The Collected Letters of James Hogg, Volume 1, 1800-1819 9781474433846

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The Collected Letters of James Hogg VOLUME 1 1800–1819

T H E S T I R L I N G / S O U T H C A R O L I NA R E S E A R C H E D I T I O N O F

TH E

C O LLE CTE D

WO R K S

OF

JA M E S

HOGG

G E N E RAL E DITORS — DOUG LAS S. MACK AN D G I LLIAN H UG H E S

ii

T H E S T I R L I N G / S O U T H C A R O L I NA R E S E A R C H E D I T I O N O F

TH E

C O LLE CTE D

WO R K S

OF

JA M E S

HOGG

G E N E RAL E DITORS — DOUG LAS S. MACK AN D G I LLIAN H UG H E S

Volumes are numbered in the order of their publication in the Stirling / South Carolina Research Edition 1.

The Shepherd’s Calendar, edited by Douglas S. Mack.

2.

The Three Perils of Woman, edited by David Groves, Antony Hasler, and Douglas S. Mack.

3.

A Queer Book, edited by P. D. Garside.

4.

Tales of the Wars of Montrose, edited by Gillian Hughes.

5.

A Series of Lay Sermons, edited by Gillian Hughes with Douglas S. Mack.

6.

Queen Hynde, edited by Suzanne Gilbert and Douglas S. Mack.

7.

Anecdotes of Scott, edited by Jill Rubenstein with Douglas S. Mack.

8.

The Spy, edited by Gillian Hughes.

9.

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, edited by P. D. Garside with an Afterword by Ian Campbell.

10.

The Jacobite Relics of Scotland [First Series], edited by Murray G. H. Pittock.

11.

Winter Evening Tales, edited by Ian Duncan.

12.

The Jacobite Relics of Scotland Second Series, edited by Murray G. H. Pittock.

13.

Altrive Tales, edited by Gillian Hughes.

14.

The Queen’s Wake, edited by Douglas S. Mack with Meiko O’Halloran and Janette Currie.

15.

The Collected Letters of James Hogg: Volume 1 1800–1819, edited by Gillian Hughes with Douglas S. Mack, Robin MacLachlan, and Elaine Petrie.

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The Collected Letters of James Hogg V OLU M E 1 1800–1819

Edited by Gillian Hughes Associate Editors Douglas S. Mack, Robin MacLachlan, and Elaine Petrie

E D I N B U RG H

U N IVE RS ITY

2004

PRESS

iv © Edinburgh University Press, 2004 Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square Edinburgh EH8 9LF Typeset at the University of Stirling Printed by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin ISBN 0 7486 1671 3 No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library Recipient of a University of Edinburgh Award for Distinguished Scottish Scholarship

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The Stirling / South Carolina Research Edition of

The Collected Works of James Hogg Advisory Board Chairman Prof. David Daiches Deputy Chairman Dr Robin MacLachlan (The James Hogg Society) General Editors Prof. Douglas S. Mack and Dr Gillian Hughes Associate General Editors Prof. Peter Garside and Dr Suzanne Gilbert Secretary Dr Gillian Hughes Co-ordinator, University of South Carolina Prof. Patrick Scott Ex Officio (University of Stirling) The Principal Head, Centre for Scottish Literature and Culture Head, Department of English Studies Dean, Faculty of Arts Research Officer, Department of English Studies Members Prof. Ian Campbell (University of Edinburgh) Ms Nicola Carr (Edinburgh University Press) Thomas Crawford (University of Aberdeen) Dr Adrian Hunter (University of Stirling) Dr Christopher MacLachlan (University of St Andrews) Dr Anthony Mandal (Cardiff University) Professor Susan Manning (University of Edinburgh) Professor Murray Pittock (University of Manchester) Prof. G. Ross Roy (University of South Carolina) Prof. Roderick Watson (University of Stirling)

The Aims of the Edition James Hogg lived from 1770 till 1835. He was regarded by his contemporaries as one of the leading writers of the day, but the nature of his fame was influenced by the fact that, as a young man, he had been a self-educated shepherd. The second edition (1813) of his poem The Queen’s Wake contains an ‘Advertisement’ which begins as follows. T H E Publisher having been favoured with letters from gentlemen in various parts of the United Kingdom respecting the Author of the Q U E E N ’ S

vi W AKE , and most of them expressing doubts of his being a Scotch Shepherd; he takes this opportunity of assuring the Public, that THE QUEEN’S WAKE is really and truly the production of J AM E S H O GG , a common shepherd, bred among the mountains of Ettrick Forest, who went to service when only seven years of age; and since that period has never received any education whatever. The view of Hogg taken by his contemporaries is also reflected in the various early reviews of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which appeared anonymously in 1824. As Gillian Hughes has shown in the Newsletter of the James Hogg Society no. 1, many of these reviews identify Hogg as the author, and see the novel as presenting ‘an incongruous mixture of the strongest powers with the strongest absurdities’. The Scotch Shepherd was regarded as a man of powerful and original talent, but it was felt that his lack of education caused his work to be marred by frequent failures in discretion, in expression, and in knowledge of the world. Worst of all was Hogg’s lack of what was called ‘delicacy’, a failing which caused him to deal in his writings with subjects (such as prostitution) which were felt to be unsuitable for mention in polite literature. Hogg was regarded as a man of undoubted genius, but his genius was felt to be seriously flawed. A posthumous collected edition of Hogg was published in the late 1830s. As was perhaps natural in the circumstances, the publishers (Blackie & Son of Glasgow) took pains to smooth away what they took to be the rough edges of Hogg’s writing, and to remove his numerous ‘indelicacies’. This process was taken even further in the 1860s, when the Rev. Thomas Thomson prepared a revised edition of Hogg’s Works for publication by Blackie. These Blackie editions present a bland and lifeless version of Hogg’s writings. It was in this version that Hogg was read by the Victorians. Unsurprisingly, he came to be regarded as a minor figure, of no great importance or interest. The second half of the twentieth century saw a substantial revival of Hogg’s reputation, and he is now generally considered to be one of Scotland’s major writers. This new reputation is based on a few works which have been republished in editions based on his original texts. Nevertheless, a number of Hogg’s major works remain out of print. Indeed, some have been out of print for more than a century and a half, while others, still less fortunate, have never been published at all in their original, unbowdlerised condition. Hogg is thus a major writer whose true stature was not recognised in his own lifetime because his social origins led to his being

