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Memorials of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd

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Memorials of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd HOY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF Hetirg HI. Sage X891 J\A'^n.^.±^ aQJii 1 h-qS.. 3081 Cornell University Library PR 4792.G21 1904 Memorials of James Hogg, the Ettrick shep 3 1924 013 483 296 1 Cornell University f Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013483296 MEMORIALS OF JAMES HOGG, iM.Ov' MEMORIALS OF JAMES HOGG THE ETTRICK SHEPHERD EDITED BY HIS DAUGHTER I MRS. GARDEN WITH PREFACE BY PROFESSOR VEITCH THIRD EDITION WITH INTRODUCTION BY Sir GEORGE DOUGLAS, Bart. PAISLEY: ALEXANDER GARDNER 1904 - PREFACE. This volume—a tribute from a daughter to the memory of her father—does not profess to be more than, as its title suggests, " Memorials " of James Hogg, the Shepherd Poet of Ettrick. It may serve, however, from the directness and authenticity of the materials—especially the letters of Hogg him- self—to shed a truer light on the man, his charac- ter, and his life, than has yet been done. Circum- stances have been unfavourable to our having a true picture of the man. It was the fate of Hogg to have his name associated with certain representa- tions in the well-known and once universally read " Noctes " of Blackwood's Magazine. Whatever be the merits of the picture of the Shepherd therein delineated—and no one will deny its power and — genius ^it is true, all the same, that this Shepherd was not the Shepherd of Ettrick, or the man James Hogg. He was neither a Socrates nor a FalstafF— Ti. PREFACE. neither to be credited with the wisdom and lofty ideahsings of the one, nor with the characteristic humour aad coarseness of the other. Nor are the habitual bombast and boasting with which the Shepherd of the " Noctes " is endowed to be re- garded as serious characteristics of the man. In these Memorials it will, I think, appear that James Hogg was very much what we might expect from his robust peasant ancestry, and the shaping circumstances of his early life and surroundings. Physically, he was a healthy man all round, knew nothing of the ailments of sedentary or dyspeptic authors, had an unfailing flow of animal spirits, loved all out-door life—walking, fishing, shooting, curling. This temperament and these habits helped him more than anything else, to bear up during a chequered life, under the pressure of adverse cir- cumstances, which would have sunk most men in despair. His poetic faculty and imaginative creations were almost as thoroughly the growth of the district and circumstances in which he was born and bred, as the birk by the burn or the bracken in the glen. The ;; PREFACE. vii. green pastoral solitudes of Ettrick moulded his feelings and fancy from the earliest days of his life and the whole district of the Ettrick and the Yar- row,—the main part of the Forest of the Stuart kings,—carried his imagination back into the past, as to an ideal world ; while in all the glens of the waters and the burns there were men and women liv- ing who could touch the heart of the eager listening stripling lad, with recitation and notes of an old ballad lore, —the quaintest, the richest, the most unique which Britain has known. Weird tale, ghostly legend, fairy visitations,—mysterious dis- appearances of maidens in the green wood shaw, and shepherds spirited away on the hills,—these were in the atmosphere which he breathed, still believed in by many, and a source of awe and won- der to all. The supernatural world was in his youth close to the natural—often flashing upon it and it was thus that the Ettrick Shepherd came gradually to weave into one beautiful, weird, and dreamy ideal, the actual scenes of the valleys he loved so well, with the world of fairy vision. The traits of Hogg's personal character, further. viii. PREFACE. reflect very much his birth and surroundings. He was a man of simple, kindly heart, and straightfor- ward purpose,—" aefauld," as he might be describ- ed, ready to trust, shrewd and sagacious withal, not prone to think or speak evil of any one, in- clined to admiration rather than to censure, but with a proud scorn of meanness and baseness of conduct. As was to be expected, his manners had a certain rusticity and homeliness. He is said some- times to have carried a little too far the privileges of an innocent rusticity in the violation of matters of social etiquette ; but we see clearly, from the tes- timonies in this volume of those who met him in so- ciety, that he was, especially towards the middle and close of his life, neither rude nor loutish, but marked by a good deal of simple dignity. His rul- ing ambition in life, from the hour when the quamt, clever, half-daft, wandering Jock Scott, recited to him, shortly after the death of Burns, Tarn o' Slianter on the hill-side in the Blackhouse Glen, was to be known as a poet, as, in fact, like Burns, a national poet, and, in his then untutored mood of mi-nd, he had even formed the idea of emulating PREFACE. ix. Burns himseE In this kind of disposition lay Hogg's strength and his weakness. He had a pro- found behef in himself and his powers,—a large share of egotism. His vanity was in no way con- cealed; he wore it on his sleeve, and it was a source of some amusement to his friends. But the con- sciousness under it aU of a latent struggling power of genius was that which kept the heart in him to face difficulties of social position, and defects of education, which few men in Scotland, or indeed in the world of letters, have had the courage to battle with and the force to overcome. The conviction was somehow in him from the first that he could achieve a place among the poets of his native land, and, while this feeling sustained him, it proved in the end to be well founded. His poetic faculty was his one title to distinction ; and we need not be surprised that he was proud of it, or that he was touched to the quick by any dis- paragement of his powers. As he once said to Scott, who had given him some no doubt kindly and candid criticism—" Ane's beuks are like his ill bairns : he disna like to hear them spoken o'. X. PREFACE. especially when he is conscious that they dinna deserve it." On another occasion he ventured to say to Sir Walter— "Dear Sir Walter! Ye can never suppose that I helang to your School o' Chivalry ! Ye are the king o' that school, but I'm the king o' the Mountain and Fairy School, which is a far higher ane nor yours." This, put with an almost sublime egotism, is in the main true. The Shepherd was a master in the Fairy fiction of Scot- land, and he attained a dehcacy and perfection of toiich in that department which, while they recall the finest of the old fairy ballads, are wholly his own. Hogg's sensitiveness on the point of his poetical genius was shown on more than one occa- sion in his relations not only with his warmly- attached friend, Sir Walter Scott, but with others, especially in the instance of Wordsworth's reported shghting speech about the trio of poets. But it does not appear that his resentment was either deep or long-continued, though he speaks of never being able to forgive Wordsworth. Hogg was essentially a kindly, generous, and warm-affectioned man, cap- able of attaching to himself friends of very opposite — — PREFACE. xi. characters ; genial in society, though not a copious or brilliant talker, and, in his own home at Eltrive and Mount Benger, hospitable almost to a fault. Obviously, too, he was a loving and well-loved man in his home circle, where he found his best happi- ness. His shrewd views of people and things, and his quaint modes of expression, redolent of the vernacular of the Forest and tinged with poetry, in a word, the singular individuality of his character made him an object of interest to numerous friends and acquaintances all over Britain. What Mr. Bobert Chambers said of him is the truth : " While thus recalling for the amusement of an idle hour, some of the whimsical scenes in which we have met Jambs Hogg, let it not be supposed that we think of him only with a regard to his homely manners, the social good nature, and the unimpor- tant foibles by which he was characterised. The world amidst which he moved was but too apt, especially of late years, to regard him in those lights alone, forgetting that beneath the rustic plaid there beat one of the kindest and most unperverted of hearts, whUe his bonnet covered the head from ' ' which had sprung KUmeny ' and Donald Mac- xii. PREFACE. Donald.' Hogg, as an untutored man, was a pro- digy, much more so than Bums, who had compara- tively a good education ; and now that he is dead and gone, we look around in vain for a living hand capable of waking the national lyre. The time will probably come when the inspired rustic will be more fully appreciated." The letters in this volume of Mr. J.
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