 ' character.' ' At the risk of being blamed for truism or 
 tautology,' writes the former of these authorities, ' I must 
 say again that Hogg was a character Men prononce, and in 
 his way matchless ' ; and, after enumerating his works, the 
 writer continues, ' yet after all these extraordinary per- 
 formances, he remained in his demeanour, appearance, 
 and manner of speech, i?iteger purus, the same unalterable 
 Ettrick Shepherd who, but a few years ago, had driven 
 his herd of nowte to All Hallow Fair.' x Surely, amid the 
 sickliness of so much of our modern civilization, a figure 
 so essentially strong and self-reliant is one to cherish and 
 be proud of. Its ruggedness, its angles, are an essential 
 part of it — it would not be itself without them. And then, 
 if we turn to contemplate obstacles overcome, the great 
 legend of the 'pursuit of knowledge under difficulties' 
 — a legend, as we venture to think, so particularly rich 
 in Scotland — contains few stories more inspiring than 
 Hogg's. And these stories are of the kind which gain 
 greatly from the ' happy ending.' For, in all departments 
 of life, it is only natural to salute the victor ; and, though 
 the Chattertons and David Grays may have aspired with 
 equal generosity of feeling towards the light, we must 
 allow its due of credit to the tougher fibre and the 
 better balance which enabled Hogg to persevere until the 
 goal was reached and the wreath wrested. 
 
 Cherish we, then, the memory of the man for what he 
 was — whether we think of him as the youth who mused, 
 
 1 Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 243. James Glass Bertram, author of Some 
 Memories of Books, Authors, and Events, who, as an apprentice in 
 Tait's publishing-house, had many opportunities of hearing about 
 Hogg from those who had known him, remarks (p. 49) that he was 
 always spoken of in a kindly way, and that Lockhart's portrait of him 
 was much resented. He quotes in particular one description of the 
 Shepherd as 'a genial man with far more in him than ever came out.' 
 
JAMES HOGG 121 
 
 and shed the tears of sensibility, and conquered the diffi- 
 culties of learning, alone, and scanted in sympathy as in 
 comprehension, on the legendary muirs of Blackhouse; 
 whether as the stalwart shepherd whose fleetness of foot 
 would enable him to turn the fleeing flock on the hill-side, 
 whose native and well-preserved vigour made him a 
 champion at St Ronan's games when on the verge of 
 three-score years ; or as the marvellous boon-companion, 
 prodigal of wit as of song and story, shouting, in his 
 Homeric thirst after a night's carouse, to his old friend 
 Tibby of St Mary's to ' bring in the loch ' ; or, again, as the 
 contented farmer, rejoicing in his grey-hounds, his curling- 
 stones, his silver punch-bowl, his country friends, his sister 
 and his sweetheart; or as the hospitable host, pointing 
 with pride to his { bit house, full as a bee-skep o' happy 
 leevin' creatures'; or as the self-made man-of-letters, 
 walking with credit and circumspection alike amid the 
 sloughs of failure and the pit-falls of success, winning and 
 holding the love and respect of such a man as Walter 
 Scott ; or, lastly but not least, as the tuneful minstrel and 
 cunning story-teller of the pastoral vales of Ettrick and 
 Yarrow. 
 
ROBERT TANNAHILL 
 
 Tannahill's poetic reputation is secure ; for, whatever 
 the flaws or shortcomings of his songs, the fact stands 
 that the Scottish people has taken them to its heart. 
 And, so this be once done, there are few hearts more 
 constant and loyal — few, we might add, slower to recognize 
 imperfections in what they have made their own. It is 
 possible that some sense of posthumous justice may have 
 had its part in this adoption ; and in that case he would 
 be a churl rather than a critic who should seek to do it 
 away. 
 
 Tannahill's brief life-history is as uneventful as it is 
 unhappy. Born at Paisley on the 3rd June 1774, he was 
 brought up to his father's craft of weaving. But his finer 
 spirit introduced variations of its own into the mere 
 mechanical plying of the shuttle. A poet and something 
 of a musician, he kept a flute — it was a cracked one, 
 bound with many plies of string — within reach of his 
 loom, to which he had also fastened a desk, so as to be 
 able to jot down ideas as they occurred to him without 
 rising from his seat. In this manner, 'weaving threads 
 and verses alternately,' he furnished new poems to many 
 old airs which he had taken an interest in hunting up. 
 And, thus diversified, his manual occupation, we are told, 
 was not distasteful to him, so that when he came to be 
 offered the post of overseer in a factory, he declined it, 
 electing to remain where he was. This pursuit of the Muse 
 in the midst of ruder avocations reminds one of the early 
 studies of James Hogg. Meantime his songs were finding 
 
ROBERT TANNAHILL 123 
 
 singers, and he himself was used to assert that no token of 
 fame had ever given him greater pleasure than the surprise, 
 when walking alone, of hearing words of his own sung by a 
 country girl in an adjoining field. In time he became ac- 
 quainted with other persons of musical tastes — striking up, 
 in particular, a warm intimacy with Robert Archibald 
 Smith, 1 with whom it became his habit to spend most 
 of his Saturday afternoons in rambles in the country. 
 From Smith we learn that Tannahill's favourite walks 
 were by the ruins of Stanley Castle, or over the Braes of 
 Gleniffer, where, reclining on the heather, or seated on 
 some bracken-fringed rock, he would resign himself to 
 what was with him always the chief source of inspiration 
 — the contemplation of Nature. 
 
 In 1807, he published his Poems and Songs, of 
 which at least the latter became widely popular. Yet 
 the author grew none the happier. For this, his 
 circumstances were less to blame, probably, than his dis- 
 position. As a member of a large family, and one who 
 would have been the last to repudiate the duties of filial 
 piety, his means remained narrow notwithstanding the 
 fact that the trade of Paisley flourished, and high wages 
 could be earned there. His culture was meagre, and his 
 experience of life — excepting for a journey he had made on 
 foot into England, followed by a sojourn of two years at 
 Bolton — was limited to that acquired in his native town. 
 But worse than all this were the seeming contradictions 
 which met in his character. For to an extremely retiring 
 disposition, and a personality which in company was apt 
 to be strangely unimpressive, he seems to have united an 
 almost morbid craving for that recognition which, though 
 
 1 Musical composer; born in 1779, and came to Paisley in 1800. 
 He was the friend of Motherwell as well as of Tannahill, and it is to 
 the information imparted by him to the former that we owe much of 
 our knowledge of the weaver poet. 
 
i2 4 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 certainly due to his gifts, has often been withheld from much 
 greater ones. ' Yes,' writes Motherwell, ' we scruple not to 
 avow it that one main cause of Tannahill's premature fate 
 was the chilling aspect of his own town. He had vanity 
 like every man of genius — a thirst for fame, as every noble 
 spirit ought to have j but the first was mortified, and the 
 last was disappointed and ungratified. True, he heard 
 his songs chaunted with delight, and his praises whispered 
 in distant parts, but then not even hinted at in the place 
 of his birth. Where was the countenance the higher ranks 
 should have conferred on him ? Where the support the 
 wealthy could have given him to prosecute his studies and 
 improve in his darling avocation ? ' Yet this was not the 
 worst. His published volume of verse had drawn forth 
 some sharp criticism — in certain respects, perhaps, not 
 wholly undeserved, for it had been published prematurely. 
 But the poet seems to have taken these strictures to heart, 
 and his mortification was subsequently and successively 
 deepened, first by the rejection of some of his songs which 
 had been offered for the famous collection of George 
 Thomson, and afterwards by Constable's declining his 
 proposal for a second, or emended, volume of poems. 
 
 In these depressing circumstances the poet fell a prey 
 to despondency, growing suspicious of his friends and ex- 
 hibiting undue anxiety as to his poetic reputation. Certain 
 dissipations into which he had been led by idle hunters 
 of celebrity, though probably of a quite unimportant char- 
 acter, seem to have exercised an unhappy effect upon his 
 sensitive mind as well as on his delicate body. 1 He pro- 
 duced some poems which are described as 'of most 
 strange texture ' ; but of more consequence was his de- 
 struction, in a mood of self-despite, of his unpublished 
 work, as well as of the emended copies of what he had 
 already sent forth. He is even said to have sought to 
 1 Harp of Renfrewshire, Introduction, p. xxxix. 
 
ROBERT TANNAHILL 125 
 
 recover for the same purpose those of his manuscripts 
 which were in the hands of his friends. 
 
