Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

318 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
gave him a fictitious importance in that brilliant re-
cord, putting the most beautiful speeches into his
mouth, though sometimes, it must be added, holding
him up on the keen spear of ridicule for the amusement
of the world. But he gained much more than
he lost, and the Shepherd is perhaps the personage
who best survives through the mists which have
closed over that laughing company, half fictitious,
half genuine, a truly characteristic and individual
figure, with his head often among the stars, though
his feet are the devious heavy feet of a son of the soil.
His appearances amid the mass of papers which have
been collected respecting the origin and early history
of the Magazine are manifold : in letters innumerable,
but rendered of little use from the fact that they are
very often about money, and the shifts and scrapes of
his not very fortunate career ;
in songs, all, I presume,
published at the time, but sunk into deepest oblivion
now ;
in scraps of proofs, of manuscripts,—a chiffonier's
heap of rubbish, in which survive a few relics which
retain a likeness of the man. There is no want of in-
formation respecting James Hogg, for he himself pub-
lished an Autobiography, the quite naive and simple
vanity of which is more remarkable than the facts
narrated. " I must apprise you," he says in a prefatory
note addressed to Scott, " that whenever I have occa-
sion to speak of myself and my performances, I find it
impossible to divest myself of an inherent vanity."
The confession is made very complacently, as from one
who knows and feels that he has occasion to be vain,
and it is fully carried out in the pages that follow.
He had scarcely begun to rhyme when " I told my
friend, the E,ev. James Nichol, that I had an inward