Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

HIS NAME NOT ENOUGH. 471
tion than his less educated and more roughly bred
competitor ; though Hogg was indulged and cared for,
with more toleration of his errors, and benevolence
towards his needs, than was ever experienced by
this sober and modest, if somewhat pompous, as Lockhart
calls him, type of the man of literature, whose
fate, when his special vein is exhausted, is often so
cruel.
A Httle longer and we find in him the disappointed
contributor, half offended, yet too anxious to recover a
lost position to permit himself to be offended, who has
begun to find his contributions only good to give ad-
ditional work to the carrier, as Hogg says in similar
circumstances :
—
Old Beompton, 10th Dec. 1833.
I wished to inquire if there was any change in the management
of ' Maga,' because the character of it I think much
altered. This notion, however, may be owing to my being of
late greatly more by myself. I am induced to ask the question
because you have returned so many MSS., some of them in
part published. In fact I am puzzled, because in giving my
name I thought Christopher North would have been absolved
from all responsibility, and it compels me to ask if the name
still is not enough to relieve you from the responsibility ? I
ask the question because among my papers I have found a
sketch of the Seven Years' War, tending to show how the
events of it gave rise to the superiority of the revolutionary
doctrines, which I think would suit you : but I cannot send it
at the hazard of rejection, for it would preclude me from offer-
ing it elsewhere. It would make more than a sheet.
One more word of that sympathy which, though so
moderate in expression, was yet, perhaps, more complete
between those two moderate and sober men
than between the younger and more fiery members of
the band and their guide, philosopher, friend, and