 At this sad juncture, an incident occurred which for 
 the moment cheered him. The Ettrick Shepherd — not as 
 yet the celebrated author of The Queen's Wake — travelled 
 from Edinburgh to Paisley with the sole aim of seeing 
 him. Let us narrate what followed in Hogg's own 
 words. ' I supposed,' says he, ' that when I arrived in 
 Paisley I had only to ask for Tannahill the poet, but to 
 my astonishment nobody knew who he was. I was sent 
 from one Tannahill to another, and many others, but 
 none of them the object of my search. At last I found 
 him on his loom, one of a long range \ he was a swarthy 
 man, bearing no external indication of the intellectual 
 lava tide that slumbered in his soul. I told him my nom 
 de plume, and I have never forgotten the look of absolute 
 bewilderment with which he regarded me, as I told him 
 how far I had come just to look upon him, and that now 
 I was before him with the same feelings as when " Jonson 
 sat in Drummond's classic shade." During the whole of 
 that night we sat together, and he sang many of his 
 choicest melodies. ... In the morning, I was about to 
 start by the coach for Glasgow on my way home. Being 
 somewhat late, I required to run some distance. Tanna- 
 hill ran by my side. When about to part, he grasped my 
 hand convulsively, and burst into tears. I said, " Hoot, 
 Robert, dinna tak' things so serious ; we shall often 
 meet again ; and if you'll no come to Edinburgh to visit 
 me, I'll come back to Paisley to see you." " No, Hogg," 
 he replied, " this has been the proudest day of my life ; 
 but it cannot be . . . " and with this, sobs choked his 
 utterance.' l 
 
 The poor poet was, in fact, in an overstrained state, 
 from which, with his peculiar temperament, all things 
 1 Memorials of James Hogg, pp. 306, 307. 
 
 u 
 
 OF 
 
i26 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 were to be feared. Gloom now settled finally above his 
 head. His countenance was pale, his form emaciated ; 
 his eyes sunk in his head. He intimated to his friends 
 wild plans which he had formed for leaving Paisley, to 
 take up his abode in ' some sequestered locality,' or for 
 canvassing the country in person for subscriptions to a 
 new issue of his poems. At last, during a visit to a friend 
 at Glasgow, he complained of the 'insupportable misery 
 of life,' and is said at the same time to have exhibited 
 unequivocal symptoms of mental derangement. His 
 friend thought it prudent to accompany him back to 
 Paisley. On reaching home, Tannahill retired to bed, 
 where he was visited by three of his brothers, who 
 remained with him till about ten o'clock, when he 
 appeared sufficiently calm. On returning to enquire for 
 him two hours later, they found his bed empty. A 
 search was at once made, which led to the discovery of 
 the missing man's coat beside the conduit of a neigh- 
 bouring brook, 'pointing out but too surely where his 
 body was to be found.' The poet perished thus un- 
 happily, by his own act, before he had quite completed 
 his thirty-sixth year. 
 
 A man of Tannahill's temperament passes through life 
 unknown even to his friends. Sometimes his work will 
 reveal him to posterity, but in this case it was not so. 
 All we can say of his character, then, is that, if somewhat 
 wanting in the spirit of resistance, it appears to have been 
 amiable and blameless. We know for certain that he 
 was a devoted son to the old mother who survived him. 
 What of his poems ? It had been best to let them speak 
 for themselves. His more ambitious efforts — his Odes 
 for the celebration of Burns's birthday — are not without 
 passages of vigour and felicity; yet it is by his songs 
 alone that his name survives. In these it were easy to 
 pick holes. They abuse the ' pathetic fallacy ' ; they are 
 
ROBERT TANNAHILL 127 
 
 disfigured by passages in the stiff Eighteenth-Century 
 manner, — such passages as — 
 
 1 There Avarice guides the bounding prow, 
 Ambition courts promotion.' 
 
 And this manner, if defensible in the didactic poems of 
 its own period, is, as we need not say, entirely out of 
 place in a lyric. But, more than all, the songs lack 
 variety. Indeed, though according to his light, the poet 
 laboured at his craft with exemplary assiduity, it may 
 almost be said that he knew but a single incentive to 
 poetic production — the emotion aroused in his breast by 
 the contemplation of Nature. For the love-interest of his 
 songs is purely conventional, and though there are con- 
 flicting statements on this point, his friend Smith, who 
 would be likely to know, assures us that even the Flower 
 of Dunblane was 'quite an imaginary person.' 
 
 Admitting so much, however, there yet remains to the 
 singer one of the finest motives for song, and from this 
 he elicited a few brief strains of pure and authentic 
 melody. Gloomy Winter and the Flower o' Dunblane, 
 with the music to which they are sung, will live as long 
 as the Scots tongue. Even in Scotland, too, — the land 
 of local attachments — few localities have been more 
 happily celebrated in song than the Braes of Balquhither 
 or Craigie Lee. In The Midges Dance and Langsyne 
 beside the woodland burn, the poet's innocent delight in 
 birds and flowers is pleasingly expressed. In a livelier 
 strain, Pease Strae and the rough serenade, O are ye 
 sleepin\ are successful. But on the whole it is difficult 
 to improve on Motherwell's estimate of the poet and his 
 work. 'The sensibility of Tannahill,' says he, 'appears 
 to have been greater than his genius, and his heart more 
 susceptible of tender than deep feeling. On the whole, 
 we believe his poetical character to have been over-rated, 
 
128 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 and that sympathy for his fate has so associated itself 
 in our minds with his many excellences, that while we 
 endeavour to estimate his merits as a poet our feelings 
 have more to say in the matter than our judgment. Be 
 this as it may, his name will long be remembered with no 
 ordinary degree of emotion, and it will be a long day ere 
 another like him shall in these western parts sweep the 
 Scottish lyre with so delicate and so artless a touch.' 1 
 
 1 Harp of Renfrewshire, Introduction, p. xlii. 
 
WILLIAM MOTHERWELL 
 
 Strictly speaking, Motherwell is perhaps less a ' Famous 
 Scot ' than an interesting phenomenon in Scottish letters. 
 A born literary man, an untiring experimenter in literary 
 forms, a figure of real significance, if of minor importance, 
 in the Romantic Movement which, inaugurated by Percy, 
 Chatterton, and Walpole, reached its full height in Scott 
 and Coleridge, his contribution to Scottish literature is in 
 the general estimation probably limited to a single song ; 
 though we must hasten to add that, for the literary student, 
 his work has an altogether different interest. Yet, after 
 all, and taking the lower estimate, how many are the 
 names of whom even this can be said ? And let us not 
 forget, either, that his talent was of a kind which by 
 length of days might have been brought to a riper bear- 
 ing. As it is, we may dismiss him quickly, for he had 
 not, like William Thorn, the advantage of a romantic 
 personal story to compensate for the tenuity of his literary 
 performance. His true history, like that of so many of 
 his brother poets, would be one, not of deeds or of cir- 
 cumstances, but of thoughts, feelings, and studies. 
 
 Born in a house in the College Street of Glasgow, 
 October 13th, 1797, William Motherwell was the third 
 son of a father bearing the same names, who carried on 
 business as an ironmonger. The family of the Mother- 
 wells was, however, an ancient one, and there is the 
 evidence of charters, as well as of tradition, to show 
 that its members both held land and filled the post of 
 hereditary millers at Dundaff, on the banks of the Carron 
 
i 3 o FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 in Stirlingshire, for, probably, not less than four hundred 
 years. The name Motherwell, also spelled Moderville 
 and Moderell, appears in the Ragman Rolls. 
 
 Mr Motherwell removing to Edinburgh, his son William 
 was placed first, in 1805, at the school kept by a Mr 
 Lennie in that town — where he remained for over three 
 years — and afterwards at the High School. It was at the 
 former seminary, and when in his eleventh year, that he 
 met the little maiden who so strangely took and retained 
 possession of his fancy. Jane Morrison is described as a 
 gentle and pretty child of about his own age. Her hair 
 was of a lightish brown, and her eyes dark, with a sweet 
 expression. In winter (for it is well to be particular 
 where one has the means) she wore a pelisse of pale blue, 
 and a light-coloured beaver with a feather. She was the 
 daughter of a respectable brewer and corn-factor of Alloa, 
 and was come to Edinburgh to ' finish her education.' 
 When Motherwell in his pathetic poem of Jeanie Morrison 
 speaks of their being ' sindered young/ not to meet again, 
 he merely states what was the fact. Jane, who in due 
 course became the wife of a respectable merchant named 
 Murdoch, is said to have retained her early attractiveness 
 in maturity. Motherwell during his school-days is described 
 as an apt scholar and an amiable and lively boy. It 
 seems quite probable that Jeanie may have been his first 
 and only love. 
 
 After a brief stay at the High School, the boy — whose 
 father had not prospered in business — was handed over 
 to the care of an uncle at Paisley, where, after attending 
 the Grammar School until he was fifteen, he was placed 
 in the office of the Sheriff-Clerk. Already he gave tokens 
 of the romantic and mediaeval bent which was to char- 
 acterize him in later life, having as a schoolboy earned 
 a reputation for his gift of spinning yarns about ' castles, 
 robbers, and strange out-of-the-way adventures,' whilst he 
 
WILLIAM MOTHERWELL 131 
 
 now exhibited great skill in deciphering and making fac- 
 similes of ancient legal documents, and would wile away 
 the intervals of business by exercising his decided artistic 
 ability in making sketches of knights in armour, on horse- 
 back or a-foot. His accomplishments, united with smart- 
 ness and intelligence, attracted the notice of the Sheriff, 
 and, in May 1819, when in the twenty-second year of his 
 age, he was appointed Sheriff-Clerk Depute of Renfrew- 
 shire, a post which he held with credit for the next ten 
 years. During this period he is described as of a kindly, 
 enthusiastic, and somewhat convivial temperament, and, 
 poet though he was, there is no sign that in his official 
 life he occupied the position of the proverbial square peg 
 in the round hole. His official career had not, however, 
 been one of unbroken smoothness, for there is record of 
 his being seized by an angry mob, whilst in the performance 
 of duties which rendered him unpopular, and actually 
 raised to the level of the parapet of a bridge over which 
 it was intended to throw him. This was in 181 8, during 
 what was known in the West Country as the Radical War. 
 Later on, the liberal emoluments of his office enabled 
 him to indulge his tastes by forming a library. 
 
