Born, at Ettrick, Selkirkshire, 1770; baptised, 9 Dec. 1770. Employed as shepherd in various quarters till 1800. Managed his father’s farm at Ettrick, 1801–03. Made unsuccessful attempts at sheep-farming on his own account. Having by this time published some poems, settled in Edinburgh, 1810, to take up literary career. Ed. “The Spy,” Sept. 1810 to 1811. Presented by Duke of Buccleuch with the farm of Altrive Lake, Yarrow, 1816. Settled there. Helped to start “Blackwood’s Mag.,” 1817; became frequent contributor. Married Margaret Phillips, 1820. Visit to London, 1832. Entertained at a public dinner there; also at Peebles in 1833. Died, 21 Nov. 1835. Buried in Ettrick churchyard. Works: “Scottish Pastorals,” 1801; “The Shepherd’s Guide,” 1807; “The Mountain Bard,” 1807; “The Forest Minstrel” (mainly by Hogg), 1810; “The Queen’s Wake,” 1813; “The Hunting of Badlewe” (under pseud. of “J. H. Craig”), 1814; “The Pilgrims of the Sun,” 1815; “Madoc of the Moor,” 1816; “The Poetic Mirror” (anon.), 1816; “Dramatic Tales” (anon.), 1817; “Long Pack” (anon.), 1817; “The Brownie of Bodsbeck” (2 vols.), 1818; “Jacobite Relics of Scotland” (2 vols.), 1819–20; “Winter Evening Tales,” 1820; “The Royal Jubilee” (anon.), 1822; “The Three Perils of Man” (3 vols.), 1822; “The Three Perils of Woman” (3 vols.), 1823; “The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner” (anon.), 1824; “Queen Hynde,” 1825; “The Shepherd’s Calendar,” 1829; “Songs” (anon.), 1831; “Altrive Tales,” 1832; “A Queer Book” (anon.), 1832; “A Series of Lay Sermons,” 1834; “The Domestic Manners and Private Life of Sir Walter Scott,” 1834; “Tales of the Wars of Montrose,” 1835. Collected Works: in 2 vols., ed. by Blackie, with life by Rev. T. Thomson, 1865–66.

Personal

  I have had the most amusing letter from Hogg, the Ettrick minstrel and shepherd. He wants me to recommend him to Murray; and, speaking of his present bookseller, whose “bills” are never “lifted,” he adds, totidem verbis, “God d—n him and them both.” I laughed, and so would you too, at the way in which this execration is introduced. The said Hogg is a strange being, but of great, though uncouth, powers. I think very highly of him, as a poet; but he, and half of these Scotch and Lake troubadours, are spoilt by living in little circles and petty societies.

  I had no method of learning to write save by following the Italian alphabet; and though I always stripped myself of coat and vest when I began to pen a song, yet my wrist took a cramp, so that I could rarely make above four or five lines at a sitting. Whether my manner of writing it out was new, I knew not, but it was not without singularity. Having very little spare time from my flock, which was unruly enough, I folded and stitched a few sheets of paper, which I carried in my pocket. I had no ink-horn, but in place of it I borrowed a small phial, which I fixed in a hole in the breast of my waistcoat; and having a cork fastened by a piece of twine, it answered my purpose fully as well. Thus equipped, whenever a leisure minute or two offered, and I had nothing else to do, I sat down and wrote out my thoughts as I found them. This is still my invariable practice in writing prose. I cannot make out one sentence by study without the pen in my hand to catch the ideas as they rise, and I never write two copies of the same thing. My manner of composing poetry is very different, and, I believe, much more singular. Let the piece be of what length it will, I compose and correct it wholly in my mind, or on a slate, ere ever I put pen to paper; and then I write it down as fast as the A, B, C. When once it is written, it remains in that state; it being with the utmost difficulty that I can be brought to alter one syllable.

