wounded it at Portobello, and pursued it a good way in the fields. "Nane o' your lies to me," said Jenny; "ye may have shot at a gull in your day, for aught I ken; but ye havena shot at this ane this ae half year. Ye'll see the mark o' my sheers on the creature's wing," continued she, "and every bairn in the place kens it fu' weil." It came across my mind, that Janet might be in the right after all; and seeing none of the usual marks of powder and lead on the animal, and moreover finding that one of its wings was actually cut, I delivered up my prize, with many apologies for my stupid mistake. Ay," said Jenny, as she took the gull, "it was very stupid, nae doubt; but am no thinkin' ye would hae fund out the stupidity, had ye no been puttin in mind o't." Moral.-Remember, O reader! that neither wisdom nor worth are always proof against cunning and knavery; and if, in the course of your peregrinations through life, you are sometimes disappointed in your well-founded expectations, reflect that even the great Christopher Columbus was twice gulled in one day by a foolish animal from the sea-side at Portobello, and be content. FAMILIAR EPISTLES TO CHRISTOPHER NORTH, LETTER I. ON HOGG'S MEMOIRS.* MY DEAR CHRISTOPHER, I TAKE the liberty of sending back Hogg, which has disgusted me more severely than any thing I have attempted to swallow since Macvey's Bacon. He is liker a swineherd in the Canongate, than a shepherd in Ettrick Forest. I shall never again think of him without the image of an unclean thing; and, for his sake, I henceforth forswear the whole swinish generation. Roast pig shall never more please my palate pickled pork may go to the devil-brawn, adieu!-avaunt all manner of hams-sow's cheek, Fare thee well! and if for ever, Still for ever, Fare thee well! What you can possibly see to admire in Jamie Hogg, is to me quite a puzzle. He is the greatest boar on earth, you must grant; and, for a decent wager, I undertake, in six weeks, to produce six as good poets as he is, from each county in Scotland, over and above the Falkirk Cobler, the Chaunting Tinsmith, Willison Glass, and the Reverend Mr. I engage to draw them all up two deep, in front of No. 17, Prince's-street, on the next day of publication; and they shall march round by the Mount of proclamation, and across the Mound, back to their parade. Lieutenant Juillinan shall be at their head-Mr shall officiate as chaplain-and if he pleases, shall be trumpeter. But joking apart, of all speculations in the way of printed paper, I should have thought the most hopeless to have been, "a Life of James Hogg, by himself." Pray, who wishes to know any thing about his life? Who, indeed, cares a single farthing whether he be at this blessed moment dead or alive? It is no doubt undeniable, that the political state of Europe is not so interesting as it was some years ago. But still I maintain that there was no demand for the Life of James Hogg, and that the world at large could have gone on without it. At all events, it ought not to have appeared before the Life of Buonaparte. Besides, how many lives of himself does the swine-herd intend to put forth? I have a sort of life of the man, written by himself about twenty years ago. There are a good many lives of him in the Scots Magazine-a considerable number even in your own work, my good sir-the Clydesdale Miscellany was a perfect stye with him his grunt is in Waugh-he has a bristle in Baldwin-and he has smuggled himself in a sack of chaff into the Percy Anecdotes. No man from the country has a right thus to become a public nuisance. This self-exposure is not altogether decent; and if neither Captain Brown nor Mr Jeffrey will interfere, why I will-so please to print this letter. The Mountain Bard; consisting of Legendary Ballads and Tales. By James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. The third edition, greatly enlarged. To which is prefixed, a Me moir of the Author's Life, written by Himself. Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh. Take Hogg, and scrape him well for half an hour, and pray what does he prove to be? Why, a very ordinary common-place animal, in my humble opinion, as one may see on the longest day of summer, namely, the 22d of June. In all these lives of his, he keeps drawling and drivelling over his want of education. He could not write, he says, till he was upwards of twenty years of age. This I deny. He cannot write now. I engage to teach any forthcoming ploughman to write better in three weeks. Let Hogg publish a fac-simile of his hand-writing, and the world will be thunderstruck at the utter helplessness of his hand. With respect to grammar, is Hogg aware of this one simple fact, that he never wrote a page approaching to grammar in his life? Give him a sentence, and force him, at the point of the sword, to point out an accusative, and he is a dead man. Now, I ask you, Christopher, and other good people, if such a man as this has any title to be compared with Robert Burns. The Ayrshire Ploughman could write long before he was twenty. He held the plough before he was in his teens-he threshed corn at thirteen-all the girls in Coil were in love with him before he was twenty-some of them to their cost,-and, at twentyfour, he published a volume of poems, containing, the Twa Dogs, The Cottar's Saturday Night, &c.-works that have made him immortal. After all, he was not a great poet; but he knew what he was about. To hear Hogg and Burns spoken of in the same year, and written of in the same volume, is sickening indeed.