The Highland monthly - National Library of Scotland

Social Life of the Bonders. 219
to the judgment of his critics, and it is the very qualities
which he has indicated, which, with all their defects in a
literary point of view, has kept them alive.
It is, however, more as a poet than as a prose writer
that Hogg is best known, and will continue to be so
though in both species of composition he has been a
voluminous author. He has boasted, with his usual frank-
ness, of his rapidit}- and fertilit}- of production. It is cer-
tainly also not a little astonishing to find, as he himself
says, one " wholly devoid of education, and in a great degree
. . . delivered
from ever\- advantage in life, and pos-
sessed only of a quick eye in observing nature," producing
in seven years no less than fifteen volumes, many of which
were of considerable merit, and one of such poetic quality
—the Queen's Wake—as to entitle it to a prominent place
in the literature of the countr)-. This fertility, considering
his original life and education, makes Hogg indeed a unique
character in literature, and in man}' respects undoubtedly a
greater mar\el than Burns himself It was, however, the
cause of the chief fault of Hogg's productions, whether in
prose or in verse—their prolixity. Not a few of his works
are disfigured by this defect, and, notwithstanding all its
beauties, it extends even to his best poem—the Queen's
Wake—a series of lays supposed to be sung before Queen
Mary, on her arrival in this countr)-. But there is this to
be said for Hogg—this blemish, as in many writers, is not
the defect of weakness, but the result of conscious power
and fulness, as is best seen in his ballads. Of all men,
Hogg had certainl}- the gift of song, crude and untutored
though its utterance sometimes was. He had a delight in
singing, and there is a joyousness in his verses and a freshness
which never forsakes him. The very making of them
was to him a delight, and though his literary adviser " often
remonstrated with him " on the necessity of revisal, and he
was often, he says, afraid of losing his countenanc
altogether, " I still held fast to m\^ integrity." That Hogg>
however, with early training, might ha\e been a highly-
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