vii smothered in genteel condescension; and whose true stature has not been recognised since, because of a lack of adequate editions. The poet Douglas Dunn wrote of Hogg in the Glasgow Herald in September 1988: ‘I can’t help but think that in almost any other country of Europe a complete, modern edition of a comparable author would have been available long ago’. The Stirling / South Carolina Edition of James Hogg seeks to fill the gap identified by Douglas Dunn. When completed the edition will run to thirty-four volumes; and it will cover Hogg’s prose, his poetry, his plays, and his letters. General Editors’ Acknowledgements This publication has its roots in a survey of Hogg’s surviving letters undertaken in the 1970s, and funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. We are grateful to the Trust for this support, and we also record with gratitude the fact that a major research grant awarded by the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Board has made it possible for Dr Gillian Hughes to prepare and edit this volume of the Stirling/ South Carolina Edition. In addition, we are grateful for the continuing support of the University of Stirling and the University of South Carolina, and for assistance from the Association for Scottish Literary Studies and the James Hogg Society. Dr Anthony Mandal gave invaluable technical support in the production of this volume and of its predecessor The Queen’s Wake, edited by Douglas S. Mack. Volume Editor’s Acknowledgements Like so many other Hogg publications this one would never have appeared but for the encouragement and support of Douglas Mack. I am also grateful for the prompt and helpful advice of Robin MacLachlan, another of the originators of the Hogg Letters survey and associate editors of this edition. Peter Garside is well-known for his generosity to other scholars, and has always been most kind and supportive of my work on James Hogg, here and elsewhere. I am fortunate indeed to have had the benefit of Jane Millgate’s experience from her work on the letters of Sir Walter Scott: with her customary generosity she not only shared her mailing list of archives with me but a wealth of practical information and sound advice resulting from her long experience as a travelling scholar. Karl Miller’s careful reading of the text of the letters and my draft annotation saved me from some egregious errors and otherwise improved my work.

viii I would also like to thank Richard Jackson for his invaluable practical help and the generosity with which he has put his detailed knowledge of various Scottish archives at my disposal and indicated several promising avenues for further exploration. Susan Dryburgh cheerfully sent out thousands of letters on my behalf to libraries and other institutions all over the world in addition to her usual secretarial and administrative duties. I owe her and her colleagues in the Department of English Studies Office of the University of Stirling very particular thanks for all that they do to forward the work of the S/SC Edition. I must also thank Suzanne Gilbert and Janette Currie, both Hogg scholars of the Department of English Studies, for their help. I thank Helen Beardsley and Gordon Willis of Stirling University Library for meeting my requests for access to rare books and manuscript material, and for promptly and patiently answering varied pleas for advice and practical assistance, sometimes at very short notice. Any collection of letters must owe a tremendous debt to many librarians and archivists, and this one is no exception. I am grateful to the many librarians with whom I have had dealings in the course of my research for this volume, but would like to express my particular gratitude to Paul Barnaby, Janet Horncy, Mike Kelly, Donald Kerr, Sheila Mackenzie, and Virginia Murray. The staff of the Edinburgh Room, Edinburgh Central Library, the National Library of Scotland, and the National Archives of Scotland have smoothed my path on numerous occasions. I have been able to look at Hogg letters in North America and New Zealand because of generous grants made by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and the Bibliographical Society, and was privileged during October 2001 to be the Frederick A. & Marion S. Pottle visiting research fellow at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. An honorary research fellowship at the University of Manchester has allowed me to access the resources of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester. The support of Hogg’s descendants has been essential for this volume, and I am grateful to Chris Gilkison, Liz and Alan Milne, and David Parr in particular. The Hogg Edition team at Edinburgh University Press have been generous with their time and trouble, particularly Nicola Carr, Ian Davidson, and Douglas McNaughton. I would also like to thank the following friends, colleagues, and fellow-enthusiasts (by no means mutually exclusive categories): John Ballantyne, Jim Barcus, Val Bold, Ian Campbell, Margaret Connor,

ix Ian Duncan, Penny Fielding, Gillian Garside, Alan Grant, Hans de Groot, Camilla Hannan, Judy King, James Knowles, Kirsteen McCue, Wilma Mack, Liz MacLachlan, Jean Moffatt, Meiko O’Halloran, Murray Pittock, Sharon Ragaz, David Reid, Tom Richardson, Judy Steel, Rachel Sweet, Graham Tulloch, and Rory Watson. I wish to thank the following institutions and individuals for permission to cite manuscript materials in their care: Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand; The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Boston Public Library/ Rare Books Department; The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; The British Library; The Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library; The Duke of Buccleuch; The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and his Circle, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; The Directors of Coutts & Co.; Edinburgh University Library, Department of Special Collections; Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University; Hornel Library, The National Trust for Scotland; John Murray Archive; Liverpool Central Library: Hornby Autograph Letters; Liverpool Record Office; Longman Archives, Reading University Library; Massachusetts Historical Society; Sir Maxwell McLeod, Bart.; Elizabeth McOwat; National Archives of Scotland; The Trustees of the National Library of Scotland; The Trustees of the National Galleries of Scotland; Mr. Laurence Blair Oliphant; Pearson Education Limited; The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; Scottish Borders Archive and Local History Centre, Scottish Borders Library Service, St Mary’s Mill, Selkirk; Stirling University Library; Torquay Museum; University of London Library; James Hogg Collection, Special Collections, University of Otago Library, Dunedin, New Zealand; and The Wordsworth Trust. Hogg’s letters to Byron of 17 August, 13 September, and 28 October 1814 are reproduced by permission of Pollinger Limited and the proprietor. Hogg’s letter to John Clarke Whitfeld of 11 November 1816 is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Hogg’s letter to Thomas Pringle of 21 August 1818 is reproduced with permission of the Department of Special Collections, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries. Hogg’s letter to William Blackwood of [November 1814—May 1815] is reproduced Courtesy of Scottish Borders Council Museum & Gallery Service. The ‘Extracts of the Proceedings of the Society from the 6th of February 1819 to the 15th of May 1824’ are cited by kind permission of the Highland Society of London. I am grateful to the Society of Anti-

x quaries of Scotland for permission to reproduce the text of Hogg’s letter to Janet Stuart of 10 October [1808?]. The illustrations to this volume have been reproduced courtesy of Edinburgh Central Library and Stirling University Library. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary acknowledgement at the first opportunity. In addition to being available from the James Hogg Society the interim index for Volume 1 can be found on the Edinburgh University Press website (www.eup.ed.ac.uk). Please use the search facility on the website to find the book and follow the link to the index. Gillian Hughes University of Stirling

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii

The Letters of James Hogg To 1802 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 To 1805. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 For 1806 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 To 1808 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 To 1810 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 To 1812 . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 For 1813 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 For 1814 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170 For 1815 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 For 1816 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263 For 1817 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289 For 1818 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 For 1819 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397 Appendix: Notes on Correspondents . . 439 Note on the Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . 476 Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .485

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Illustrations Hogg’s letter to Margaret Phillips of 27 July 1811 . . . xxiii (Stirling University Library, MS 25 Box 4, Item 1)