  Hogg is a little red-skinned stiff sack of a body, with quite the common air of an Ettrick shepherd, except that he has highish though sloping brow (among his yellow grizzled hair), and two clear little beads of blue or grey eyes that sparkle, if not with thought, yet with animation. Behaves himself quite easily and well; speaks Scotch, and mostly narrative absurdity (or even obscenity) therewith. Appears in the mingled character of zany and raree show. All bent on bantering him, especially Lockhart; Hogg walking through it as if unconscious, or almost flattered. His vanity seems to be immense, but also his good-nature. I felt interest for the poor “herd body,” wondered to see him blown hither from his sheepfolds, and how, quite friendless as he was, he went along cheerful, mirthful, and musical. I do not well understand the man; his significance is perhaps considerable. His poetic talent is authentic, yet his intellect seems of the weakest; his morality also limits itself to the precept “be not angry.” Is the charm of this poor man chiefly to be found herein, that he is a real product of nature, and able to speak naturally, which not one in a thousand is? An “unconscious talent,” though of the smallest, emphatically naïve. Once or twice in singing (for he sung of his own) there was an emphasis in poor Hogg’s look—expression of feeling, almost of enthusiasm.

  Scott … invited him to dinner in Castle Street…. When Hogg entered the drawing-room, Mrs. Scott, being at the time in a delicate state of health, was reclining on a sofa. The Shepherd, after being presented, and making his best bow, forthwith took possession of another sofa, placed opposite to hers, and stretched himself thereupon at all his length; for, as he said afterwards, “I thought I could never do wrong to copy the lady of the house.” As his dress at this period was precisely that in which any ordinary herdsman attends cattle to the market, and as his hands, moreover, bore most legible marks of a recent sheep-shearing, the lady of the house did not observe with perfect equanimity the novel usage to which her chintz was exposed. The Shepherd, however, remarked nothing of all this—dined heartily, and drank freely, and, by jest, anecdote, and song, afforded plentiful merriment to the more civilized part of the company. As the liquor operated, his familiarity increased and strengthened; from “Mr. Scott,” he advanced to “Shirra,” and thence to “Scott,” “Walter,” and “Wattie,” until, at supper, he fairly convulsed the whole party by addressing Mrs. Scott as “Charlotte.”

  I have seen him many times by the banks of his own romantic Yarrow; I have sat with him in the calm and sunny weather by the margin of St. Mary’s Lake; I have seen his eye sparkle and his cheek flush as he spoke out some old heroic ballad of the days of the Douglas and the Græme; and I have felt, as I listened to the accents of his manly voice, that whilst Scotland could produce amongst her children such men as him beside me, her ancient spirit had not departed from her, nor the star of her glory grown pale! For he was a man, indeed, cast in nature’s happiest mould. True-hearted, and brave, and generous, and sincere, alive to every kindly impulse, and fresh at the core to the last, he lived among his native hills the blameless life of the shepherd and the poet; and on the day when he was laid beneath the sod in the lonely kirkyard of Ettrick, there was not one dry eye amongst the hundreds that lingered round his grave.

  Hogg’s birthplace and his grave are but a few hundred yards asunder. The kirkyard of Ettrick is old, but the kirk is recent; 1824 is inscribed over the door. Like most of the country churches of Scotland, it is a plain fabric, plainly fitted up within with seats, and a plain pulpit…. Ettrick kirk lifts its head in this quiet vale with a friendly air. It is built of the native adamantine rock, the whinstone; has a square battlemented tower; and, what looks singular, has, instead of Gothic ones, square doorways, and square, very tall sash windows. Hogg’s grave lies in the middle of the kirk-yard. At its head stands a rather handsome headstone, with a harp sculptured on a border at the top, and this inscription beneath it:—“James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, who was born at Ettrick Hall, 1770, and died at Altrive Lake, the 21st day of November, 1835.”