 What we are most concerned to know, however, is how 
 in the meantime his pen had been occupied. His first 
 writings which have been traced are contributions to a 
 Greenock Visitor, dated 1818. In the next year The 
 Harp of Renfrewshire — an anonymous publication, but 
 known to have been brought out under his care — appeared 
 at Paisley. It consists of a collection of local and other 
 songs and poems, of which many are original, with notes 
 and an Introductory Essay on the poets of the county, 
 from Sir Hugh Montgomerie (d. 1545) to Tannahill. 
 This volume was followed by the Minstrelsy, Ancient and 
 Modern, published by Wylie of Glasgow in 1827 — a work 
 of permanent value in its own department. It is prefaced 
 
i 3 2 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 by a careful and well-informed Historical Introduction, 
 and, in the respect for antiquity which it exhibits, ap- 
 proaches more nearly to modern comparative methods 
 than the work in the same kind of other writers of 
 the period. Indeed Motherwell had a much more real 
 feeling for the essential beauty of the old ballads than had 
 most of his better known contemporaries, as the comparison 
 of such a delicate piece of imitative work as his Etti?i o' 
 Sillarwood with the gross labours of, for instance, Leyden, 
 will readily suffice to show. Among the men of literary 
 distinction with whom the Minstrelsy brought Motherwell 
 acquainted was Scott, who, in a letter 1 relating to Gil 
 Morrice, frankly confesses to having done wrong 'in 
 endeavouring to make the best possible set of an ancient 
 ballad out of several copies obtained from different 
 quarters ' — a liberty, which, compared with those taken 
 for instance by Cunningham, appears venial. Scott and 
 Motherwell never met ; but the latter, after Scott's death, 
 made a pilgrimage to Abbotsford, and is said to have 
 declared that nothing there affected him so much as Sir 
 Walter's staff ' with the bit dibble at the end of it.' 
 
 In 1828 Motherwell took a principal share in starting 
 the Paisley Magazifie, to which several of his poems were 
 contributed. He was now manifestly gravitating towards 
 his true vocation of literature, and, having become a 
 contributor to the recently started Paisley Advertiser, on 
 the retirement of its editor, who was his intimate friend, 
 in the same year, he was appointed to succeed him. This 
 editorship he held — for a time, as would appear, conjointly 
 with his legal office — until he was invited to Glasgow to 
 undertake that of the Glasgow Courier — a position on 
 which he entered February 2nd, 1830. His connexion 
 with this journal was maintained until his premature death 
 
 1 Quoted in Memoir of Motherwell prefixed to his Poetical Works, 
 ed. 1881, p. xviii. 
 
WILLIAM MOTHERWELL 133 
 
 in November 1835. At first sight the change in his 
 circumstances appears beneficial, but it remains very 
 questionable whether for his best literary interests it really 
 was so. A literary career was, indeed, that for which his 
 temperament had marked him out ; but the class of litera- 
 ture required by a newspaper demanding to be fed with the 
 product of his brain three times a-week was not that for 
 which he was best fitted. On the contrary : his mind worked 
 slowly, his preference was for careful elaboration — in proof 
 of which we may cite the statement that he worked upon 
 the draft oijeanie Morrison over a period of twenty years. 
 Then, the times were against him. Political party-feeling 
 waxed to an unprecedented height over the Reform Bill, 
 and Motherwell — a Tory by conviction as well as by con- 
 stitution — entered keenly into the war of opinions. We 
 cannot wonder that his muse fell silent. In an account 
 of a visit paid by him to Hogg's farm at this date, it is 
 said that he ' affected to care for neither literature, nor 
 sentimentalism, nor song,' his ambition being to shine as 
 a wit and to talk politics. 1 Nevertheless it was during this 
 period, in 1832, that his Poems, Narrative and Lyrical, 
 were collected and published. Considering the per- 
 turbation of the time, and the merit of most of the poems 
 was largely esoteric, their reception is said to have been on 
 the whole favourable. A preface to Henderson's Scottish 
 Proverbs, the humorous Memoirs of a Paisley Bailie, 
 contributed to The Day, and a share with the Ettrick 
 Shepherd in an edition of Burns, which Motherwell did 
 not live to complete, make up the tale of his literary 
 works. 
 
 Amid the bewilderment of the time, the poet had some- 
 how been misled into joining the Orange Society, whose 
 principles he embraced with warmth. In 1835, when 
 Government contemplated to suppress that organization, 
 1 Memorials of the Ettrick Shepherd, p. 302. 
 
i 3 4 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 he was summoned to London to give evidence, touching 
 its constitution and practices, before a Committee of the 
 House of Commons. He was not by temperament fitted 
 to acquit himself well on such an occasion, and it has 
 been suggested that he was already the victim of pre- 
 monitory symptoms of the disease known as 'softening 
 of the brain.' At any rate he ' broke down ' in his evi- 
 dence. He was able, however, to return to Glasgow and 
 resume the train of his everyday life. On the evening of 
 the 31st October, whilst attending a party at the house of 
 a friend, he was attacked by bleeding from the nose, which 
 was followed, in the small hours of the next morning, by 
 a shock of apoplexy, so violent as in a few hours to prove 
 fatal. He was buried in the Necropolis, his death at the 
 early age of thirty-eight being deplored by a large circle 
 of friends and by the inhabitants of Glasgow generally. 
 
 In person Motherwell was of very short stature, but 
 strong and well formed, and of features which, by differ- 
 ing standards, might be characterized either as ordinary 
 or as comely. In attire he retained the scrupulous spruce- 
 ness characteristic of his early employment. Except in 
 the company of his more intimate friends, he spoke little, 
 and, save in rare moments of enthusiasm, did not shine in 
 conversation. But that he was no recluse or mere book- 
 worm is shown by the fact of his having served at different 
 times both in the Paisley Rifle Corps and the Renfrewshire 
 Yeomanry, as well as by his possession of a taste for 
 boxing and fencing, and even, in early days, for practical 
 joking. In private life, he harboured one or two inoffen- 
 sive eccentricities : for instance we are told that he believed 
 firmly in ghosts, though not that he had ever seen one. 
 In his reading he wisely preferred to follow up particular 
 lines of his own, rather than to aim at the ba?iale univer- 
 sality of the ordinary well-read man. Thus he deliberately 
 neglected physical science, philosophy, and modern history. 
 
WILLIAM MOTHERWELL 135 
 
 In a word, his culture was that of the artist rather than the 
 savant : he studied that for which he had affinity, to which 
 he was capable of imparting life. But, of course, it is 
 possible to carry this principle of study to the point where 
 it begets prejudice, and it is possible that at some points he 
 did not steer quite clear of this fault. His love of Scotland 
 and of Scottish literature was ardent and enthusiastic. 
 
 We have said that Motherwell is a poet for literary 
 men, and what need have these with ready-made criticism ? 
 For them, if not an impertinence, it is at least generally 
 an encumbrance ; so the briefer our observations on his 
 poetry the better. In the first place, then, Motherwell 
 is remarkable, almost unique it might be said, among 
 modern Scottish minor poets, for this very characteristic 
 — that he was a ' literary ' poet, or one whose inspiration, 
 if not drawn mainly from books, was at least much modi- 
 fied by study. So, in place of giving us the spontaneous 
 carol of a Hogg or a Tannahill, he adapts his song to 
 a carefully thought-out melodic scheme. And one point 
 at which he gains over his compeers is that his work is of 
 much more even quality than theirs : he wrote little or 
 nothing that was worthless. 
 
 But we may go further than to say that he was a 
 literary poet, and may add that, among literary poets, he 
 was a raffijie — one curious as to form, apt to abandon each 
 form in turn when he had mastered its secret. In this 
 respect he may be ranked with the initiators. Thus, in 
 Jeanie Morrison^ he was the first, or one of the first, to 
 write the Scots tongue, not intuitively, but deliberately 
 and with linguistic research — thus starting a fashion 
 which was long afterwards followed with success by 
 Stevenson and ' Hugh Haliburton.' After this, taking 
 his cue from Gray, he experimented in the, to our poets, 
 still almost virgin ground of themes derived from Scan- 
 dinavian mythology. The results which he obtained 
 
1 36 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 have won the praises of connoisseurs in that domain. 
 Then the rhapsody entitled The Witches' Joys shows a 
 Gothic or Elizabethan luxuriance of fantasy akin to 
 that of Beddoes ; whilst with what success he tried his 
 hand at the 'art ballad' has been already seen. But, 
 indeed, the ' revival ' side of the Romantic Movement 
 in which he has his place is in him particularly strong. 
 Several of his poems are even deliberately imitative of 
 particular authors — as, for instance, the Cavalier s Song of 
 Lovelace, Meiancholye of Beaumont, The Solemn Song of a 
 Righteous Hearte of Raleigh perhaps, or of the mournful 
 lines written on the eve of execution by the young and 
 misguided Chidiock Tichborne. 1 From all these things 
 of course it follows, as the night the day, that the 
 poet has no very distinctive style of his own. And 
 hence perhaps arises the fact that, fine man-of-letters as 
 he was, Motherwell has never yet been generally awarded 
 his full dues of appreciation and applause. 
 
 Jea?iie Morrison, by which he is generally known, and 
 which is said to have been sketched by him at the age of 
 fourteen, is a sweet and pathetic poem, telling of a childish 
 love which lasts a life-time. Its sentiment may perhaps 
 appear a little strained ; yet the school-children who 
 
 • . . .on the knowe abune the burn 
 
 For hours thegither sat, 
 In the silentness o' joy, till baith 
 Wi' very gladness grat,' 
 
 were obviously children of very exceptional sensibility of 
 temperament — exceptional, but not necessarily unnatural ; 
 and it is with the exceptional that the romantic poet 
 delights to deal. Another way of looking at the poem 
 is to view the poet's love for the little girl as the form 
 into which the natural yearning backward toward a 
 happy childhood has been crystallized by time. 
 1 ' My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,' etc. 
 