Engraved portrait of Hogg by William Nicholson . . 238 (from Etched Portraits of Distinguished Scotsmen (1818), Fine Art Department, Edinburgh Central Library)

Title-page of The Ettricke Garland . . . . . . . . . . . 261 (from The Ettricke Garland (1815), Stirling University Library)

Engraving of the expedition to the Kirk of Shotts . . . 420 (from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 5 (September 1819), between pp. 672 and 673, Stirling University Library)

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Introduction I. Letters and Autobiography In publishing a collection of Hogg’s surviving letters the present editor is aware that she is moving into other territory from that covered by previous volumes of the Stirling/South Carolina Edition. In general those consist of works Hogg prepared for general circulation and for publication, and while they are personal, as all good creative work must be, they are not private. What Hogg wished his readership to know about his life he fashioned into an autobiography at different times, the final version being published under the title ‘Memoir of the Author’s Life’ in what was intended to be the first of a multi-volume collection of his prose fiction, Altrive Tales.1 This was his own interpretation of his life and literary career, the way in which he chose towards the end of his life to present himself to his readers and to posterity. In writing a memoir of Robert Burns Hogg explicitly condemns further and unauthorised intrusions into the life of a writer, even in the act of perpetrating one: So I am pitched on to write a memoir of the Life of Robert Burns! I wish from my soul that as many lives of that singular man had been written during his lifetime as have been of myself and then we should have known all of the bard and the man that behoved us to know for really this everlasting raking up of the ashes of the illustrious dead in search of collateral evidences relating to things about which we have no concern and ought not to know never will do It has always been my opinion that mankind have as little right to dive into the private actions of a poet as those of any other individual in society. It is by a man’s general behaviour in society that he is to be judged. [...] For what he has produced under the sanctions of his name to the public his character is answerable both to the existing public and posterity but no farther. [...] Let any man consider how he would like to have all his private amours, follies, political and selfish intrigues raked together and exposed to public view. Let even the most cautious and specious of our sex consider of this and think of the catalogue.2

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An edition of Hogg’s letters undoubtedly exceeds the limits of what a writer has ‘produced under the sanctions of his name to the public’ and represents an intrusion of the kind Hogg condemns as diving ‘into the private actions of a poet’. It is possible that this edition of his letters would not have pleased Hogg himself, but a public figure inevitably loses something of his right to privacy and even more so when he has historic importance. It is almost a hundred and eighty years after Hogg’s death. The friends and relatives to whom his letters were addressed and who are mentioned in them are also long since dead (which was not entirely the case when Hogg was composing his memoir of Robert Burns), and at this distance of time it is difficult to see who would benefit if investigations into Hogg’s private life were to be curtailed. Some of Hogg’s letters do indeed bring ‘private amours’ and ‘follies’ into public view, and it could be argued that only those aspects of his career which influenced his public role should be matter for enquiry. But if so, how are these to be distinguished—what in these letters shall be deemed relevant and what irrelevant to the career of Hogg the novelist, poet, and autobiographer? Hogg’s reputation will certainly be enhanced rather than diminished by the appearance of his letters within the Stirling/South Carolina Edition, which is itself an accumulating tribute to and exploration of one of Scotland’s most important cultural figures. Hogg’s Edinburgh is recognisably the cultural capital dominated in the 1810s and beyond by Walter Scott and Francis Jeffrey, but lit from a different angle and one which reveals a new pattern of players and networks of influence and association. The contribution of the Grieves and the Izetts, the McDiarmids, the Aitkens, and the Pringles, almost invisible in elite literary history of the period, are newly revealed. The strong links between Edinburgh as a magnetic centre and the provincial pools of talent from which it drew so much of its cultural capital and dynamism also feature largely in these letters. A treasure trove of information may be gleaned from them about the relations existing at this period between Edinburgh publishers such as William Blackwood and Archibald Constable and their publishing partners in London. Anyone interested in the history of periodical publications and their development during these crucial years will find much to reflect upon in Hogg’s attempts to establish himself as a professional literary man. Within this broad, sympathetic, and sensitive context Hogg’s letters supplement and enhance our understanding of his public writings. Firstly they form a commentary on his own Memoir by providing another, fluctuating, and at

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times spasmodic, account of Hogg’s life and character in his own terms and in his own words. They also contain vital information about the genesis and production of his published and unpublished literary works. In some instances they even embed the raw materials on which some of the published work is based, since when Hogg sent a shorter poem or a song to an editor of a collection or a periodical he frequently wrote it out within a letter. They act as social commentary, and provide important insights into the author’s significant relationships. But above all Hogg’s letters are wonderfully entertaining and well-written in their own right, the impress of his vitality and literary gifts. This is the last and best justification for their publication in the Stirling/South Carolina Edition. At the time of writing more than seven hundred letters have been located and identified, written between 1800 and 1835. The work of tracing and transcribing them was begun by Douglas Mack and Robin MacLachlan in the late 1970s, and Elaine Petrie and Gillian Hughes were recruited shortly afterwards to assist their labours and to contextualise them. At that time Elaine Petrie, with her expertise on ballads and folk-song generally, made a major contribution to the annotation of the earliest letters. In recent years Gillian Hughes has been the active editor of the Hogg Letters project, with help from many other scholars and librarians around the world not least from Jane Millgate (see the Volume Editor’s Acknowledgements). Deposits in major research libraries were well-known and easily identified: Hogg’s letters in the National Library of Scotland and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library have long been used by Hogg scholars, for example. Alan Lang Strout’s pioneering work in his first (and unfortunately only) published volume of The Life and Letters of James Hogg, The Ettrick Shepherd has been an important resource for half a century, particularly with reference to holdings in libraries and other institutions in North America.3 Hogg’s descendants in New Zealand have carefully deposited many family letters in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, and more recently recognised the University of Stirling as an important centre for Hogg Studies by gifting letters and other papers to the library there. Published lists and library catalogues have revealed the existence of smaller holdings, and thousands of letters of enquiry have been sent to libraries and public institutions around the world, sometimes to the puzzlement of the recipients. Personal contacts and visits have also been the means of bringing extra letters to light. Occasionally letters in private collections become visible in sale or auction catalogues and there is the excitement of trying to contact the