  Hogg … had his joyous moods, seemingly without any reaction of gloom; with the help of “the sclate,” he composed with great facility, and had a dislike to corrections afterwards; his temper was sustained and equable; his ambition, though stedfast, was of a quiet character, and though baffled, as it often happened, in his purpose, he was never for a moment cast down. Surely there never has been any instance of the pursuit of literature under circumstances more untoward than those which the Shepherd so cheerfully encountered. Take, for example, the difficulties attending his first attempt at publication. Being appointed to the vastly pleasant and poetical task of driving a herd of cattle from Ettrick to Edinburgh … in the dreary month of November, he suddenly conceived the notion of getting a volume into print, but having no manuscript in hand, he tried during his walks to remember the verses, and as often as they recurred ran into a shop to borrow a stump of pen and morsel of paper to note them down. In this way copy was provided; luckily for his purpose, he found a good-natured printer, and an octavo volume, or pamphlet was produced in a week, with which he returned in triumph to the Forest.

  There was a homely heartiness of manner about Hogg and a Doric simplicity in his address, which was exceedingly prepossessing. He sometimes carried a little too far the privileges of an innocent rusticity, as Mr. Lockhart has not failed to note in his life of Scott; but, in general his slight deviations from etiquette were rather amusing than otherwise. When we consider the disadvantages with which he had to contend, it must be admitted that Hogg was in all respects a very remarkable man. In his social hours, a naïveté, and a vanity which disarmed displeasure 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, although 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 pretension.

  In the latter period of his life, when brought to mix with the most refined circles of society of London for a brief season, his ready adaptation of his manners to the company was absolutely marvellous. Never forgetting, and never obtruding himself when urged to a display of his talents, he so acquitted himself as to become an object of genuine admiration and interest to all who had the pleasure to witness these coruscations of genius.

  You will perhaps wonder to hear me assert that it was the simplicity and the single-heartedness—if I may so word it—of his character which rendered it to many so difficult to understand. At least so have I always thought. Men of the world, I mean simply of the every-day world, expecting to meet with one who, a poet, was yet in other respects quite of their own cast, could not understand why it should turn out so far otherwise, and much less could they readily comprehend the unassuming simplicity both of manners and language which constituted the cause of anomaly…. Nothing ever hurt his feelings so much as to hear one man speaking disrespectfully of another…. I do not think that he was apt to entertain bitter or unrelenting feelings towards any of his fellow kind, and this is how, I suppose, not a few took unwarrantable advantage of his good nature. Yet if dissatisfied with any one he would not scruple to express his sentiments as opportunity might serve…. He would not seek to alter your opinion, and most likely you have failed to alter his. There was a deep and earnest stamina of mental firmness in him after all.

  Thirty years ago many of those whom I now address knew the Shepherd well. We remember among the things of this life that are worth remembering, his sturdy form, and shrewd, familiar face; his kindly greetings, and his social cheer; his summer angling, and his winter curling; his welcome presence at kirk and market and border game; and above all, we remember how his grey eye sparkled as he sang, in his own simple and unadorned fashion, those rustic ditties in which a manly vigour of sentiment was combined with unexpected grace, sweetness and tenderness. It is now a quarter of a century since he ceased to be seen among us, and since a large assemblage of sorrowing friends bore him past these waters to his grave in Ettrick.

  In 1824 Christopher North predicted, in the ever memorable “Noctes,” that a monument would be erected to his honour. “My beloved Shepherd, some half-century hence your effigy will be seen on some bonnie green knowe in the Forest, with its honest freestone face looking across St. Mary’s Loch, and up towards the Gray Mare’s Tail, while by moonlight all your own fairies will weave a dance around its pedestal.” His prediction was verified June 28, 1860, when a handsome freestone statue, executed by Andrew Currie, was erected in the Vale of Yarrow, on the hillside between St. Mary’s Loch and the Loch of the Lowes, and immediately opposite to Tibby Shiel’s cottage.