WILLIAM THOM 
 
 ' O ye Cairngorms,' cries Lord Cockburn, in his Circuit 
 Journeys?- ' how have ye never produced a poet of your 
 own ? ' Of course the accomplished lawyer does not here 
 speak strictly by the book; 2 still the poetical poverty of 
 Aberdeenshire, compared with certain districts of the 
 West and South of Scotland, is certainly noticeable. And 
 scarcely less noticeable is the fact that the subject of the 
 following sketch, an Aberdonian by birth, is in all other 
 respects alien to his county. His dialect, learnt from 
 books, is ' pure Tannahill and Dundee ' ; 3 nor, in all his 
 verse, is there an allusion to Aberdeen. 
 
 In the ranks of the ill-fated among men of genius, William 
 Thorn holds a conspicuous place. For that he had a spark 
 of genius — though perhaps not strictly poetic genius — there 
 
 1 P- 337- 
 
 2 Alexander Ross, author of The Fortunate Shepherdess, and of the 
 song of Wood and married and a' ; John Skinner, author of Tulloch- 
 gorum and several other popular songs ; John Ewen, author of The 
 Boatie Rows, and George Halket, generally credited with the author- 
 ship of Logie d Bnchan, are alone enough to redeem the county from 
 the charge of poetical barrenness. Nor, in more recent times, must 
 we overlook the veteran Dr George MacDonald. 
 
 3 The author is indebted to Mr W. Keith Leask for drawing his 
 attention to this curious fact. The same gentleman points out that, 
 in the verses quoted on p. 147, there occur no less than five words — 
 viz. * ettle,' * lo'esome,' ■ hallan,' 'cranreuch,' ' aiblins ' — which are 
 quite foreign to Aberdonians. 
 
 137 
 
1 38 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 is little room to doubt. An obscure Aberdonian weaver, 
 labouring under every possible disadvantage of birth and 
 up-bringing, he yet succeeded in so impressing the world 
 that, whilst literary London hailed him as a ' second Burns,' 
 India vied with the United States in contributing towards 
 his maintenance. The means by which this impression was 
 produced were the wit and eloquence of his conversation, 
 the beauty of his flute-playing and singing, the charm of 
 his lyric verse, and the pathos of his history. To-day, 
 his wit, his music, his personality are lost. His verse 
 remains ; but in that verse the spark of genius that was 
 in him shone with no steady, unobstructed ray. His 
 story likewise remains to us, and, as has been hinted, 
 it is one of the most cruelly ironical in the annals of 
 literature. For it is that of one whose inherent weak- 
 ness was betrayed, not by the long-continued assaults 
 of adverse fortune, but in the tardy hour of the turning 
 of her wheel. 
 
 Thorn was born in Sinclair's Close, Justice Port of 
 Aberdeen, as nearly as can be ascertained about the end 
 of 1798, or the beginning of the year following, 1 though 
 the date mistakenly given in Whistle-binkie and on the 
 poet's grave-stone is ten years earlier. A lameness from 
 which he suffered through life, and which was due 
 originally to a deformed foot, had been aggravated by 
 his being run over, whilst still a child, by the carriage 
 of the Earl of Errol, whilst attending the local race- 
 meeting. For the injury thus inflicted he is said to 
 have been 'compensated' with the sum of five shillings; 
 but the story lacks inherent probability, and at any rate 
 it seems only fair to assume that the extent of the damage 
 done was unknown to the owner of the carriage. Thom the 
 elder, who has been variously described as a ' contractor ' 
 
 1 Life, prefixed to Rhvtnes and Recollections of a Handloom Weaver, 
 ed. 1880. 
 
WILLIAM THOM 139 
 
 and a ' merchant/ died soon after the birth of his son, 
 leaving his widow in very poor circumstances. Hence 
 the entire education of the future poet was acquired in 
 a dame's school of the very humblest description, — to 
 which he tells us that boys of five years old and upwards 
 brought the weekly fee of 'three bawbees and a peat.' 
 Of the mistress of this seminary, and the customs of the 
 place, he has left some lively sketches. ' Our Wifie,' he 
 writes, ' had always twenty scholars, one cat, one taurds, 
 and one opinion. The scholars exercised her patience, 
 the cat her affections, and the opinion [was] simply that 
 the taurds (a cordovan improvement on the feebler birch) 
 was, as an exercise, the best panacea on earth for rheu- 
 matism in the right shoulder. . . . The outfit for grown-up 
 students was a Bible, a Westminster Catechism, and a stool, 
 all of which were removed on Saturday, and fetched again 
 on Monday. Oh, that I could tell, and tell it rightly, the 
 " skailing of the squeel ! " or paint yon joyous little mob, 
 gushing forth from the laigh door of Elspet Gillespie ! 
 Every face a commentary on the " rights of man " — every 
 little head crowned with a three-footed stool, its " cap of 
 liberty.'" The great day of the year was Candlemas, 
 when each little lad and lass — no matter how shabby on 
 ordinary days — wore a clean sark or a white frock, and 
 carried a white pocket-napkin. A king and queen were 
 appointed by the schoolmistress, and as it was customary 
 to present her with a guerdon, on the occasion, it was 
 observed that her choice usually fell on children of a 
 butcher or a baker. Then ' two tea-spoonfuls of sweeties 
 and an orange were laid on every happy hand. The 
 fiddler comes — all on foot a once — all at once in motion 
 — twenty white napkins flutter over twenty pretty heads. 
 Fiddler ! what care they for a fiddle ? They see the fiddle ! 
 The dance started when he began to tune — the dance 
 continues — he is tuning still — hands up ! Patter, patter, 
 
i 4 o FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 patter, — forty little feet pattering ! Think of that when 
 ye see the hail dance to the whirr of a May shower ! 
 Oh, the days of childhood ! Voyage hereafter as we 
 may, on smooth or on broken water, these are the land- 
 marks that will never fade.' 
 
 For Thorn these simply happy days were of short 
 continuance. At the age of ten he was apprenticed 
 to a firm of cotton-manufacturers, with whom he re- 
 mained for four years, entering in 1814 a large weaving 
 factory, known as the School Hill Factory, which oc- 
 cupied the site of the present East and West Free 
 Kirks. Melancholy, indeed, is his account of the years 
 he passed within the ' dismal walls ' of that ' prime 
 nursery of vice and sorrow ' of the days of unreformed 
 factories ; where, in his own words, virtue perished once 
 and for all, or was only remembered in a sense of deep 
 and woeful self-abasement. Here between three and four 
 hundred male and female workers toiled promiscuously — 
 1 the distinctive character of all sunk away,' the men be- 
 coming less manly, the women unlovely and rude. With 
 these, mixed the dregs of humanity, for, when hands were 
 wanted, no character was deemed too coarse to take part 
 in the work. Thorn was unfortunate even in the period 
 of his admission to the establishment, which took place 
 during a cycle of lean years, when wages which had 
 recently ruled as high as forty shillings for four days' work 
 had fallen to six shillings for a week. And, indeed, during 
 the seventeen years which he spent in the factory, he tells 
 us that the average earnings of first-rate hands, in good 
 times and bad, did not exceed from six to nine shillings. 1 
 There was, however, a brighter, or at least a more lively, 
 side to the picture j for the editor of Whistle-binkie, 
 
 1 It is only fair to say that Thorn has been charged with exaggera- 
 tion in this picture, the truth of which was disputed on the publication 
 of the Recollections. 
 
WILLIAM THOM 141 
 
 writing in somewhat Anacreontic strain, speaks of Thorn's 
 striking and early-developed 'gift of the gab,' which 
 stood him in good stead, not only in getting out of 
 scrapes, but in the more serious business of sweetheart- 
 ing. In the latter, it seems to have rendered him well- 
 nigh irresistible, so that, though he was a man of little 
 stature and plain though expressive features, it is 
 claimed for him that he made more ' conquests ' than 
 the best. His talents in singing and flute-playing 
 contributed also to distinguish him from his fellows. 
 He also loved poetry, in which taste he was not alone, 
 reading Scott and Byron with his fellows. But 
 'nearer and dearer' to hearts like theirs, he tells us, 
 was the Ettrick Shepherd, then in his full tide of song 
 and story. 'But nearer and dearer still than he/ he 
 continues, 'or any living songster — to us dearer — was 
 our ill-fated fellow-craftsman, Tannahill, who had just 
 then taken himself from a neglecting world, while yet 
 that world waxed mellow in his lay. What we owe to 
 thee ! Your Braes 0' Balquidder, and Yon Burnside, and 
 Gloomy Winter, and the Minstrel's wailing ditty, and 
 the noble Gleniffer. Oh, how they did ring above the 
 rattling of a hundred shuttles ! Let me again proclaim 
 the debt we owe the Song Spirits, as they walked in 
 melody from loom to loom, ministering to the low-hearted.' 
 Praise as eloquent as it is generous, and such as any poet 
 worthy the name must set high above gold or place ! 
 From earliest youth, Thom himself had experienced an 
 ' irrepressible tendency to make rhymes,' but it was not 
 until his thirtieth year that he ventured to submit one 
 of his effusions to an editor. He has left an amusing 
 account of the anxiety with which he awaited the result, 
 in company with a friend, outside the office of the 
 Aberdeen Journal. Too poor to purchase a copy of the 
 newspaper, and being refused a sight of it by successive 
 
1 42 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 passers-by, he was at last compelled to have recourse to 
 the expedient of a forced loan from the person of a boy 
 — when he found, with extravagant delight, that his con- 
 tribution had been inserted. 
 