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seller and purchaser in order to obtain a copy before the letter sinks once more from view. Surprisingly, the present edition is the first ever systematic collection of Hogg’s letters. Hogg’s youngest daughter, Mary Gray Garden, includes many family letters in her loving tribute to her father, Memorials of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, and others were published in memoirs and biographies of Hogg’s contemporaries.4 Various letters have been included in histories of the important publishing houses who numbered Hogg among their authors, published privately by proud collectors, or by the contributors to various periodicals.5 More recently, Norah Parr’s portrait of her great-grandfather’s domestic life draws on and prints a number of his letters from the 1820s and 1830s. Recent editions of individual Hogg works also cite his letters as evidence in support of accounts of the composition and reception of the work.6 In most cases, however, Hogg’s letters have been regarded as raw materials for the manufacture of other work or as isolated literary curiosities. Until comparatively recently Hogg has not been generally regarded as a major author, whose entire correspondence is worthy of serious attention. Even Alan Lang Strout, who was clearly captivated by Hogg’s letter-writing powers, felt it necessary to apologise for the number of letters he included in his book even though he printed many only in part. He treated the notion of a complete collection of Hogg’s letters as essentially comic: Perhaps in some dull and deadly future (one may conjecture, not too seriously), when the Scholarly vies with the Comic Section in interest, a definitive Missives of the Ettrick Shepherd may be found worth publishing.7 Why should the publication of the complete letters of Sir Walter Scott or of Lord Byron be worthwhile, but not those of James Hogg? The time has come to take Hogg seriously as a major Romanticist and as one of the greatest of Scotland’s writers. All his known and surviving letters are now being carefully transcribed and edited (see the Note on the Texts, pp. 476–84 for specific details), and presented with full and respectful annotation. Inevitably there will be oversights and omissions in the present collection. The letters have been divided chronologically into three volumes to be published at two-yearly intervals, so that any letters brought to the editor’s attention after the publication of the earlier volumes may be included in an Appendix to the third. As the Stirling/ South Carolina Edition progresses our knowledge of Hogg and

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his world is constantly being refined and extended, a process in which the letters project will continue to participate. This first volume begins with Hogg’s earliest letters and continues up to the end of 1819 when he was, as his fiftieth year approached, seriously courting a wife.

2. The Pattern and Survival of Hogg’s Early Correspondence James Hogg was the second son of a small tenant farmer in Ettrick parish in Selkirkshire, probably born towards the end of November 1770 into what was essentially a peasant community. Reading the Bible was a valued skill, and a mark of social and intellectual respectability, but writing was probably less often practised in a society where members of an extended family lived within easy visiting distance of one another and where neighbours were also familiar acquaintances. Where a meeting could not be arranged, messages must often have been transmitted verbally. Paper was expensive, letter-writing mostly unnecessary, and the reckoning of his annual expenditure or the addition of a signature to an occasional contract was probably as much writing as the average shepherd or tenant-farmer often performed from year to year. It seems probable that Hogg’s family, like those of Thomas Hardy subsequently, were not letter-writers in general.8 Of the hundreds of surviving letters written by James Hogg in the course of his life none are addressed to members of his own birth family except for those to William Hogg and his eldest son, Robert. William, like James Hogg himself, read widely and had literary ambitions, while his cherished hope for a number of years was to see his clever eldest son a placed minister of the Church of Scotland.9 The bankruptcy of Hogg’s father, Robert Hogg, in his son’s early childhood and the consequent financial destitution of the family meant that Hogg himself received very little formal education. His school attendance was probably limited to something like six months in total, after which he served as a farm-worker throughout his childhood and adolescence until he achieved the responsible position of a shepherd, the best-paid and most respected category of farmworker. Clever, shrewd, and observant as he was, Hogg had hardly received sufficient instruction to secure even basic literacy. He describes his school instruction in writing as taking him only to the point where he had ‘defiled several sheets of paper with copy-lines,

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every letter of which was nearly an inch in length’ (Memoir, p. 13), and how as a farm-worker in his late teens at Willenslee he had forgotten how to write at all: I was about this time obliged to write a letter to my elder brother, and, having never drawn a pen for such a number of years, I had actually forgotten how to make sundry letters of the alphabet; these I had either to print, or to patch up the words in the best way I could without them. (Memoir, p. 16) He seems to have copied some of these forgotten letters of the alphabet by imitating the letters in a copy of the Shorter Catechism, and several years later when making his first attempts as a poet facility of conception was not at all equalled by mechanical proficiency in writing.10 Hogg describes penmanship as unaccustomed hard manual labour: 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 six lines at a sitting. (Memoir, p. 17) It is hardly surprising that there are no surviving letters from Hogg’s youth and that the earliest of them was written when Hogg was almost thirty years old. In weighing up the probabilities for letters not having been written or not having survived, the chances are that during Hogg’s earliest years very few letters were actually written. Those that were would almost certainly be thrown away as soon as answered, since the recipients would mostly be in similar social circumstances to Hogg himself—shepherds moving from farm to farm on a series of renewable annual contracts or small tenant-farmers. The transformative period of Hogg’s youth was his ten years’ service as a shepherd to James Laidlaw of Blackhouse farm in Yarrow beginning when he was nineteen years of age. His employer owned a number of valuable books and was willing to share them with members of his household, and Hogg was on affectionate and easy terms with his employer’s sons, with the eldest of whom, William Laidlaw, he formed a lifelong friendship. Alexander Laidlaw of Bowerhope farm in Yarrow was another congenial youngster with literary interests, and by 1794 Hogg had joined a literary club whose members met by turns at each other’s places of residence to read and criticise one another’s essays.11 It was only during his early twenties, therefore, that writing became a regular and habitual thing

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for Hogg. His earliest extant letter is to William Laidlaw, written after Hogg had moved from Blackhouse in Yarrow back to the next valley of Ettrick at Whitsunday 1800 to care for his aged parents in their little farm of Ettrickhouse. It was clearly important for Hogg to keep in close touch with his literary confidante, the younger admirer who believed in his talent and to whom he could describe the work he had been undertaking and his future ambitions. These early letters are self-consciously literary for all their idiosyncrasies, and the correspondence was probably viewed as educational on both sides. Besides the cost of paper to the writer, postage was also expensive in the days before the penny-post and paid for by the recipient, who would therefore expect to receive something of value for his money. Hogg’s letter to Laidlaw from Blairgowrie of 6 June [1800], for instance, echoes the kind of observations made in the Statistical Account of Scotland (1791–99), with touches of the Highland journey made in a previous generation by Johnson and Boswell. Hogg’s selfconsciousness about the act of writing surely comes from reading Laurence Sterne. Addressing Laidlaw on 9 January 1801 he writes the customary address of ‘Dear Sir’ and then reflects upon the natural pause that ensues, with ‘my hand writes these involuntarily, but for another word of this succeeding epistle, I have not yet consulted the dictionary of my brain, nor is there a thought or sentiment of it formed in embryo’. A letter about the difficulties of letter-writing is not as naive as may at first appear. By 1800 Hogg’s handwriting too is surprisingly well-shaped, firm, and clear, with none of the nearillegibility and hesitations that might be expected from someone who has only recently regained functional literacy. Despite their literariness these earliest letters nevertheless vividly convey a feeling of immediacy, the sense of a powerful and living presence, and a definite, distinctive personality. It is not exaggerating to say that Hogg’s life was transformed by his meeting in the summer of 1802 with Walter Scott, respected locally as the Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire and a published writer with excellent connections in the Scottish literary and publishing capital of Edinburgh.12 Through Laidlaw and through Andrew Mercer Hogg had been contributing to Scott’s ballad collection, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, enthusiastically realising the literary capital of the ballads he had grown up taking for granted. He and Scott shared an abundant energy, a talent for mimicry, a value for the landscape and legends of the Scottish Borders, and a genius for friendship. After purveying traditional ballads and an insider commentary on