  I likewise formed an acquaintance with James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, and was amused with his blunt simplicity of character and good-nature. It did not seem as if he had the slightest veneration for any one more than another whom he addressed, no matter what was their rank or position; and I could quite believe that he sometimes took the liberty, as is alleged of him, of familiarly addressing Sir Walter Scott as “Watty,” and Lady Scott as “Charlotte.” The Shepherd, however, was a genuinely good creature, and an agreeable acquaintance.

  Mrs. Hogg survived her husband for the long period of five-and-thirty years, but to the last day of her gentle life the recollection of the “Noctes” of that period brought back to her mind the bête noir that had made her pulse beat faster and her eye sparkle with a wife’s indignation. Was she wrong; or did it happen that the world, being wiser than she, detected the conceit and saw through the mask? Doing so they would know that the “Shepherd” of the “Noctes” was, after all, but a creation of the wild and somewhat jovial fancy of Christopher North, having little or no real existence.

  Hogg was essentially a kindly, generous, and warm-affectioned man, capable of attaching to himself friends of very opposite 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 happiness. 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.

  According to an old Border character who knew him in the flesh, James Hogg had no right to the title of Shepherd at all. “Though kind o’clever,” says this worthy, “he was nae shepherd, for the useless body let a’ his sheep get scabbed, and though he had his farm free from the Duke o’ Buccleuch, he made naething o’t, but was aye lettin’ his bills be overdue.” The old worthy is probably right, but we shall e’en let the title pass without question. It is something to have the admission that, though he was no shepherd, Hogg was “kind o’ clever,” and that he wrote “several fine songs,” which his countrymen have placed on a level with the best lyrics of Burns himself. His cleverness was, indeed, of a kind that is very rarely met with, even in the case of men of the highest genius. He was entirely an untutored singer, an uncultivated child of Nature, who certainly owed as much to his own industry and indomitable perseverance as to the inborn talent which he undoubtedly possessed.

The Queen’s Wake, 1813

  The specimens we have already given (of “Kilmeny”) will enable the reader to judge of the style and manner of the singular composition; upon the strength of which alone we should feel ourselves completely justified, in assuring the author, that no doubt can be entertained that he is a poet—in the highest acceptation of the name.

  “The Queen’s Wake” is a garland of fair forest-flowers, bound with a band of rushes from the moor. It is not a poem,—not it; nor was it intended to be so; you might as well call a bright bouquet of flowers a flower, which, by-the-by, we do in Scotland. Some of the ballads are very beautiful; one or two even splendid; most of them spirited; and the worst far better than the best that ever was written by any bard in danger of being a blockhead. “Kilmeny” alone places our (ay, our) Shepherd among the Undying Ones.

  The poem is unequal, and it could not well be otherwise; it consists of the songs of many minstrels in honour of Queen Mary, united together by a sort of recitative, very rambling, amusing and characteristic. Some of the strains of the contending Bards are of the highest order, both of conception and execution; the Abbot of Eye has great ease, vigour, and harmony, and the story of the Fair Kilmeny, for true simplicity, exquisite loveliness, and graceful and original fancy, cannot be matched in the whole compass of British song.

  “Kilmeny” has been the theme of universal admiration, and deservedly so, for it is what Wharton would have denominated “pure poetry.” It is, for the most part, the glorious emanation of a sublime fancy—the spontaneous sprouting forth of amaranthine flowers of sentiment—the bubbling out and welling over of inspiration’s fountain.

  After a few hits and misses in various departments of literature, he succeeded in striking the right chord in “The Queen’s Wake,” which was published in 1813. This stamped Hogg as, after Burns (proximus sed longo intervallo) the greatest poet that had ever sprung from the bosom of the people. It became at once, and deservedly, popular.

  Full of beautiful things.

  That one so ignorant as he should have written it excited the wonder of all who knew him, and gave it a distinction which readers of to-day fail to find in it. It was remarkable as the work of an unlettered man, but not so remarkable, all things considered, as a work of the period when it appeared.