 In 1828 Thorn married, and three years later settled 
 with his wife in Dundee. But, for some reason not 
 specified, his wife soon after this left him, and returned 
 to Aberdeen. Thorn on his part removed to Newtyle, a 
 manufacturing village which had recently sprung up near 
 Cupar Angus. There he formed a new connexion — with the 
 girl named Jean whom he has celebrated in his verse, who, 
 throwing in her lot with his, in time bore him five children. 
 The alliance was of course irregular, and as such is open 
 to censure ; yet it was by no means without redeeming 
 features. The evidence before us shows the poet as at all 
 times a most affectionate parent, and throughout the eight 
 or nine years which passed before Jean's death, he seems 
 to have made her a faithful and loving mate. In fairness 
 to his memory, too, we must bear in mind that it was in 
 those days no easy matter for a poor man to obtain a 
 divorce, so that, though certainly irregular, his conduct 
 must be acquitted of any charge of profligacy. 
 
 He was still living, and working as a weaver, at New- 
 tyle, when, in the spring of 1837, a great commercial 
 crisis in America combined with other causes to silence, 
 in one week, upwards of 6000 looms in Dundee and its 
 dependencies alone, and to spread dismay throughout the 
 whole county of Forfar. Thorn found the resources on 
 which he had to support six lives reduced to five shillings 
 a week. And, furthermore, as a stranger in the village, 
 he was regarded with prejudice rather than sympathy, so 
 much so, in fact, that most of those who had been in- 
 comers with him, and whose circumstances permitted 
 them to do so, made haste to withdraw from the place. 
 But, with four young children depending on him, this 
 
WILLIAM THOM 143 
 
 was not easy for Thorn. And here I make no apology 
 for transcribing largely from his own Recollections of this 
 time. For those Recollections are not only admirably told, 
 but as literature are worth all the poetry that came from 
 his pen put together. 
 
 1 Imagine a cold spring forenoon. It is eleven o'clock, 
 but our little dwelling shows none of the signs of that 
 time of day. The four children are still asleep. There 
 is a bed-cover hung before the window, to keep all within 
 as much like night as possible ; and the mother sits beside 
 the beds of her children, to lull them back to sleep when- 
 ever any shows an inclination to awake. For this there is 
 a cause, for our weekly five shillings have not come as ex- 
 pected, and the only food in the house consists of a hand- 
 ful of oatmeal saved from the supper of last night. Our 
 fuel is also exhausted. My wife and I were conversing in 
 sunken whispers about making an attempt to cook the 
 handful of meal, when the youngest child awoke beyond 
 its mother's power to hush it again to sleep, and then fell 
 a-whimpering, and finally broke out in a steady scream, 
 rendering it impossible any longer to keep the rest in a 
 state of unconsciousness. Face after face sprang up, each 
 with one consent exclaiming, "Oh, mither, mither, gie me 
 a piece ! " How weak a word is sorrow to apply to the 
 feelings of myself and wife during the remainder of that 
 dreary forenoon ! ' 
 
 The family lingered on in the hope and expectation of 
 warmer weather, until strength rapidly declining warned 
 them to be moving. Having then pawned a last relic of 
 better days for the sum of ten shillings, Thorn invested 
 four of these in the purchase of a pack for his wife, and 
 as many in second-hand books to form a stock of mer- 
 chandize for himself; and thus equipped, they set out to 
 travel the country. It was a Thursday when they left 
 home — turning the key in the door of the cottage, where 
 
i 4 4 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 the weaver's two looms with some furniture were left 
 behind. 
 
 'On the third day, Saturday, we passed through the 
 village of Inchture, in the Carse of Gowrie, and proceeded 
 towards Kinnaird. Sunset was followed by cold sour 
 east winds, and rain. The children becoming weary and 
 fretful, we made frequent inquiries of other forlorn-looking 
 beings whom we met, to ascertain which farm-town in the 
 vicinity was likely to afford us quarters. Jean was sorely 
 exhausted, bearing an infant constantly at her breast, and 
 often carrying the youngest boy also, who had fairly broken 
 down in the course of the day. It was nine o'clock when 
 we approached the large and comfortable steading of 
 Balguay, standing about a quarter of a mile off the road. 
 Leaving my poor flock on the wayside, I pushed down 
 the path to the farm-house, with considerable confidence, 
 for I had been informed that Balguay (meaning, by this 
 local appellation, the farmer) was a humane man, who 
 never turned the wanderer away from his door. Un- 
 fortunately for us, the worthy farmer (Playfair) was from 
 home, and not expected to return that night. His house- 
 keeper had admitted several poor people already, and could 
 admit no more. I pleaded with her the infancy of my 
 family, the lateness of the night, and their utter unfitness 
 to proceed — that we sought nothing but shelter — that the 
 meanest shed would be a blessing. Heaven's mercy was 
 never more earnestly pleaded for than was a night's lodging 
 by me on that occasion j but, " No, no, no," was the un- 
 varying answer to all my entreaties. 
 
 1 1 returned to my family ; they had crept closer together, 
 and all, except the mother, were fast asleep. 
 
 ' " Oh, Willie, Willie ! what keepit ye ? " inquired the 
 trembling woman. " I'm dootfu' o' Jeanie," she added ; 
 1 isna she waesome like ? Let's in frae the cauld ! " 
 
 i « We've nae way to gang, lass," said I, " whate'er come 
 
WILLIAM THOM 145 
 
 'Few more words passed. I drew her mantle over 
 the wet and chilled sleepers, and sat down beside them. 
 My head throbbed with pain, and for a time became the 
 tenement of thoughts I would not now reveal. . . . The 
 gloamin' light was scarcely sufficient to allow me to write 
 a note, which I carried to a stately mansion hard by. It 
 was to entreat what we had been denied at Balguay. 
 This application was also fruitless. The servant had 
 been ordered to take in no such notes, and he could not 
 break through the rule. On rejoining my little group, 
 my heart lightened at the presence of a serving-man, who 
 at that moment came near, and who, observing our 
 wretchedness, could not pass without endeavouring to 
 succour us. The kind words of this worthy peasant sunk 
 deep into our hearts. I do not know his name, but 
 never can I forget him. Assisted by him, we arrived, 
 about eleven o'clock, at the farm-house of John Cooper, 
 West-town of Kinnaird, where we were immediately ad- 
 mitted. The accommodation, we were told, was poor; 
 but what an alternative from the storm-beaten wayside ! 
 The servants were not yet in bed, and we were per- 
 mitted a short time to warm ourselves at the bothy fire. 
 During this interval the infant seemed to revive; it 
 fastened heartily to the breast, and soon fell asleep. 
 We were next led to an out-house. A man stood by 
 with a lantern, while, with straw and blankets, we made 
 a pretty fair bed. In less than half-an-hour, the whole 
 slept sweetly in their dark and almost roofless dormitory. 
 
 1 1 think it must have been between three and four 
 o'clock when Jean wakened me. Oh, that scream ! — I 
 think I can hear it now. The other children, startled 
 from sleep, joined in frightful wail over their dead sister. 
 Our poor Jeanie had, unobserved by us, sunk during the 
 night under the effects of the exposure of the preceding 
 evening, following, as it did, a long course of hardship, 
 
 K 
 
i 4 6 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 too great to be borne by a young frame. Such a visita- 
 tion could only be sustained by one hardened to misery 
 and wearied of existence. I sat a while and looked on 
 them ; comfort I had none to give — none to take ; I spake 
 not — what could be said — words ? Oh, no ! the worst is 
 over when words can serve us. And yet it is not just when 
 the wound is given that pain is felt.' Than the above per- 
 haps no sadder story was ever told, no more piteous experi- 
 ence ever placed on record. On reading it, one has no 
 choice but to throw to the winds all thought of literature, 
 and give one's self up to sheer poignant human sympathy. 
 The effect is thus the same as in the triumphs of literature ; 
 yet, of course, the cause is not the same. But, keeping 
 this in view, how manly, simple, and straightforward is 
 the writer's tone — how free from any suspicion of an 
 attempt to ' pile up the agony,' or appeal ad miseri- 
 cordiam ; how free also from the lachrymose note which 
 spoils the effect of the most popular poems of Moir and 
 Motherwell ! Surely none who has once read it will ever 
 again pass a houseless family of ■ tramps ' upon the road 
 without thinking of Thorn — and thinking, let us hope, 
 to some purpose. Judged as a mere piece of composi- 
 tion, the passage quoted has very high merits. But, 
 indeed, the author's prose shows, throughout, a gift of 
 free and forcible expression, which is by no means so 
 conspicuous in his verse. Says he, after his sorrow, ' The 
 busy singing world above us was a nuisance ; and around, 
 the loaded fields bore nothing for us — we were things 
 apart. Nor knew we where that night our couch might 
 be, or where, to-morrow, our grave.' And again, this 
 harsh truth, ' In common tramp-houses, a death is, in 
 a double sense, a godsend — such, indeed, is to them a 
 gracious notice, even when it comes in a " fair strae " 
 kind of way [i.e. not by foul means]. But if the decease 
 has aught about it of the extraordinary, so as to attract 
 
WILLIAM THOM 147 
 
 local sympathy, out of that comes a true Christmas.' 
 And again, ' It is always so : but for the poor, the poorer 
 would perish.' 
 