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them to Scott, Hogg quickly adopted him as literary advisor, patron, and friend. Approximately two-thirds of Hogg’s surviving letters between 1802 and his career-change from Borders shepherd and tenant-farmer to professional literary man in 1810 are addressed to Walter Scott. In the section of the present volume headed ‘To 1805’, indeed, Scott is Hogg’s only correspondent. To some extent this is clearly misleading, the result of Scott’s careful and unusual retention of all or most of his incoming correspondence. When he came to write his famous biography of Scott, Lockhart expressed his surprise that, despite the relative position of the two writers and Hogg’s emotional and literary dependance on his more famous friend, Hogg’s letters to Scott had mostly been preserved while Scott’s letters to Hogg had mostly disappeared or been destroyed.13 His assumption that Scott’s letters might have seemed more valuable to Hogg than Hogg’s letters did to Scott is not unreasonable. However, at this period Hogg was an impecunious and largely unsuccessful shepherd and farmer, who had written some poems for various magazines and who had published in 1807 a volume of ballad imitations entitled The Mountain Bard that had been only moderately successful. Few of his correspondents would have thought it worthwhile to keep his letters for their own sake, and it is noticeable that those that have survived were written to gentlemenly antiquarians with settled and sizeable houses like Robert Surtees or were concerned with matters of business. Hogg’s letters to Walter Cunningham of Catslackburn, for instance, were preserved by the recipient as evidence of a debt and as documents brought forward in a legal action.14 His letters to the Edinburgh publisher Archibald Constable were placed by the recipient among his business archive, and his letter to Adam Bryden of 4 December [1806] concerned the leasing of a Dumfriesshire farm. W. Smith’s endorsement of the letter Hogg sent to him between May and December 1807 serves as a useful reminder of what has been lost: ‘This was sent to me in 1807 at the time the Shepherd/ had the farm of Corfardin Dumfriesshire/—I have only one letter in my possession left out/ of many I had from him’. Nothing at all survives from Hogg’s correspondence, for instance, with the elder brother of Allan Cunningham, whose work Hogg admired in the pages of the Scots Magazine.15 Nor is there a single letter from the period covered by this volume to his closest Edinburgh friends, James Gray and John Grieve. Whereas in Hogg’s youth the absence of letters probably indicates that few were written, the paucity between 1802 and 1812 almost certainly means simply that few of his friends preserved what he sent them

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for their literary as opposed to their business significance. The account of these years given by Hogg’s letters is therefore misleading, in that Hogg’s relationship with Scott is exaggerated by the effective disappearance of many other friendships from the record. The publication of The Mountain Bard in 1807 clearly extended Hogg’s reputation and his correspondence only to a limited extent, by bringing him to the attention of antiquarians such as Robert Surtees, for example. The two years or so following this publication were ones of increasing recklessness as Hogg’s farming ventures at Corfardin and Locherben foundered and his debts increased. He probably had less leisure for writing and less inclination to steady pursuits of any kind than even during the two preceding years he spent as a shepherd at Mitchelslacks farm in Closeburn parish, Dumfriesshire. During the first period his problems were chiefly the physical constraints of securing time in the intervals of hard labour and the necessary peace and privacy among his fellow-servants. He could not write during the autumn sheep-smearing because, as he told Scott in his letter of 23 October 1806, the operation continued ‘every lawfull night until a late hour and in a very few days always makes my hand that I can in nowise handle a pen’. In a previous letter of 17 March that same year he had asked Scott rhetorically, ‘how would you like to write as I do now amongst a housefull of brutal noisy servants but I have no other alternative but the fields’. The hope of publishing The Mountain Bard and of securing the money to take a home and a farm of his own bore Hogg up at Mitchelslacks nevertheless, while the subsequent feeling of hopeless enmeshment in difficulties during the two succeeding years he passed as a farmer in Dumfriesshire seems to have badly affected his literary output, including his letters. Writing to Scott in a self-justifying spirit on 26 September 1808 Hogg describes his carelessness as the result of ‘being engaged wholly in a hopeless job’. He later wrote of this period, ‘I blundered and struggled on [...] giving up all thoughts of poetry or literature of any kind’.16 Nor does Hogg’s correspondence take off at all for the period immediately after his removal to Edinburgh in February 1810 and change of profession from that of shepherd and aspiring farmer to that of literary man, though for diametrically opposite reasons. Hogg was now living at the locus of his literary activities and ambitions. There would be little call for him to write to those whom he could see by taking a short stroll on any day that he chose, and despite the kindly tone of several of the notices of The Mountain Bard it seems that Hogg was little valued as a poet beyond Edinburgh and the

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Scottish Borders. Some letters must have been written during this period to family and friends in the country—but perhaps not many, since Hogg recorded of his return from Dumfriesshire to his native Ettrick, ‘I found the countenances of all my friends altered; and even those whom I had loved, and trusted most, disowned me, and told me so to my face’ (Memoir, p. 23). Postage costs, too, were high enough to limit the number of letters that would be welcome to people in modest financial circumstances. The most interesting group of letters from this period were preserved because the recipient was flattered and perhaps already a little in love with the writer. Shortly after his arrival in Edinburgh Hogg met Margaret Phillips while she was on a visit to the Buccleuch Place house of her brother-in-law, James Gray, and began a courtship, or at least a flirtation with her, continued on her departure from Edinburgh by means of letters. These attentions to the Nithsdale lassie with the dark eyes and simple unsuspecting heart provide details of Hogg’s day-to-day activities at this time—speaking in the Edinburgh Forum debating society, attending the theatre, and scribbling away at his poetry. Hogg declared in later life, ‘I have liked the women a great deal better than the men ever since I remember’ (Memoir, p. 13), and the other significant correspondent of his first years in Edinburgh was also female. He had become acquainted with Eliza Izett through his friend John Grieve, and clearly both admired her as a woman and confided in her friendship for him. Hogg’s letters to her began in 1808 when he was in Dumfriesshire and she in Edinburgh, and were continued after he came to live in the city because she and her husband had by that time made their country-house of Kinnaird in Perthshire their permanent residence.17 A very sharp increase in the number of surviving letters occurs after the publication at the end of January 1813 of Hogg’s best-known long narrative poem The Queen’s Wake. Quite suddenly, Hogg became a well-known poet, to be taken seriously by the admirers of literature. His friendships expanded, particularly in England, and his correspondents now included Bernard Barton, William Roscoe, and even Lord Byron. Publishers such as the fastidious John Murray were interested in his future work and corresponded with him on terms of familiarity. Many more of his correspondents than before considered his letters worth preserving, and there are almost twice as many surviving letters for 1813 than there are for the two years preceding, and almost three times as many for 1814. It is clear from the details of those letters that Hogg at this point was generally regarded as one of Scotland’s leading writers. At this time John Wilson,

