f
an old Border family. Miss Stoddart tells a painful tale of an aged
Miss Helen who burned family papers because she thought she was
bewitched by the seals and decorated initials. Similar follies are
reported of a living old lady, on whose hearth, after a night of
destruction, was once found the impression of a seal of Mary of
Modena. I could give only too good a guess at the _provenance_ of
_those_ papers, but nobody can interfere. Beyond 1500 the family
memories rely on tradition. The ancestors owned lands in the Forest of
Ettrick, and Williamhope, on the Tweed hard by Ashestiel. On the
Glenkinnon burn, celebrated by Scott, they hid the prophets of the
Covenant "by fifties in a cave." One Williamhope is said to have been
out at Drumclog, or, perhaps, Bothwell Brig. This laird, of enormous
strength, was called the Beetle of Yarrow, and was a friend of Murray
of Philiphaugh. His son, in the Fifteen, was out on the Hanoverian
side, which was _not_ in favour with the author of _The Death-Wake_.
He married a daughter of Veitch of The Glen, now the property of Sir
Charles Tennant. In the next generation but one, the Stoddarts sold
their lands and took to commerce, while the poet's father won great
distinction in the Navy. The great-great-grandfather of the poet
married a Miss Muir of Anniston, the family called cousins (on which
side of the blanket I know not) with Robert II. of Scotland, and, by
another line, were as near as in the sixth degree of James III.

As a schoolboy, Mr. Stoddart was always rhyming of goblin, ghost,
fairy, and all Sir Walter's themes. At Edinburgh University he was a
pupil of Christopher North (John Wilson), who pooh-poohed _The
Death-Wake_ in _Blackwood_. He also knew Aytoun, Professor Ferrier, De
Quincey, Hartley Coleridge, and Hogg, and was one of the first guests
of Tibbie Sheils, on the spit of land between St. Mary's and the Loch
of the Lowes. In verses of this period (1827) Miss Stoddart detects
traces of Keats and Byron, but the lines quoted are much better in
_technique_ than Byron usually wrote.

The summer of 1830 Mr. Stoddart passed in Hogg's company on Yarrow,
and early in 1831 he published _The Death-Wake_. There is no trace of
James Hogg in the poem, which, to my mind, is perfectly original.
Wilson places it "between the weakest of Shelley and the strongest of
Barry Cornwall." It is really nothing but a breath of the spirit of
romance, touching an instrument not wholly out of tune