 One wishes that it were possible here to follow Thom 
 step by step in his wanderings, for every line of this part 
 of his narrative is worthy to be graven in brass, first for 
 the strength of its appeal to the heart, and secondly for 
 the graphic traits of ■ tramp ' life noted by the keen eye 
 of the little weaver, and herein embodied. After having, 
 with all sympathy from the people of the place, consigned 
 his little one to earth, on the Monday morning he set out 
 once more — wandering onward with his flock, without 
 settled aim or purpose. Gratefully he acknowledges the 
 kindness of strangers to his children, though shrewdly 
 suspecting that, to some extent, it might be due to the 
 respectability of their dress. One night, at a tramp 
 lodging-house at Methven, he found himself a half-penny 
 short of the landlady's dues, which she was accustomed 
 rigorously to exact before permitting her lodgers to remove 
 their boots — a euphemism in the case of many, who had 
 no boots to remove. He had recently observed a street 
 singer — one evidently not to the manner born — and his 
 flute now occurred to him as a possible means of raising 
 funds. But there was some natural unwillingness to be 
 overcome before setting to work. Having gone outside 
 the town, and awaited the darkening, he dipt his flute 
 into a streamlet and began to play, advancing townwards 
 as he did so. The ' Flowers of the Forest ' 1 soon drew 
 listeners to the windows, and within ten minutes he held 
 the sum of three and ninepence. His strathspey-playing, 
 for which he acknowledges that he had a turn, was not 
 much less successful, and when he returned to his lodging 
 it was not only with exchequer replenished, but bearing 
 
 1 Specially popular in the north at this time through the singing of 
 John Wilson, the baritone. 
 
148 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 gifts as well. Well might he apostrophize in one of his 
 sweetest lyrics the instrument which had been his friend 
 in need ! 
 
 ■ It's nae to harp, to lyre, nor lute, 
 
 I ettle now to sing ; 
 To thee alane, my lo'esome flute, 
 
 This hamely strain I bring ! 
 Oh ! let us flee on memory's wing, 
 
 O'er twice ten winters flee, 
 An' try ance mair that ae sweet spring 
 
 Whilk young love breathed in thee. 
 
 1 Since then, my bairns hae danced to thee, 
 
 To thee my Jean has sung ; 
 And mony a nicht, wi' guiltless glee, 
 
 Our hearty hallan rung. 
 But noo, wi' hardship worn and stung, 
 
 I'll roam the warld about ; 
 For her and for our friendless young, 
 
 Come forth, my faithful flute ! 
 
 ' Your artless notes may win the ear 
 
 That wadna hear me speak ; 
 And for your sake that pity spare, 
 
 My full heart couldna seek. 
 And whan the winter's cranreuch bleak 
 
 Drives houseless bodies in, 
 We'll aiblins get the ingle-cheek, 
 
 A' for your lichtsome din.' 
 
 His success notwithstanding, Thorn was glad, as soon as 
 opportunity offered, to relinquish flute-playing and similar 
 precarious means of earning a livelihood, and to settle again, 
 as a 'customary' or household weaver, first at Aberdeen, 
 and subsequently at Inverurie in the same county. When 
 he had been at the latter place a year, and when things 
 had begun to go hardly with him again, he sent the first 
 part of his poem entitled The Blind Boy's Pranks to the 
 
WILLIAM THOM 149 
 
 Aberdeen Herald, where it was inserted, over the signature 
 1 A Serf,' with a sympathetic note by the editor, to whom 
 Thorn was an entire stranger. The lyric has more of sub- 
 stance or body, and is more carefully elaborated, than is 
 the case with most of Thorn's verse, but its merits, apart 
 from the circumstances of the author's history, would 
 scarcely suffice at the present day to attract attention. In 
 1 84 1 it was otherwise. The poem, as we are told, was 
 copied into most of the newspapers in the country. In 
 this manner it attracted the eye of Mr Gordon of Knock- 
 espock, a local landowner of literary and antiquarian tastes, 
 who forthwith sent the author ^5, and soon afterwards, 
 having furnished him with an outfit, carried him and his 
 little girl to London. The faithful much-enduring Jean 
 had died in childbed a few months too soon to witness 
 the dawn of her partner's good fortune. 
 
 There is no doubt that Knockespock's conduct was 
 actuated by amiable enthusiasm, and sincere goodwill to- 
 wards Thorn — to whom, during the remaining seven years 
 of the poet's life, he continued a true friend. But, 
 when judged by the light of after events, the wisdom 
 of the course here adopted by him remains very open 
 to question. The little weaver stayed in London four 
 months, being feted and lionized, and introduced to most 
 of the literary celebrities of the day. He also accompanied 
 a party, of which Samuel Lover was one, on a tour in 
 Wales. When he returned to his loom at Inverurie, though 
 he was now a personage and received many orders from 
 rich patrons, he was in reality none the better for the 
 outing. He had grown unsettled, as, in similar circum- 
 stances, Burns had done before him, and the temptations 
 of his position became too much for him. It is of the 
 Thorn of this period that Professor Masson has left his 
 classical description. 
 
 1 The first occasion of my seeing him,' writes the Pro- 
 
150 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 fessor, 'was a kind 01 public dinner or supper (I forget 
 which) given in his honour at the Royal Hotel [at Aberdeen] 
 by a number of the most respectable townsmen. He was 
 neatly dressed, in a peculiarly cut blue coat with bright 
 buttons, and home-made check waistcoat, as a weaver of 
 the old times of good weaving might have been attired on 
 a holiday. As he moved about on his first coming in, a 
 tight, small figure, with short light hair, one noted the 
 slight lameness of his gait, but most of all his face — which 
 was creased and wrinkled all over wherever a wrinkle could 
 be, and had an expression at once shrewd, humorous, in- 
 sinuating, and woe-begone. Nothing could be easier or 
 in more perfect tact than his manner : and in the little 
 speeches he made from his place at table we had a specimen 
 of a power which some who knew him best afterwards have 
 told me he possessed consciously in a wonderful degree, 
 especially with women — that of fluent, happy, and most 
 persuasive talk. " What a tongue the creature had ! " is 
 the phrase in which one who knew him very intimately 
 has conveyed to me his impression of this power of Thorn's; 
 " if he had your ear for five minutes he charmed you." 
 He certainly, on this occasion, even before a considerable 
 audience, spoke admirably and readily.' 
 
 Professor Masson saw him afterwards, more quietly, at 
 his little weaving-place in Inverurie, ' where there was a 
 tall, dark, sensible-looking man acting as his assistant at 
 the loom, and evidently exercising a tender and admiring 
 care over him.' But the three or four years — from spring 
 of 1 841 to the end of 1844 — during which he now made 
 Inverurie his head-quarters, were not to his advantage. 
 The old and baneful alliance of Scots Song with Scots 
 Drink was hurtful to him. The traditional example of 
 Burns had recently been brought out in stronger colours 
 by the amazing success of the roistering Nodes of North ; 
 there was in Aberdeen a considerable element of ' tavern- 
 
WILLIAM THOM 151 
 
 conviviality, streaked with uncultivated literary enthusiasm 
 and imitative ambition/ to which these misleading papers 
 had given birth, and on occasion of Thorn's visits to that 
 city there were friends of his who were ever ready to way- 
 lay the coach and carry him off into their company. Oh, 
 those admiring drouthy friends to Scottish genius ! for 
 how much waste and wreck of talent, time and character 
 are they responsible ! We who write have seen it with 
 our eyes. Friends, indeed ? Call them, rather, the basest, 
 most callously selfish, most insidious of foes. We can 
 well believe that in North and his doings Thorn took 
 little real interest, and that, excepting a kind of ' official ' 
 perfunctory participation in the Chartism which at the 
 time was in the air, he cared for politics not at all. A 
 Scots song, a strathspey on the flute, and in conversation 
 the unsought humours and suggestions of the moment, 
 were for the couthy, companionable little body enjoyment 
 enough. What concerns us most here is the fact that, 
 after all the bright encouragement he had received, he 
 should not have applied himself with more of vigour and 
 effect to the work of self-education, and to literary com- 
 position. 
 
 In autumn, 1844, he published the only book that 
 ever came from his pen — his Rhymes and Recollections of 
 a Handloom Weaver, the first thousand copies of which 
 were soon disposed of. Towards the end of the year he 
 returned to London, being actuated by various motives, 
 amongst which the more immediate was to superintend a 
 new edition of his book, whilst a scheme of trading in 
 Scottish home-made fabrics, such as he had himself been 
 in the habit of producing, also entered into his programme. 
 It was on the occasion of this sojourn in London that 
 his planet reached its apogee. His fame had by this 
 time spread far and wide, and at home and abroad people 
 vied with one another in doing him honour. It may be 
 
152 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 unwise, at this distance of time, to assign the motive 
 which influenced them to this generous emulation, but, 
 unless instinct be at fault, it was the artless and irresistible 
 appeal of the Recollections far more than the not very remark- 
 able poetry of the Rhymes. Be this as it may, on the 26th 
 February 1845, a great dinner in the poet's honour was 
 given at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand, 
 at which W. J. Fox, the then celebrated preacher, phil- 
 anthropist, and anti-Corn-Law League orator presided, 
 and many speeches were made. This entertainment was 
 followed by a complimentary soiree given to Thorn by the 
 working-men of London, whilst, in the meantime, enthusi- 
 astic Scotsmen in India had sent him ^300, and a sub- 
 scription for his benefit headed by Margaret Fuller in 
 America reached the sum of ^"400. Thorn was now 
 flattered and caressed, feted by the ' Gorgeous ' Lady 
 Blessington, and sought after, as we are told, by the literary 
 stars of the time — though, among those mentioned — 
 Dickens, William and Mary Howitt, Douglas Jerrold, 
 John Forster, Mr and Mrs S. C. Hall and Eliza Cook — 
 it is noticeable that several are of very low magnitude. 
 