— Some silly gentleman has done this, Christopher, in your own Magazine. Why, the idea of such a comparison is enough to make a horse laugh-it is enough to set the whole British cavalry into a guffaw. Come now, Christopher, and be honest with me. Do you believe that there is a man living who can repeat a single line of Hogg's? If there be, send for a metaphysician to him instantly. Cut off his head, and transmit it to Spurzheim. What the devil is his poetry, as you call it, about? Tell me that, and I will write a sheet in your Magazine every month gratis. Jamie has no ideas. For, if he had, are you so credulous as to believe that one or two would not have spunked out before now? Draw upon him at sight, or at six months' date-no effects. But I had no intention, when I took up my pen, to write one syllable about Hogg's genius, as it is called. And pray, what is in his life?-absolutely nothing. He has been in this world, it appears, fifty years, and his existence has been one continued bungle. But the selfconceit of the man is incredible. Lord Erskine is a joke to James Hogg,and often must he have a sore heart to think what the worthy world will do without him some twenty years hence, when he hops the twig. His death will be remembered like a total eclipse of the sun, no doubt; and the people about Selkirk will date any event according to its distance in time from the death of Hogg." I remember it well-it was the year of the national bankruptcy."-"Ay, ay-the year Hogg died of the cholic." Pray, was your friend asleep during the twenty years he herded sheep in Ettrick, and Yarrow, and Polmoody? How do shepherds employ themselves?-Of this he tells us nothing. Day after day-year after year, seems to have passed over his head in a state of mystification, and the honest man is no more able to give an account of them than an old ram, or his dog Hector. Now, all shepherds are not such dolts. Many of them are extremely clever, long-headed, sagacious, well-informed people; and in the present case, the wonderful thing is, that Hogg could have lived so long among such an intelligent class of men, and appeared in the world so utterly ignorant as he is. This is the view of the subject, which I maintain must be taken by all sensible people who read his Memoirs, and I feel confident that Hogg himself will be startled to find that it is the true one, if he chuses to clap his large, grey, unmeaning eyes on this part of the Magazine. Well, then-this prodigy tires of the shepherd's life, and comes jogging into Edinburgh; he offers his ballads and balderdash, at sundry times, and in divers manners, to all the booksellers in Edinburgh, high and low, rich and poor, but they are all shy as trouts during thunder-not one will bite. No wonder. Only picture to yourself a stout country lout, with a bushel of hair on his shoulders that had not been raked for months, en veloped in a coarse plaid impregnated with tobacco, with a prodigious mouthful of immeasurable tusks, and a dialect that set all conjecture at defiance, lumbering suddenly in upon the ele gant retirement of Mr Miller's backshop, or the dim seclusion of Mr John Ogle! Were these worthies to be blamed if they fainted upon the spot, or run out yelling into the street past the monster, or, in desperation, flung themselves into safety from a back window over ten stories? Mr Hogg speaks of his visits to booksellers' shops at this period with the utmost nonchalance. What would he himself have thought, if a large surly brown bear, or a huge baboon, had burst open his door when he was at breakfast, and helped himself to a chair and a mouth ful of parritch? would not his hair have touched the ceiling, and his under jaw fallen down upon the floor? So was it with those and other bibliopoles. It was no imputation on their taste that they, like other men, were subject to the natural infirmity of fear. No man likes to be devoured suddenly in the forenoon-and the question, in such a case, was not respecting the principles of poetical composition, but the preservation of human life. Baulked in his attempt at publication of poetry, Hogg determines to I set the town on fire. To effect this purpose, he commences a periodical work called the Spy, in which he proposes to treat of Life, Manners and Miller. This, I humbly presume to think, was gross impertinence. I have a copy of the Spy, and it is truly a sickening concern. The author makes love like a drunken servant, who has been * turned out of place for taking indecent liberties in the kitchen with the cookwench. The Edinburgh young ladies did not relish this kind of thing,-it was thought coarse even by the Blue Stockings of the Old Town, after warm whisky toddy and oysters; so the Spy was executed, the dead body given up to his friends-where buried, remains a secret until this day. Hogg looks back on this enterprize with feelings of evident exultation, ill disguised under mock humility. Just take notice how he glories in his shame! "And all this time I had never been ence in any polished society-had read next to none was now in the 38th year of my age, and knew no more of human life or manners than a child. I was a sort of natural songster, without another advantage on earth. Fain would I have done something; but, on finding myself shunned by every one, I determined to push my own fortune independent of booksellers, whom I now began to view as beings obnoxious to all genius. My plan was, to begin a literary weekly paper, a work for which I certainly was rarely qualified, when the above facts are considered. I tried Walker and Greig, and several printers, offering them security to print it for me.. No; not one of them would print it without a bookseller's name at it as publisher. 