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for example, might more justly be described as Hogg’s protegé than the condescending showman and patron he was to become in the 1820s. In September 1815, for example, he requested Hogg’s good word with John Murray for his own poetry: If you have occasion soon to write to Murray, pray introduce something about ‘The City of the Plague,’ as I shall probably offer him that poem in about a fortnight or sooner. Of course I do not wish you to say that the poem is utterly worthless. I think that a bold eulogy from you (if administered immediately) would be of service to me [...].18 Well-known poets like Thomas Campbell called on Hogg informally in his modest and unfashionable lodgings, his table was covered over with notes of invitation, and he seems to have been on familiar terms with Francis Jeffrey, editor of the city’s outstanding critical journal, the Edinburgh Review.19 Hogg was one of the organisers of the Edinburgh dinner to mark the anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns on 25 January 1815, and a leading light of clubs such as the Dilettanti Society of Edinburgh and the Shakespeare Club of Alloa.20 It also becomes clear through these letters and their annotation how up to the minute Hogg was with regard to contemporary literature at this time. He read Southey’s Roderick, The Last of the Goths two months before publication, for instance, while on a visit to the Lake District, and his letters to John Murray show that in 1815 he was reading and commenting on successive issues of the Quarterly Review within a day of their arrival in Edinburgh.21 During the following years the emphasis of Hogg’s surviving correspondence slowly shifts more firmly back towards rural Scotland. His reputation appears to have been damaged when he followed up The Queen’s Wake with the ambitious Romantic narrative poem of The Pilgrims of the Sun in December 1814. John Murray, who had earlier offered the astonishing price of £500 for the copyright, saw the printed copies dubiously received by his literary advisers in London, and decided not to acknowledge it as a publication of his own, his name appearing on the title-page of the London copies only as William Blackwood’s agent for the sale in England.22 Nearer to home, Francis Jeffrey reportedly gave it as his opinion that ‘it is too stretchy and desultory’ and that public opinion of Hogg’s judgement would be lowered by it.23 Hogg’s hopes of succeeding as a dramatist were dashed when his literary advisers, both English and Scottish, found major flaws in the prototype of his drama The Hunting of Badlewe. Another poem, Mador of the Moor, was seen as an

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imitation of, rather than a challenge to, Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, and improperly had as its heroine a country girl pregnant out of wedlock. Early in 1815 Hogg’s literary powers were recognised by the gift of a small farm in Yarrow, rent-free and for his lifetime, from the Duke of Buccleuch. Although he was clearly delighted to have a permanent home in his native district in which to settle his aged father, the old house at Altrive was barely habitable and Hogg still spent weeks or even months at a time in Edinburgh staying with his friend John Grieve.24 Local events and national events seem equally important in his correspondence at a time when his attention was divided between literature in Edinburgh and farming in Selkirkshire. He was in the country, for example, when the news of the battle of Waterloo arrived in Edinburgh, and found himself outmanoeuvered when he sent his commemorative poem ‘The Field of Waterloo’ in to William Blackwood for publication. Hogg’s former protegé John Wilson helped William Blackwood to stifle the work.25 The anger expressed in Hogg’s letter to Wilson of 2 January [1816] surely rises partly from a feeling of having been publicly slighted by a man who had formerly been eager to cultivate his society and admire his work. On the other hand his poem ‘To the Ancient Banner of the House of Buccleuch’, Hogg’s contribution to the pageantry of local patriotism surrounding the Yarrow-Selkirk football match at Carterhaugh on 4 December 1815, was highly successful. Hogg’s standing as a national poet is clear from letters that reveal that he was sitting to William Nicholson for his portrait, and receiving a number of requests for contributions to song-collections and assorted periodical works. Hogg’s letters also demonstrate that with his move to Yarrow he became part of a local Scott patriarchy fostered by Walter Scott and headed by his patron the Duke of Buccleuch. During these years before Hogg’s marriage in 1820 William Blackwood appears to dominate his correspondence almost as much as Scott does before 1810. Roughly one third of Hogg’s letters for both 1817 and 1818 are addressed to his Edinburgh publisher, and these are better known than many of the scattered letters to other correspondents. This is partly a question of survival and and partly one of accessibility. Blackwood, at least after his first few years as an Edinburgh publisher, carefully kept his incoming letters and copied many of the ones he sent out, and these were subsequently bound into the familiar volumes now available in the National Library of Scotland. Hogg first made Blackwood’s acquaintance in the autumn of 1814, when copies of the third edition of The Queen’s Wake were

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kept out of circulation by the bankruptcy of George Goldie and Blackwood was appointed a trustee in the case. While he was absent in Yarrow Hogg gradually came to rely on Blackwood in Edinburgh for information and practical assistance of various kinds. In a letter of [June 1816], for instance, Hogg asked Blackwood for an advance on his profits from Mador of the Moor to meet his farming expenses, but the most significant bond between the two men was created with the founding of the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine (subsequently retitled Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine) in the spring of 1817. Hogg was ridiculed in later years for unfounded egotism in claiming a principal part in the creation of this journal, but his account appears to be more accurate than is often supposed.26 In his letters to Blackwood of 1817 and 1818 he acts as one of the publisher’s principal advisers, advising him to ‘keep hold of’ John Wilson as a singularly promising periodical writer on 12 August 1817, and sending poetry to ‘show the world that the redoubted Ettrick Shepherd is on your side’.27 At the start of 1818 he was entrusted by Blackwood with the delicate task of negotiating matters at Abbotsford so that William Laidlaw might be induced to give up the chronicle section of the magazine without the publisher forfeiting the powerful support of Walter Scott. When Blackwood was set upon by the editor of the Glasgow Chronicle and sought a backer in his attempts at retaliation James Hogg was the man he chose to accompany him.28 Hogg’s letters undoubtedly chart his closeness to Blackwood in these years, but also provide evidence that he was not entirely happy to be categorised as an author from the Blackwood stable. Two important Hogg publications of these years were brought out by John Ballantyne. The first of these, Hogg’s brilliant parodies of Romantic poets under the title of The Poetic Mirror (1816), appears to have been refused by Blackwood previously—a warning to Hogg to keep his options open. This was a runaway success, well subscribed initially and with a second edition brought out within three months, but even at the point of first publication Ballantyne urged Hogg to use the work strategically to ensure better treatment from Blackwood and his London partner John Murray for the future: Do nothing with Murray or Blackwood till the fate of the present publication is known. James who is of the most fastidious, thinks it admirable; &, assuredly, it exhibits more elegant versatility of talent than any of your other productions [...] the success of this work will bring Murray & Blackwood to your feet, & your terms will then be acceeded