 But the scene was not long in changing. In the 
 natural course of things, the wave of applause and 
 recognition spent itself; probably, as is apt to be the 
 case, it had been from the first overdone. Doubtless 
 the poet's conduct served also to alienate certain of his 
 friends — among grounds of offence being his indifference 
 to the formality of obtaining a divorce before establishing 
 a new domestic connection. Meantime his affairs were 
 not prospering — his scheme for trading in Scotch woven 
 fabrics having proved visionary, whilst, through no fault 
 of his own, the London edition of his poems was delayed 
 till 1847, when the demand for it had passed away. 
 
 Neglected, spoilt by the caprice of fortune, and with 
 failing health, Thorn's last state became far worse than his 
 
WILLIAM THOM 153 
 
 first. Yet still his old imposing cleverness would from 
 time to time assert itself. Thus we are told how, walking 
 out along the New Road from his lodgings near King's 
 Cross, as he was fond of doing in an evening, he would 
 sometimes join the group assembled round, it might be an 
 argumentative cabman or his dishonest ' fare,' and feigning 
 to enter into the spirit of the thing, would soon by his wit 
 and volubility raise shouts of laughter among the bystanders. 
 Many traits in his character, indeed, would incline one to 
 believe that it was for a comedian rather than a poet that 
 Nature had designed him. His course was, however, almost 
 run, and his dominant mood at this time is expressed in 
 his Farewell to Lo?idon. A grant from the Literary 
 Fund, assisted by a subscription among his friends, 
 enabled him to gratify his wish of returning with his 
 family to Dundee, where he took up his abode in the 
 suburb of Hawkhill, in a couple of rooms. There disease 
 and penury further depressed his failing powers, and after 
 few and evil days he died there on the 29th February 1848. 
 His remains, which were honoured with a public funeral, 
 were laid in the Western Cemetery of Dundee, which over- 
 looks the * queenly Tay,' and in 1857 a monument was 
 erected over them. A public subscription was raised for 
 the benefit of his consort and her children. 
 
 The irony of the ill-judged enthusiasm which saluted 
 in Thom 'Scotland's second Burns' is to-day too sadly 
 apparent to require pointing out, and serves but to add 
 one more to the already innumerable instances of the 
 fallibility of the general public in matters of literary 
 criticism. The poem of the Mitherless Bairn, by which 
 alone he is now remembered, gives expression to the 
 genuine tenderness and sympathy with suffering humanity 
 that were in the man ; whilst, as a moving record of 
 personal experience, his prose Recollectio?is remain, as 
 has been said, as full of human interest to-day as on the 
 
154 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 day when they were written. The rest, alas ! is silence, 
 or nearly so, for ' local patriotism ' may yet suffice to 
 keep the poet's memory green within the district of his 
 birth and up-bringing. To the few beyond that region 
 who may still care to trace out his history, he will remain 
 a genial and pathetic figure, born to strange vicissitude 
 of fortune. For his lot was a hard one, cast in evil 
 times. And yet it was success that undid him. For it 
 is scarcely too much to say that he fell a victim to the 
 desire on the part of his countrymen to make vicarious 
 reparation to the greatest of Scottish poets. 
 
OPINIONS OF THE PRESS ON THE 
 "FAMOUS SCOTS" SERIES. 
 
 Of THOMAS CARLYLE, by H. C. Macpherson, 
 
 The Literary World says : — 
 "One of the very best little books on Carlyle yet written, far out-weighing in 
 value some more pretentious works with which we are familiar." 
 
 Of ALLAN RAMSAY, by Oliphant Smeaton, 
 
 The Scotsman says : — 
 "It is not a patchwork picture, but one in which the writer, taking genuine 
 interest in his subject, and bestowing conscientious pains on his task, has his 
 materials well in hand, and has used them to produce a portrait that is both life- 
 like and well balanced." 
 
 Of HUGH MILLER, by W. Keith Leask, 
 
 The Expository Times says : — 
 " It is a right good book and a right true biography. . . . There js a very fine 
 sense of Hugh Miller's greatness as a man and a Scotsman ; there is also a fine 
 choice of language in making it ours." 
 
 Of JOHN KNOX, by A. Taylor Innes, 
 
 Mr Hay Fleming in the Bookman says : — 
 "A masterly delineation of those stirring times in Scotland, and of that famous 
 Scot who helped so much to shape them." 
 
 Of ROBERT BURNS, by Gabriel Setoun, 
 
 The New Age says : — 
 " It is the best thing on Burns we have yet had, almost as good as Carlyle's 
 Essay and the pamphlet published by Dr Nichol of Glasgow." 
 
 Of THE BALLAD I STS, by John Geddie, 
 
 The Spectator says : — 
 " The author has certainly made a contribution of remarkable value to the 
 literary history of Scotland. We do not know of a book in which the subject has 
 been treated with deeper sympathy or out of a fuller knowledge." 
 
 Of RICHARD CAMERON, by Professor Herkless, 
 
 The Dundee Courier says : — 
 "In selecting Professor Herkless to prepare this addition to the ' Famous Scots 
 Series ' of books, the publishers have made an excellent choice. The vigorous, 
 manly style adopted is exactly suited to the subject, and Richard Cameron is 
 presented to the reader in a manner as interesting as it is impressive. . . . 
 Professor Herkless has done remarkably well, and the portrait he has so cleverly 
 delineated of one of Scotland's most cherished heroes is one that will never fade." 
 
 Of SIR JAMES YOUNG SIMPSON, by Eve Blantyre 
 
 Simpson, 
 
 The Daily Chronicle says : — 
 " It is indeed long since we have read such a charmingly-written biography as 
 this little Life of the most typical and ' Famous Scot' that his countrymen have 
 been proud of since the time of Sir Walter. . . . There is not a dull, irrelevant, 
 or superfluous page in all Miss Simpson's booklet, and she has performed the 
 biographer's chief duty— that of selection— with consummate skill and judgment." 
 
Press Opinions on "Famous Scots" Series— continued 
 Of THOMAS CHALMERS, by W. Garden Blaikie, 
 
 The Spectator says : — 
 " The most notable feature of Professor Blaikie's book — and none could be more 
 commendable — is its perfect balance and proportion. In other words, justice is 
 done equally to the private and to the public life of Chalmers, if possible greater 
 justice than has been done by Mrs Oliphant." 
 
 Of JAMES BOSWELL, by W. Keith Leask, 
 
 The Morning Leader says : — 
 " MrW. K. Leask has approached the biographer of Johnson in the only possible 
 way by which a really interesting book could have been arrived at — by way of the 
 open mind. . . . The defence of Boswell in the concluding chapter of his delightful 
 study is one of the finest and most convincing passages that have recently appeared 
 in the field of British biography." 
 
 Of TOBIAS SMOLLETT, by Oliphant Smeaton, 
 
 The Weekly Scotsman says : — 
 "The book is written in a crisp and lively style. . . . The picture of the great 
 novelist is complete and lifelike. Not only does Mr Smeaton give a scholarly 
 sketch and estimate of Smollett's literary career, he constantly keeps the reader in 
 conscious touch and sympathy with his personality, and produces a portrait of the 
 man as a man which is not likely to be readily forgotten." 
 
 Of FLETCHER OF SALTOUN, by W. G. T. Omond, 
 
 The Leeds Mercury says : — 
 " Unmistakably the most interesting and complete story of the life of Fletcher of 
 Saltoun that has yet appeared. Mr Omond has had many facilities placed at his 
 disposal, and of these he has made excellent use." 
 
 Of THE BLACKWOOD GROUP, by Sir George Douglas, 
 
 The Weekly Citizen says : — 
 "It need not be said that to everyone interested in the literature of the first half 
 of the century, and especially to every Scotsman so interested, ' Ths Blackwood 
 Group ' is a phrase abounding in promise. And really Sir George Douglas fulfils 
 the promise he tacitly makes in his title. He is intimately acquainted not only 
 with the books of the different members of the ' group,' but also with their environ- 
 ment, social and otherwise. Besides, he writes with sympathy as well as know- 
 ledge." 
 
 Of NORMAN MACLEOD, by John Wellwood, 
 
 The Star says : — 
 "A worthy addition to the ' Famous Scots Series' is that of Norman Macleod, 
 the renowned minister of the Barony in Glasgow, and a man as typical of every- 
 thing generous and broadminded in the State Church in Scotland as Thomas 
 Guthrie was in the Free Churches. The biography is the work of John Wellwood, 
 who has approached it with proper appreciation of the robustness of the subject." 
 
 Of SIR WALTER SCOTT, by George Saintsbury, 
 
 The Pall Mall Gazette says :— 
 " Mr Saintsbury's miniature is a gem of its kind. . . . Mr Saintsbury's critique 
 of the Waverley Novels will, I venture to think, despite all that has been written 
 upon them, discover fresh beauties for their admirers." 
 
 Of KIRKCALDY OF GRANGE, by Louis A. Barbe. 
 
 The Scotsman says : — 
 "Mr Barbe* s sketch sticks close to the facts of his life, and these are sought out 
 from the best sources and are arranged with much judgment, and on the whole 
 with an impartial mind." 
 
Press Opinions on "Famous Scots" Series— continued 
 
 Of ROBERT FERGUSSON, by Dr A. B. Grosart, 
 
 The Westminster Gazette says : — 
 "One of the most interesting of the Famous Scots Series is devoted to 'Robert 
 Fergusson' the poet, to whom 'the greater Robert,' as he freely acknowledged, 
 was under so many obligations. Dr Grosart is perhaps the best living authority 
 on all that relates to the bard of ' The Farmer's Ingle,' and he gives many new 
 facts and corrects a number of erroneous statements that have hitherto obtained 
 currency respecting him. We have read it with genuine pleasure." 
 