'D-n them,' said I to myself, as I was running from one to another, the folks here are all combined in a body.' Mr Constable laughed at me exceedingly, and finally told me he wished me too well to encourage such a thing. Mr Ballantyne was rather more civil, and got off by subscribing for so many copies, and giving me credit for £10 worth of paper. David Brown would have nothing to do with it, unless some gentlemen, whom he named, should contribute. At length, I found an honest man, James Robertson, a bookseller in Nicolson Street, whom I had never before seen or heard of, who undertook it at September, 1810, my first number made once on my own terms; and on the 1st of its appearance on a quarto demy sheet, price four-pence. "A great number were sold, and many hundred delivered gratis; but one of Robertson's boys, a great rascal, had demanded the price in full for all that he delivered gratis. They shewed him the imprint, that they were to be delivered gratis; so they are,' said he; I take nothing for the delivery; but I must have the price of the paper, if you please.' This money, that the boy brought me, consisting of a few shillings and an imand only money I had pocketed, of my mense number of halfpence, was the first own making, since my arrival in Edinburgh in February last. On the publication of the two first numbers, I deemed I had as many subscribers as, at all events, would secure the work from being dropped; but, on the publication of my third or fourth number, I have forgot which, it was so insubscribers gave up. This was a sad blow decorous, that no fewer than seventy-three for me; but, as usual, I despised the fastidity and affectation of the people, and continued my work. It proved a fatal oversight for the paper, for all those who had given in set themseves against it with the utmost inveteracy. The literary ladies, in particular, agreed, in full divan, that I would never write a sentence which deserved to be read. A reverend friend of mine has often repeated my remark on being told of this Gaping deevils! wha cares what C they say! If I leeve ony time, I'll let them see the contrair o' that.' "My publisher, James Robertson, 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 drank whisky and ate rolls with a number of printers, the dirtiest and leanestlooking men I had ever seen. My youthful habits having been so regular, I could not stand this; and though I took care, as I thought, to drink very little, yet, when I went out, I was at times so dizzy, I could scarcely walk; and the worst thing of all was, I felt that I was beginning to relish it." I write now, Christopher, to direct your attention to the next grand æra in the life of this extraordinary man, and let us have it first in his own words. "The next thing in which I became deeply interested, in a literary way, was the FORUM, a debating society, established by a few young men, of whom I was one of the first. We opened our house to the public, making each individual pay a sixpence, and the crowds that attended, for three years running, were beyond all bounds. I was appointed secretary, with a salary of £20 the smallest departure from good taste, or from the question, was sure to draw down disapproval, and where no good saying ever missed observation and applause. If this do not assist in improving the taste, I know not what will. Of this I am certain, that I was greatly the better of it, and I may safely say I never was in a school before. I might and would have written the Queen's Wake had the Forum never existed, but without the weekly lessons that I got there, I would not have succeeded as I did." in St Cæcilia's Hall, Niddry Street, Now, you and I have been together at meetings of this Society, called the Forum, and am I wrong in saying, that it was a weekly congregation of the most intrepid idiots that ever brayed in public? Hogg tells us," it was established by a few young men, of whom I was one of the first!" This is a gross anachronism. He was at this time an old man, of two score and up"he felt the wards. Here he says, pulse of the public," and gauged "precisely what they would swallow and what they would not!" Suppose, my dear Christopher, that you, or any other medical man, (you seem to have dropped the M. D.) by way of feeling the pulse of christian patients, should a-year, which never was paid, though I gave jack-asses at Leadburn-hills! or judge practice on the left legs of a gang of away hundreds in charity. We were exceedingly improvident; but I never was of the swallow of a convalescent young so much the better of any thing as that so- lady, by amusing yourself with feeding ciety; for it let me feel, as it were, the a tame cormorant? or prescribe toadowpulse of the public, and precisely what they ager, fat, fair, and forty, as if you were would swallow, and what they would not. James Stuart flinging oil cakes to the All my friends were averse to my coming Dunearn ox? The Public unquestionforward in the Forum as a public speaker, ably has a large and a wide swallow, and tried to reason me out of it, by repre- and a pretty strong bouncing pulse of senting my incapacity to harangue a thou- her own. But the Public would have sand people in a speech of half an hour. I had, however, given my word to my assoretched, scunnered,* vomited, swarfciates, and my confidence in myself being ed,† fallen into successive convulsions, unbounded, I began, and came off with become comatose, and died under one flying colours. We met once a-week: I tenth part of the perilous stuff that spoke every