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ration beyond question or control. Accordingly, while you find every man and woman in Scotland, the peasantry as much as the more cultivated classes, having lines and verses of Burns's treasured in their memories, as the precious wealth of the national mind, you rarely or never hear a similar quotation from Hogg. "A clever, ranting chiel was the shepherd," is the remark; his countrymen read, and admire, and do justice to his genius, but he can not, with all his ambition, seat himself in their heart of hearts like Robert Burns.

There is nothing so amusing as Hogg's autobiography. His good-natured egotism overflows it. The capital terms on which he is with himself makes him relate flatteries and rebuffs with equal naïveté; and the familiarity with which he treats the greatest names of modern literature, presenting the most grave and dignified personages as his cronies, chums, and convivial companions, is ludicrous beyond every thing. He opens his narrative in this style :-" I like to write about myself: in fact, there are few things which I like better; it is so delightful to call up old reminiscences. Often have I been laughed at for what an Edinburgh editor styles my good-natured egotism, which is sometimes any thing but that; and I am aware that I shall be laughed at again. But I care not: for this important memoir, now to be brought forward for the fourth time, at different periods of my life, I shall narrate with the same frankness as formerly; and in all relating either to others or to myself speak fearlessly and unreservedly out. Many of those formerly mentioned are no more; others have been unfortunate; but of all I shall speak the plain truth, and nothing but the truth."

Immediately afterward he adds-"I must apprise you, that, whenever I have occasion to speak of myself and my performances, I find it impossible to divest myself of an inherent vanity." Of this no one can doubt either the truth or the candor of the confession. He tells us that he was the second of four sons of Robert Hogg and Margaret Laid

law, the wife in Scotland often retaining her maiden name. That his father was a shepherd, but, saving money, had taken the farms of Ettrick-house and Ettrick-hall. At the latter place Hogg was born, he says, on the 25th of January, 1772; but he assigns this date to his birth out of his desire to resemble Robert Burns, so much as even to have been born on the same day and month. He used to boast of this, and even of some similar occurrence, as of having been in some sort of danger at his birth through a storm, and the necessary help for his mother being difficult to procure in night and tempest. He has related, in his life, that he was born on the same day of the same month as Burns, but on referring to the parish registry it did not bear him out, but showed him to have been born on the 9th of December, 1770. He tells us that his father was ruined, and that they were turned out of doors without a farthing when he was six years old, but that a worthy neighboring farmer, Mr. Brydon of Crosslie, took compassion on them, leased the farm of Ettrick-house, one of those Hogg's father had occupied, and put him as shepherd upon it. Here the embryo poet went to the parish school just by for a few months, and then at Whitsuntide was sent out to service to a farmer in the neighborhood, as a herd-boy. The account that he gives of himself, as a lad of seven years old, in this solitary employment on the hills, is curious enough. "My wages for the halfyear were a ewe-lamb and a pair of new shoes. Even at that early age my fancy seems to have been a hard neighbor for both judgment and memory. I was wont to strip off my clothes, and run races against time, or rather against myself; and in the course of these exploits, which I accomplished much to my own admiration, I first lost my plaid, then my bonnet, then my coat, and finally my hosen, for as for shoes, I had none."

The next winter, he tells us, he went to school again for a quarter, got into a class who read in the Bible, and "horribly defiled several sheets of paper with copy lines, every

letter of which was nearly an inch long." This, he says, finished his education, and that he never was another day at school. The whole of his career of schooling he computes at about half-a-year, but says that his old schoolmaster even denied this, declaring that he never was at his school at all! What a stock of education on which to set up shepherd, farmer, and poet!

Like Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and other illustrious men, Hogg, of course, fell in love in his very childhood, and, to say truth, his relation of this juvenile passion is as interesting as that of any of theirs. "It will scarcely be believed that at so early an age I should have been an admirer of the other sex. It is, nevertheless, strictly true. Indeed, I have liked the women a great deal better than the men ever since I remember. But that summer, when only eight years old, I was sent out to a height called Broadheads, with a rosy-cheeked maiden, to herd a flock of newweaned lambs, and I had my mischievous cows to herd beside. But as she had no dog, and I had an excellent one, I was ordered to keep close by her. Never was a master's order better obeyed. Day after day I herded the cows and 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 joost 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 years of age he says he had served a dozen masters, being only engaged for short terms, and odd jobs. When about twelve years old, such

was the flourishing state of his circumstances that he had two shirts, so bad that he could not wear them, and therefore went without, by this means falling into another difficulty, that of keeping his trowsers up on his bare skin, there being no braces in those days. Yet he had a fiddle, which cost five shillings, with which he charmed the cow-houses and stable-lofts at night, after his work was done. In his eighteenth year he entered the service of Mr. Laidlaw, of Black-house, near St. Mary's Loch, on Yarrow. He had been in the service of two others of the same family, probably relatives by his mother's side, who was a Laidlaw, at Willensee, and at Elibank, on the Tweed; and he now continued with Mr. Laidlaw, of Black-house, ten years, as shepherd. William Laidlaw, the son of his master, and afterward the bailiff of Sir Walter Scott, and also the author of the sweet song of "Lucy's Flitting," was here his great companion, and here they read much together, and stimulated in each other the flame of poetry. These must have been happy years for Hogg. The year after Burns's death he first heard Tam o' Shanter repeated, and heard of Burns, as a ploughman, who had written beautiful songs and poems. "Every day," says he, "I pondered on the genius and fate of Burns. I wept, and always thought with myself, what is to hinder me from succeeding Burns? I too was born on the 25th of January, and I have much more time to read and compose than any ploughman could have, and can sing more old songs than ever ploughman could in the world. But then I wept again, because I could not write. However, I resolved to be a poet, and follow in the steps of Burns!" A brave resolve, to be a poet, in a man that could not write. Nevertheless, he composed songs, and one of these, called M'Donald, had the luck to get sung at a great masonic meeting at Edinburgh, and was taken up by a General M'Donald, who fancied it was written upon him, and had it sung every week at his mess. Hogg, now thirty-one years of age, resolved to as

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tonish the world with his genius, and the account of the way he took is not a little amusing.

"In 1801, believing that I was then become a grand poet, I most sapiently determined on publishing a pamphlet, and appealing to the world at once. Having attended the Edinburgh market one Monday, with a number of sheep for sale, and being unable to dispose of them all, I put the remainder into a park until the market on Wednesday. Not knowing how to pass the interim, it came into my head that I would write a poem or two from my memory, and get them printed. The thought had no sooner struck me than it was put in practice; and I was obliged to select, not the best poems, but those that I remembered best. I wrote several of these during my short stay, and gave them all to a person to print at my expense; and having sold off my sheep on Wednesday morning, I returned to the forest. I saw no more of my poems until I received word that there were one thousand copies of them thrown off. I knew no more of publishing than the man in the moon; and the only motive that influenced me was, the gratification of my vanity by seeing myself in print. All of them were sad stuff, although I judged them to be exceedingly good. Notwithstanding my pride of authorship, in a few days I had discernment enough left to wish my publication heartily at the devil, and I had hopes that long ago it had been consigned to eternal oblivion, when, behold! a London critic had, in malice of heart, preserved a copy, and quoted liberally out of it last year, to my intense chagrin and mortification ;" i. e., while Hogg was, but four years before his death, lionizing in London.

His adventures afterward in Edinburgh, publishing his subsequent poems, are equally curious. How he published by subscription, and one third of his subscribers took his books, but never paid for them. How he set up a weekly literary paper-" The Spy," which he continued a year. How he became a great spouter at a debating club called

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