 Of JAMES THOMSON, by William Bayne, 
 
 The Daily News says : — 
 "A just appreciation of Thomson as poet and dramatist, and an interesting 
 record of the conditions under which he rose to fame, as also of his friendships 
 with the great ones of the eighteenth century." 
 
 Of MUNGO PARK, by T. Banks Maclachlan, 
 
 The Leeds Mercury says : — 
 " We owe to Mr Maclachlan not only a charming life-story, if at times a pathetic 
 one, but a vivid chapter in the romance of Africa. Geography has no more 
 wonderful tale than that dealing with the unravelling of the mystery of the 
 Niger." 
 
 The Speaker says : — 
 " Mr Maclachlan recounts with incisive vigour the story of Mungo Park's heroic 
 wanderings and the services which he rendered to geographical research." 
 
 Of DAVID HUME, by Henry Calderwood, 
 
 The Speaker says : — 
 " The little book is a virile recruit of the ' Famous Scots Series.' " 
 " This monograph is both picturesque and critical." 
 
 The New Age says : — 
 " To the many students of philosophy in Scotland a special interest will attach 
 to Professor Calderwood's sketch of David Hume from the fact that it is the last 
 piece of work done by its lamented author ; and very pleasing it is to note the 
 fairness and charity of the judgment passed by the most evangelical of philosophers 
 upon the man who used to be denounced as the prophet of infidelity." 
 
 Of WILLIAM DUNBAR, by Oliphant Smeaton, 
 
 The Speaker says : — 
 
 " Mr Smeaton looks narrowly into the characteristics of Dunbar's genius, and 
 does well to insist on the almost Shakespearian range of his gifts. He contends 
 that in elegy, as well as in satire and allegory, Dunbar's place in English litera- 
 ture is amongst the great masters of the craft of letters." 
 The Glasgow Herald says : — 
 
 " This is a bright and picturesquely written monograph, presenting in readable 
 form the results of the critical research undertaken by Laing, Schipper, and the 
 other scholars who during the present century have done so much for the elucida- 
 tion of the greatest of our early Scottish poets." 
 
 Of SIR WILLIAM WALLACE, by Professor MURISON, 
 
 The Speaker says : — 
 " Mr Murison is to be congratulated on this little book. After much hard and 
 discriminative labour he has pieced together by far the best, one might say the 
 only rational and coherent, account of Wallace that exists." 
 
 Mr William Wallace in the Academy says : — 
 "Professor Murison has acquitted himself of his task like a patriot." 
 " Capital reading." 
 
 The Daily News says : — 
 " A scholarly and impartial little volume, one of the best yet published in the 
 ' Famous Scots Series.' ' 
 
Press Opinions on "Famous Scots" Series — continued 
 
 The Pall Mall Gazette says :— 
 "Another of this admirable collection of biographical studies has appeared. 
 It is a well written narrative of the few authenticated facts known about the 
 popular hero of Scotland, Sir William Wallace, its production having been pre- 
 ceded by a diligent study of such documents as have been rendered procurable 
 by text clubs and historical societies in the north. So far the book would be 
 acceptable to all. It, however, contains something else. History is dumb about 
 many of the years of the hero's life ; but legend and romance have found utter- 
 ance in minstrelsy, and with Blind Harry's epic to draw upon, what more could 
 perfervid Scots wish for? Professor Murison has incorporated such a quantity 
 of the minstrel's incredible tales in his book that it is scarcely likely to prove 
 delectable fare for any but his compatriots. It is a bright little book which will 
 be much relished north of the Tweed and also among those Scottish exiles who 
 are supposed to be pining away their lives south of it." 
 
 The New Age says : — 
 " Anyhow, here at least, we have his life-story— a most difficult tale to tell — 
 recorded with a painstaking research and in a spirit of appreciative candour which 
 leave almost nothing to be desired." 
 
 Of ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, by Margaret Moves 
 Black, 
 
 The Banffshire Journal says : — 
 " The portrait drawn as it is by a loving hand, is absolutely photographic in its 
 likeness, and the literary criticisms with which the book is pleasantly studded are 
 alike careful and judicious, and with most of them the ordinary reader will cordially 
 agree." 
 
 The Bookman says : — 
 "This little book is sure to get a welcome." 
 
 The Speaker says : — 
 " Sense and sensibility are in these pages, as well as knowledge and delicate 
 discrimination." 
 
 The Outlook says : — 
 " Certainly one of the most charming biographies we have ever come across. 
 The writer has style, sympathy, distinction, and understanding. We were loth to 
 put the book aside. Its one fault is that it is too short." 
 The Daily Free Press says : — 
 " One of the most charming sketches— it is scarcely a biography— of a literary 
 man that could be found has just been published as the latest number of the 
 1 Famous Scots Series'—' R. Louis Stevenson,' by Miss Black. The excellence of 
 the little book lies in its artless charm, in its loose and easy style, in its author's 
 evident love and delight in her subject." 
 
 Of THOMAS REID, by Professor Campbell Fraser, 
 
 The North British Daily Mail says : — _ 
 
 "A model of sympathetic appreciation and of succinct and lucid exposition." 
 The Scotsman says : — 
 
 " Professor Campbell Fraser's volume on Thomas Reid is one of the most able 
 and valuable of an able and valuable series. He supplies what must be allowed to 
 be a distinct want in our literature, in the shape of a brief, popular, and accessible 
 biography of the founder of the so-called Scottish School of Philosophy, written 
 with notable perspicuity and sympathy by one who has made a special study of 
 the problems that engaged the mind of Reid." 
 The Glasgow Herald says : — 
 
 " We do not know any volume of the * Famous Scots Series' that deserves or is 
 likely to receive a heartier welcome from the educated public than this life and 
 estimate of Reid by Professor Campbell Fraser. The writer is no amateur but a 
 past-master in the subject of the Scottish philosophy, and it has evidently been a 
 real pleasure to him to expiscate quite a number of new facts regarding the pro- 
 fessional and private life of its best representative." 
 
Press Opinions on "Famous Scots" Series— continued 
 
 Of POLLOK AND AYTOUN, by Rosaline Masson, 
 The Spectator says : — 
 "One of the most artistically conceived and gracefully written of the series to 
 which it belongs." 
 
 The Glasgow Herald says : — 
 "The facts of the two lives are presented by Miss Masson with intelligence and 
 spirit, and the volume will take a good place among the rest of the series." 
 
 The Publishers' Circular says : — 
 " Very sympathetic is this life of Pollok, and it is well that his name should not be 
 allowed to sink into oblivion. Miss Masson's sketch of Aytoun is a charming one, 
 and fully maintains the high standard of the series to which it belongs." 
 
 Of ADAM SMITH, by Hector C. Macpherson, 
 The Speaker says : — 
 "This little book is written with brains and a degree of courage which is in 
 keeping with its convictions. It has vision, too, and that counts for righteousness, 
 if anywhere, in political economy." 
 
 The Echo says : — 
 " Smith's life is briefly and clearly told, and there is a good deal of independent 
 criticism interspersed amidst the chapters on the philosopher's two principal 
 treatises. Mr Macpherson's analysis of Smith's economic teaching makes excellent 
 reading." 
 
 The Scots Pictorial says : — 
 "One of the best of an admirable series." 
 
 Of ANDREW MELVILLE, by William Morison, 
 The Spectator says : — 
 "The story is well told, and it takes one through a somewhat obscure period 
 with which it is well to be acquainted. No better guide could be found than Mr 
 Morison." 
 
 The Speaker says : — 
 " The great aspects of his career as Principal of Glasgow and then of St Andrews 
 — it has been said that the European renown of the Scottish Universities began with 
 Melville — are admirably discussed in this virile, and at the same time critical 
 monograph." 
 
 The North British Daily Mail says :— 
 " Mr Morison outlines the main facts of Melville's life-work with singular lucidity 
 and point. He displays a full and accurate knowledge of the ecclesiastical history 
 of the period, and his judgments are invariably sound. Altogether the book is one 
 of the best of the series." 
 
 Of JAMES FREDERICK FERRIER, by E. S. Haldane, 
 
 The Scotsman says : — 
 
 " Ferricr the man, and even Ferrier the professor, Miss Haldane brings near to 
 us, an attractive and interesting figure." 
 
 The Dundee Courier says : — 
 _" This biography of him will be highly esteemed because of the grace and vigour 
 with which Miss Haldane has done her work. To the ' Famous Scots' series of 
 volumes there have been many excellent contributions, but not one of them is more 
 interesting than this latest addition." 
 
 The Greenock Telegraph says : — 
 "Alas, we shall never see his like again ; but if a new generation wishes to know 
 of him, and also something of his profound philosophy, let them get and read Miss 
 Haldane's capital little book." 
 
Press Opinions on "Famous Scots" Series — continued 
 
 Of KING ROBERT THE BRUCE, by Professor MURISON, 
 The Morning Leader says : — 
 "Professor Murison has given us a book for which not only Scots, but every man 
 who can appreciate a record of great days worthily told, will be grateful." 
 
 The Aberdeen Journal says : — 
 " The story of Bruce is brilliantly told in clear and flexible language, which 
 draws the reader on with the interest of a novel. Professor Murison is a most 
 impartial and thoroughly reliable critic, and may be followed with confidence by all 
 who desire a truthful and unprejudiced picture of this greatest of the Scots." 
 
 The Leeds Mercury says : — 
 "A worthy, as it is a necessary, addition to an admirable series." 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
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 OdT j£ T916 
 
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