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to, as presented by your own judgement, without being qualified by their opinion, or views of individual profit.29 Hogg clearly felt some satisfaction in refusing to make a formal acknowledgement of his authorship of this anonymously-published volume while throwing in Blackwood’s teeth the patronising and overbearing way in which he had declined to publish the collection: What are you insinuating about your guerilla’s and Grey Cats to me? You know if I had had any hand in such a thing I would have mentioned it “By the by Mr. Blackwood I have been thinking of publishing a few imitations of the principal living poets of the age” “O I dont know sir: that will be a kind of rejected addresses thing—I would not degrade myself by any such attempt” (in a higher and slower tone) “take my word for it, that will never do” You do not remember of any such dialogue I am sure therefore it is ungenerous to impute such a work to me30 When Blackwood afterwards saw an advertisement for Hogg’s forthcoming Dramatic Tales in the Edinburgh Evening Courant as a Ballantyne and Longmans publication he was clearly chagrined again. Hogg, feeling himself undervalued, must have enjoyed telling him that the publication of this work had been agreed with Ballantyne at the time when The Poetic Mirror was published.31 A similar and by no means unjustifiable resentment of the way in which his support was taken for granted and his work undervalued is also palpable in the letter Hogg wrote to the editor of The Scotsman on 17 May [1818] to thank him for an enthusiastic and early notice of The Brownie of Bodsbeck: And Other Tales that had just appeared in that newspaper. Hogg’s indirect reproach to his colleagues on Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (which never reviewed the work, despite it being a Blackwood publication) is plain when he says: I have had a hard and patient struggle for literary fame and have often wondered that no one of my friends ever thought of lending me a lift—It was apparent that I wanted it and I was sure my efforts took away all risk of disgrace from the attempt. At this time Hogg was often caught in the cross-fire between Whig and Tory publishers and literary men, having good friends in both camps and not wishing to quarrel seriously with either party. This was, however, an extremely difficult thing. When James Gray’s ac-

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count of Hogg’s life and writings was serialised in Constable’s Edinburgh Magazine at the start of 1818 it seems probable that both sides objected to a eulogy on a Tory writer in the principal Whig magazine. Two mocking letters addressed to Hogg on the subject appeared in Blackwood’s and the series was apparently discontinued on Constable’s instruction on the grounds that Hogg was a known adherent of the rival magazine.32 It was not in Hogg’s interest to fall entirely into the hands of either party if only it was possible for him to avoid it. His pleasure in the renewal of a friendly intercourse with the rival Whig publisher Archibald Constable, evident in his letter of 30 October 1818, was probably underpinned by a growing sense of being at once appropriated and undervalued by William Blackwood and by a wish to keep open the possibility of taking his work elsewhere in case of need. The Edinburgh polarisation of Whig and Tory, so deeply antipathetic to Hogg and so limiting to his wider ambitions and interests, is a reflection of wider cultural and political developments within Britain, and indeed Europe, during the period covered by this volume. Hogg’s periodical The Spy was produced within the context of a protracted war with France that had lasted for most of his adult life and generated various anxieties not only about invasion from without Britain but also about the hidden enemy, the spies and subversives, within. After the triumphant and heroic conclusion of Waterloo attention was redirected toward political and social conditions within Britain itself. Napoleon’s promotion and fostering of men of talent and enterprise from very varied social backgrounds encouraged those like them to question the old order of social deference in Britain and to demand a stake in the country for which they had fought and suffered during the recent conflict. Agricultural prices, stimulated by the conflict, dropped, and returning soldiers found that employment and homes were not necessarily there to reward their heroism. The years covered by the present volume are those not only of Waterloo but of Peterloo, when soldiers opened fire at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester on a crowd of men, women, and children, unarmed and dressed in their Sunday clothes, who had come together to hear the celebrated Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt. This political background receives little overt comment in Hogg’s letters, but it inevitably colours his world and influences his ambitions and his prospects. He was himself a fair example of the man of talent and energy from outside the social elite who nevertheless wanted to make a place for himself within the literary establishment. Hogg’s letters to a variety of correspondents indicate how much

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his attention was occupied during these years by song-writing and song-collecting, some of it overtly political and some not. Writing to George Thomson he is self-consciously treading in the footsteps of his role-model Robert Burns as well as engaging in Scottish triumphalism with songs like ‘Bonny Laddie, Highland Laddie’, published subsequently as ‘Where got ye that Siller Moon’. There are also important letters to John Wallace, Peter Buchan, George Thomson, and John Steuart of Dalguise about the preparation of Hogg’s two-volume Jacobite Relics of Scotland, several references to Hogg’s own collection of traditional Border tunes, and a revealing letter to the composer W. E. Heather of 1 April 1818 about music and his own song-collections A Border Garland and A Selection of German Hebrew Melodies. Hogg’s letters increasingly describe the country world of Yarrow as his home. They provide many details of leisure interests such as sailing and hare-coursing, visits to and from his friend John Grieve (now spending his summers in poor health at Cacrabank in Ettrick), and acts of neighbourly kindness, such as one to put a lame shepherd’s son named James Telfer in the way of earning a livelihood.33 During 1818 his new stone-built cottage was gradually being built at Altrive, making it a more attractive and important residence than it had been for Hogg previously. Hogg’s proposal of marriage to Margaret Phillips during the following year was perhaps not unconnected with the fact that he now had a permanent home and a modern house to which he could welcome a wife. Margaret Phillips is Hogg’s most significant correspondent during the second half of 1819. His serious and distinctly edgy and anxious courtship of her makes it more and more clear that Hogg sees Altrive as his future permanent residence and that he looks forward to the stability of marriage as an enabling background to his career as a writer. On 7 September 1819, for instance, he wrote: I think the sooner we are married the better we are both losing our time and doing no good to ourselves either in a spiritual or temporal point of view and I am certain if I had you home I would be enabled to do much more good in my literary pursuits I have much in hand but am doing very little because every one that comes in servant traveller or neighbour takes me off and I would leave all these to you and pursue my studies. I am pondering often about these things and you have always a share of my musings. By the end of 1819 Hogg’s life had shifted away from politically-

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riven literary Edinburgh and back to Selkirkshire again, and was about to become more settled and domestic, with his establishment at Altrive firmly at its centre.