  His songs will not bear comparison with the best of his master’s, and as a poet generally he takes much lower rank; some, indeed, in our day denying him all poetic rank whatever; but, without instituting comparisons where none are necessary, the reader may enjoy “the Witch of Fife” as an example of Northern wit and humour, well worthy of a place in any collection of humorous poetry. “The Queen’s Wake,” in which it appears, was first published in 1813, and became an immediate success. Its author was a born balladist, and the form of this effort exactly suited his powers. In the result he produced a work which can hardly fail to give him a permanent place in literature.

  There is a balance-sheet of the transaction between Goldie and Hogg enclosed with these old letters—by which it appears that Hogg received for the slim volume of poetry no less a sum than £245, a reward which a minor poet in our own day would certainly think no unsubstantial one.

General

  Unlike those puny productions of pastoral bards, which the injudicious flattery of admirers, incompetent to form a judgment, has so often obtruded on the public, his compositions many bear comparison with many of the happiest flights of the more cultivated geniuses of this truly poetic age. In almost every style of verse which he has attempted, and there are few which he has left untried, he has succeeded.

  Who is there that has not heard of the Ettrick Shepherd—of him whose inspiration descended as lightly as the breeze that blows along the mountain-side—who saw, amongst the lonely and sequestered glens of the south, from eyelids touched with fairy ointment, such visions as are vouchsafed to the minstrel alone—the dream of sweet Kilmeny, too spiritual for the taint of earth? I shall not attempt any comparison—for I am not here to criticise—between his genius and that of other men, on whom God in His bounty has bestowed the great and the marvellous gift. The songs and the poetry of the Shepherd are now the nation’s own, as indeed they long have been; and amidst the ministrelsy of the choir who have made the name of Scotland and her peasantry familiar throughout the wide reach of the habitable world, the clear wild notes of the forest will forever be heard to ring.

  A man of stubborn and graceful imagination—of unscrupulous manners and delicate sentiment; a man who taught himself to write with such labour, that he began his task by taking off his coat and waistcoat, but who produced his songs with such facility, that they seem to have presented themselves to him like a group of sun-touches on the prominences of his native valleys and hillsides. His life was one of painful vicissitudes, from his want of prudence, and of knowledge of the world.

  All the verses of Hogg exhibit that kind of imaginative awe which lives on the fruit and food yielded by Superstition. His images from Nature are all surrounded with the beings of another day: what an array of fairies, witches, bogies, ghosts, we have! He seems to transport his mind back to the time when every object in Nature was the home, and beneath the guardianship of some spiritual being; when there was a spirit in every dingle, and the muttering of some potent power in every gale: when Superstition was privileged to erect her gibbets, and kindle her fires in every village and town…. His eye had beheld, his soul had sported, in all the strange amplitude of nature’s vast boundless theatre. Whatever else he felt, the soul of the forest was strong within him; he wrote beneath the glare of its lightnings, and the gleam of its sunsets and sunrisings. The roar of its woods and waters was forever sounding on his ear; the snatches of old songs, the carol and the lilt of old wild lyrics, these were the pages of the book whence he gathered his ideas.

  Halleck ever held James Hogg in high estimation as a poet, and he once told me that few poems had afforded him so much delight as “The Queen’s Wake.” He deemed the Shepherd’s lines, written for the famous Buccleugh Border celebration, much superior to Sir Walter Scott’s.

  No Scottish poet has dealt with the power and the realm of Fairy more vividly and impressively than the Bard of Ettrick. He caught up several of the floating traditions which actually localised the fairy doings, and this, as he haunted the hills and moors where they were said to have taken place, brought the old legend home to his every day life and feeling. He was thus led to an accurate observation and description of the reputed scenes of the story, and of the haunts of the Fairies. These had received only bare mention in the tradition itself, and little more than this even when they had been put into verse in the older time. But all these spots he knew well; many of them were the daily round of the shepherd and his collie. The legends he had learned thus acquired something of the reality which he felt. Hence Hogg’s poems of Fairy are remarkable for the fulness, the richness, and the accuracy of the description of the country—of hill, glen, and moor.