night, and sometimes twice the was both meat and drink to the same night; and, though I sometimes in- Forum, The Forum got fat and pursy, curred pointed disapprobation, was in gene- red in the face, with a round belly, ral a prodigious favourite. The characters under circumstances that would have of all my brother members are given in the reduced the Public to a walking skelelarger work, but here they import not. I ton. The pulse of the Forum was have scarcely known any society of young heard like the tick of an eight-day men who have all got so well on. Their pro- clock, 60 in the minute, slow but sure, gress has been singular; and, I am certain, when that of the poor Public would have people may say as they will, that they were greatly improved by their weekly appearbeen 150. The Forum heard unmoved, ances in the Forum. Private societies sig. what would have driven the Public for nify nothing; but a discerning public is a ever into the deepest retirement, the severe test, especially in a multitude, where cell, or the cloister. Why, in com See Dr Jamieson once more. + Once more. parison with the Forum, the Public has all the sensitive delicacy of a private person. But lest I should be suspected of exaggeration-who composed the select society of the Niddry Street Forum? Young grocers, redolent of cheese, comfits, and tallow-candles, who dealt out their small, greasy, fetid sentences, as if they were serving a penny customer across the counter with something odious in brown paper,-precocious apprentices, one of whom, in all probability, had made or mended the president's unpaid breeches,-occasional young men obviously of little or no profession, who rose, looked wildly round them, muttered, sunk, and were seen no more,-now and then a blunt bluff butcher-like block-head, routing like a bull on a market-day in the Grass Market, stray students of medicine from the sister-island, booming like bitterns in the bog of Allen,-long-faced lads from Professor Paxton, dissenters from every thing intelligible among men,-laymen from Leeds, and Birmingham, Hull, and Halifax, inspired with their red port wines, and all stinking like foxes of the strong Henglish-accent,-pert, prim, prating personages, who are seen going m, and coming out of the Parliament House, nobody knows why, or wherefore,-mealy-mouthed middle-aged men, of miscellaneous information, masters of their matter, all cut and dry, distinguished as private pedagogues, great as grinders, and powerful in extemporaneous prayer,-now and then a shrivelled mummy, apparently of the reign of George the II. with dry dusty leathern palate, seen joining in the debate,-stickit ministers who have settled down into book-binders, compositors, or amanuenses to some gentlemen literarily disposed,-apothecaries deep in dog-latin, and tenderly attached to words of six or eight syllables, such as latitudinarianism,-a sprinkling of moist members from mason-lodges, dropping in when the discussion is about half-seas-over, and finally, for there is no end to this, a few players and scene-shifters, (for on Friday night the theatre is shut,) assiduous in their noble endeavours to revive the study of Shakespeare, and making the Forum resound with screeds of blank verse, out of mouths as unmerciful as leaden spouts on a rainy day. Such is a most imperfect enumeration of a few of the component parts of the Forum, where Hogg learned to feel the pulse, and gauge the swallow of the Edinburgh public. "Here it was,' quoth the swineherd, "that the smallest departure from good taste was sure to draw down disapproval!!!!!!!!! !!!!!" No doubt, even in the Forum, it was possible to go too far, and Hogg was, I know, often hissed. It is said, that even among apes and monkeys, there are rules of good breeding, and that the better bred ones are often excessively irritated at the mews and chattering of their less decorous brethren of Ape kind. But the truth is, that Hogg never could speak at all in the Forum. He used to read ribald rhymes about marriage and other absurdities, off whitybrown paper, stuck up on a niche, with a farthing candle on each side of him, which he used to snuff in great trepidation, with his finger and thumb instantly applied to his cooling mouth, in the midst of the most pathetic passages, cheered by shouts of derisive applause that startled Dugald M'Glashan and his cadies beneath the shadow of the Tron-Kirk. He has no more command of language than a Highlander had of breeches before the 45; and his chief figure of speech consisted in a twist of his mouth, which might certainly at times be called eloquent. He had recourse to this view of the subject, whenever he found himself fairly planted, so that a deaf spectator of the debate would have supposed him stuck up in a hole in the wall to make ugly faces, and would have called for a horse-collar. Was that a situation in which "the smallest deviation from good taste would have drawn down disapproval ?" On the decline and fall of the Forum, James Hogg looked once more abroad over the world, and, his brilliant career of oratory being closed, Poetry once more opened her arms to receive his embrace. He wrote the Queen's Wake; and wishing to astonish some of his friends with a rehearsal, the following scene is described as taking place. "Having some ballads or metrical tales past me, which I did not like to lose, I planned the Queen's Wake, in order that I might take these all in, and had it ready in a few months after it was first proposed. I was very anxious to read it to some person of taste, but no one would either read it, or listen to me reading it. |