Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

320 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
Queen's Wake.' The particulars I have unfortunately
mislaid : but so far as my recollection serves me, the
sum realised was £240 : which, indeed, as the profits
on a small book of poetry,—well known as a generally
unsaleable article, and which was his first introduc-
tion to the world,—was comparatively a large sum,
and would, we think, dazzle a provincial poet now
but the age was one which, in the flush of a poetic revival,
read much poetry, and, what is perhaps of more
importance, bought it. Even at this beginning of his
career Hogg was not a young man. " I was forty," he
says, "before I wrote 'The Queen's Wake' ;" and he
had already had sharp experience of life, having been
a farm-servant, a shepherd, and a small farmer, one
after the other. At the time his first poem was
written he was a resident in Edinburgh ; but soon
after he was presented by the Duke of Buccleuch, in
memory of the Duchess, who had died a short time
before, with " the small farm of Altrive Lake, in the
wilds of Yarrow." The Duchess had wished to give
the poet a house, and this was the manner in which
her husband carried out her wish. " In the letter he
said, ' The rent shall be nominal ; but it has not '
even
been nominal, for such a thing as rent has never once
been mentioned." There was never a more pretty
mode of patronage, nor a more touching way of paying
regard to the wishes of the dead.
This gift enabled the Shepherd to resume the mode
of life that was natural to him, and one of the first
letters we find gives a very pleasant picture of the
household and habits of the farmer-poet, to whom his
poetry was not only a crown but a solid foundation,
meaning at this period of life prosperity and honour,
;