  Hogg wrote certain short poems, the beauty of which in their kind Sir Walter himself never approached.

  The combination of rough humour with sweetness of purity and sentiment is by no means rare; but Hogg is one of the most eminent examples of it; all the more striking that both qualities were in him strongly accentuated by his demonstrative temperament. His humour often degenerates into deliberate loutishness, affected oddity; and his tenderness of fancy sometimes approaches “childishness,” or, as the Scotch call it, “bairnliness.” But with all his extravagances, there is a marked individuality in the Shepherd’s songs and poems; he was a singer by genuine impulse, and there was an open-air freshness in his note.

  The moving tales and strange legends from the fertile pen of the Shepherd, for generations to come, will help innocently to entertain the fancy of many an honest cottar’s fireside in the long winter nights; while the strange unearthly weirdness of his “Fife Witch’s” nocturnal ride, and the spiritual sweetness of his “Bonnie Kilmeny,” will secure their author a high place among the classical masters of imaginative narrative in British literature; but his appearance on the field of narrative poetry in the same age with the more rich and powerful genius of Scott, was unfavourable to his asserting a permanent position as a poetical story-teller. It is as a song-writer, therefore, that he is likely to remain best known to the general public; for, though in this department he has no pretensions to the wealth or the power or the fire of Burns, he has prevailed to strike out a few strains of no common excellence, that have touched a chord in the popular heart and found an echo in the public ear: and this, indeed, is the special boast of good popular songs, that they are carried about as jewels and as charms in the breast of every man that has a heart, while intellectual works of a more imposing magnitude, like palatial castles, are seen only by the few who purposely go to see them or accidentally pass by them. Small songs are the circulating medium of the people. The big bullion lies in the bank.

  Hogg deserved the approbation he received from his distinguished compeers. Scott probably understood him best, and invariably advised him well, receiving him heartily after a period of alienation owing to the “Poetic Mirror,” and acting as peacemaker when Hogg became exasperated with Blackwood and the magazine. Wilson had a real and deep affection for the Ettrick Shepherd, as the idealism of the “Noctes” shows, and it is to be regretted that he did not write Hogg’s biography, as at one time he intended. Southey’s honest outspoken criticism and commendation were as heartily received by Hogg as they were given, and Wordsworth’s memorial tribute strikes a true note of appreciation in crediting him with a “mighty minstrelsy.”

  What Hogg was up to this time he remained to the end of his days. A man with a poetic gift—one may almost say with a certain literary gift—but with no skill in literature. He was ignorant and confident—ignorant of the world and its ways, and confident of himself and what he could do. If Scott could write metrical romances, he could; if the author of “Waverley” could write stories, he could; whatever anybody could do, he could do.

  Though the Shepherd’s popularity among his countrymen has been wide and promises to be enduring, his work has received less attention than it merits at the hands of the literary critic. Much that he wrote is of little or no worth; his long ambitious tales in verse, “Queen Hynde,” “Madoc of the Moor,” and “The Pilgrims of the Sun,” have fallen into the limbo of the unread, and for them there is no resurrection. His defects are glaring; he is often affected and over-ambitious; he uses words with a pedantic ineptitude, a comic infelicity which it would be hard to parallel in the works of any writer of corresponding genius. Compare him, not to Burns or Scott—which would be grotesquely unjust—but to such a minor singer as Tannahill, and you find that the verses of the west-country weaver have a depth of feeling, a glow and tremor of lyric passion, which moves you as you are never moved by aught that Hogg has written. But he was a most musical songwriter and a master of the ballad; he had a gift of humour both playful and grimly fantastic; and in one sphere of work he has hardly been excelled.

  Hogg’s notes [Edition of Burns] are more amusing than instructive. Some notes were counted so personal or so improper that alternative leaves were supplied for substitution in binding.

  If Leyden surpassed Scott in versatility of intellect, James Hogg, with all his grotesque eccentricities, surpassed him in ultimate poetical quality.