Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

A DEAR RENT AND TWO FLITTINGS. 351
in and talk about it in some shape." One's heart
aches, and yet one can barely resist a smile at the
unconscious revelation. The debt is there, a very real
fact ; but the poor debtor is capable of nothing but to
"come in and talk about it." The dusty annals of
a publisher s office, the' waste heap of yellow manu-
scripts, letters, memoranda of the many times in
which a despairing writer—to whom yet it was so
easy to persuade himself that the talk would be effec-
tual, or the next contribution redeem everything
— :
came in to discuss his own circumstances with that
arbiter of fate, are full of such memorials. And
Hogg is always Hogg, whatever happens. " I have
been much to blame in writing so little," he says,
though, alas ! in fact the little was too much ; " but
I am the most easily discouraged being alive—whereas
blowing me up ^ will make me do anything."
If you but knew the confusion I have been in since I saw
you [he says in another letter], you would pity me rather than
be angry with me. The making up a dear rent from nothing
the confusion of two flittings (that of my parents-in-law from
the distance of sixty miles to this), their distress since then, the
changing of servants, wedding, washings, and sheep-shearings,
cattle-shows, fairs, sales, funerals, with all the [cares] of an
extensive arable and sheep farm at this season, so that the
truth is, if the loss of all my friends had depended on my com-
posing or even correcting three pages, I could not have retained
them,—not that I could not have found time for such a trifle,
but I could not have forced my mind into a frame for its
execution.
At another time Hogg expresses himself grateful
for some bantering notices of his publications in the
' : Noctes '
—
^ In the sense of praising him.