Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

JAMES HOGG. 35
rived." James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, had
already pubHshed a volume of poetry, and had been
heard of even in London. This son of the soil has
had a curious fortune. He possessed a spark of un-
deniable genius ; and certainly he had a distinct tune
and melody of his own among the poetical pipings of
the fields. But it fell to his lot to be caught up
from the borders of his forest into the company of
a number of men much more brilliant than himself
men who, without possessing his special quality, were
in all ways more able, more capable, of higher intellect
and infinitely higher training than he. The Shepherd
never was in the least the half- inspired delightful
talker which he appears in the ' Noctes ' : but he was
a poet in his way, an echo of the inspiration of Burns,
" trailing clouds of glory " from the inheritance of that
one great Peasant-Poet, who seemed in those days to
make it more possible to find poets among peasants
than in any other class. The Shepherd is the first
of the men with whom he had in future so much to
do, who came visibly into William Blackwood's life.
The beginning of what turned out to be a very long
correspondence refers to the publication of 'The
Queen's Wake,' and is addressed to Blackwood not
as publisher, but as trustee or executor of a certain
Mr Goldie, a minor publisher, who had died before
the book could be brought out. Hogg suggests that
half of the printed copies should be made over to him
on condition that he should pay for paper and print
ing. This no doubt was his simple way of interpreting
an agreement for half profits. " I am sufiering,"
he says, " a double injury by having my principal
work thus locked up from the public, it never having
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