3. Critic and Author Particularly during the years from 1810 onwards, when Hogg was either living permanently in Edinburgh or making extended visits to the city, his letters provide vivid pictures of the reception of various literary works, and pithy and emphatic expressions of his personal assessments of them. Edinburgh was a publishing centre of European importance and Hogg’s letters portray its energy and power at this period. Besides the obvious players (Archibald Constable and his Edinburgh Review, William Blackwood and his new magazine) Hogg’s letters trace the emergence and submergence of new and sometimes ephemeral publishers and periodicals such as George Goldie, Oliver & Boyd, the Lanark-based Clydesdale Magazine and the Literary and Statistical Magazine of Scotland, the constituency for which was intended to be very much the educated man and woman of modest social and financial background who had formerly contributed to Hogg’s essay-periodical The Spy. A fascinating depiction of the relations between Edinburgh and London in publishing terms emerges from the present volume. Edinburgh magazines are produced, for instance, in time to be shipped south and go on sale with their London competitors on the ‘magazine day’ there of the first of the month. The advent of London periodicals and publications was regularly advertised in the Edinburgh newspapers, and it was a point of honour among writers like Hogg to have the earliest copies of the poems of Lord Byron or the latest issue of the prestigious Quarterly Review. Hogg would note and often read the latest publications in the shops of the city’s rival booksellers. Here, for instance, is his account of the reception of Scott’s Marmion as given to the author on 2 May 1808, when Hogg was visiting Edinburgh some two months after first publication: I get a lesson on Marmion every day in Constables and until I get through it the news-papers will not suffer sore by my perusal. I heard two gentleman [sic] reading with great glee and much laughter several sheets of a parody upon part of it yesterday which they gave me to understand would be published. The verse seemed not at all contemptible but the

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matter bore every mark of malice and envy There were 240 copies of Marmion sold in constables shop yesterday forenoon. Hogg is both observer and participant, the unsuccessful Dumfriesshire farmer and little-known poet counting the copies of his famous friend’s famous poem sold, while reading in instalments the new and absorbing work he is too impoverished to purchase himself. His enthusiastic absorption in Scott’s poem to the neglect of the newspapers is contrasted with the malicious concentration of the parodists or their adherents. The attention of friend, enemies, shop-assistant (and Hogg as reflecting letter-writer) is all focused on Scott. Hogg’s remarks on Scott’s writings and his close observation of Scott as an author is a noticeable feature of the letters in this volume. He comments variously on Scott’s narrative poems and shows himself an attentive reader, objecting for example, to the imprecision of a particular passage in The Lay of the Last Minstrel in his letter to Scott himself of 18 April [1806], and remarking of Marmion, ‘You gave the truest picture of your manner of writing in the introduction to Mr. Erskine that ever was given’.34 Hogg seems to have valued Scott particularly as a Scottish poet. In the concluding section of The Queen’s Wake (1813) he reproaches Scott for being ‘of change enamoured’ and for taking the poetic harp ‘to other kingdoms’, asserting, ‘That harp he never more shall see, | Unless ’mong Scotland’s hills with me’.35 Occasionally Hogg clearly felt that Scott in appealing to an English book-buying public betrayed his Scottish roots. Commenting on The Lord of the Isles, for instance, in a postscript to his letter to John Ballantyne of [5–7 January 1815] Hogg’s evident enjoyment is damped not only by Scott’s introduction of seemingly irrelevant female characters but also by his attitude to the central event of the Battle of Bannockburn: I think it is the most spirited poem ever Scott wrote—He has availed himself of his peculiar forte, a kind of easy elastick rapidity which never once flags from beginning to end. It is a pity that the tale should be again butched the two females are a mere clog upon it, and no one natural occurrence connected with them takes place—I likewise expected some finer bursts of feeling with regard to Scottish independence— the coaxing apology to England is below any Scot to have uttered The charge is repeated in his letter to the London publisher John

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Murray of 18 January, in which he reports that ‘the Scots are chagrined at the fear he has shown of giving offence to the English in his description of the final battle and they maintain that he is himself the English bard who was taken captive there and compelled to celebrate the Scotish victory’. A less than favourable review of Guy Mannering in Murray’s prestigious Quarterly Review evokes national as well as personal defensiveness of Scott, backed by a charge of ingratitude from his correspondent (who was the review’s proprietor). The review is not only ‘ignorant and absurd’, Hogg declares, but also ‘contrary to the feelings of a whole nation’, adding ‘of all the men in Scotland, Scott has been the most strenous supporter of the character of your Miscellany as excellent’.36 Several of Hogg’s criticisms of Scott’s writing occur in his letters to Lord Byron, perhaps as part of Hogg’s mental realignment of Byron as a predominantly Scottish poet, perhaps as a reminder to England’s most famous writer of the best-known writer of his own land, and almost certainly as a demonstration to Byron of his own closeness to the centre of Edinburgh literary life. There is a hint of the imminent publication of Waverley in Edinburgh in Hogg’s remark of [30 June] 1814 that Scott seemed busy the previous day and that ‘in a short time he will produce something that will outdo any of his former works’, followed up a month later with his own remark that ‘with regard to the author [of Waverley] there is not and cannot be a doubt remaining [...] that the whole structure of mind should so exactly coincide in two distinct individuals is not in nature’. In endorsement of Byron’s praise Hogg adds ‘I like Waverly exceedingly and never was more diverted than by some pictures there of Scottish manners and I am much pleased to hear you commend it and more to find that you are half a Scotsman’. 37 Hogg wanted to write periodical reviews of both Guy Mannering and Rob Roy, and it is a matter of regret that his offers to Murray and to Blackwood were not accepted.38 The poetry of Byron was also remarked upon by Hogg in his letters. In a letter to the author of Lara himself Hogg quizzes the author about its careless plotting compared with its ‘harmony of numbers’: I have been extremely puzzled to find out who Sir Ezzelin is sometimes I have judged him to be some sea captain at others Medora’s uncle or parent from whom the Corsair had stole her but I have at last pleased myself by concluding that Lord Byron does not know himself 39 Having urged Byron in this letter to take ‘a review of your native

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mountains’ Hogg must have been delighted on reading The Siege of Corinth subsequently to detect something ‘which convinces me that you have loved my own stile of poetry better than you ever acknowledged to me’, while reattributing his own earlier opinion to others that ‘some of the people here complain of the inadequacy of the tales to the poetry’.40 Elsewhere Hogg regretted that Byron should not ‘delineate some of the benevolent and pleasing characters of human life’, commenting that the ladies ‘regard you as a kind of Jagernaut’. In view of the sensational amorousness of Byron’s poetry and, indeed, of his life Hogg was greatly amused by rumours in the month preceding Byron’s marriage to Miss Milbanke that ‘he was very busy writing godly Psalms to be sung in congregations and fa