Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

HOW TO COOK A BLACKCOCK. 357
Blackwood was bold enough to bring out. " They
are excellent," Hogg says, " with the exception of
* La Petite Madeleine,' which to me is quite despicable.
To slight your old friend for such feminine pribble-
prabble ! Wilson's poem is most splendid, but I have
never been able to get straight through it, and I don't
think any man ever will." " Scott's agents are only
interested in one author in the world," he says, with
fine contempt for such a mistake. " I have," says
Lockhart on another occasion, " a line from Hogg
saying he has made you drop him out of the Maga-
zine : that the ' Noctes ' will not be tolerable without
his name, and concluding, ' The Baillie had better have
given me £500 a-year ' ! " Such was his idea to the
end of his life.
One of Mr Blackwood's numerous lesser kindnesses
to the Shepherd was a gun licence, with which he
supplied him every year, and which is acknowledged
from time to time by a present of game from Ettrick.
" Tell Miss Steuart," he writes with one of these
tributes, " that the blackcock must first be parboiled,
and then stewed in the hroo, to make him a real fine
dish."
Hogg's spirits seem to have been revived by the
publication of several short articles after this, and the
reception of several small cheques in consequence,
which made the life of the farmer more cheerful.
But unfortunately in the year 1833 another quarrel
arose, which was violent, and might have been final
but for the intervention of Hogg's faithful friend, Mr
Grieve, who acted as mediator between the justly
angry publisher and the hot-headed and foolish Shepherd,
a man to whom no teaching of experience made