life this Ettrick Shepherd really was--the Shepherd whom Scott not only
befriended with unwearied and lifelong kindness, but ranked very high as
an original talent, whom Byron thought Scott's only second worth
speaking of, whom Southey, a very different person from either, esteemed
highly, whom Wilson selected as the mouthpiece and model for one of the
most singular and (I venture to say despite a certain passing wave of
unpopularity) one of the most enduring of literary character-parts, and
to whom Lockhart was, as Hogg himself late in life sets down, "a warm
and disinterested friend." We have seen what Professor Veitch thinks of
him--that he is the king of a higher school than Scott's. On the other
hand, I fear the general English impression of him is rather that given
by no Englishman, but by Thomas Carlyle, at the time of Hogg's visit to
London in 1832. Carlyle describes him as talking and behaving like a
"gomeril," and amusing the town by walking about in a huge gray plaid,
which was supposed to be an advertisement, suggested by his publisher.

The king of a school higher than Scott's and the veriest gomeril--these
surely, though the judges be not quite of equal competence, are
judgments of a singularly contradictory kind. Let us see what middle
term we can find between them.

The mighty volume (it has been Hogg's ill-fortune that the most
accessible edition of his work is in two great double-columned royal
octavos, heavy to the hand and not too grateful to the eye) which
contains the Shepherd's collected poetical work is not for every reader.
"Poets? where are they?" Wordsworth is said, on the authority of De
Quincey, to have asked, with a want of graciousness of manners uncommon
even in him and never forgiven by Hogg, when the latter used the plural
in his presence, and in that of Wilson and Lloyd. It was unjust as well
as rude, but endless allowance certainly has to be made for Hogg as a
poet. I do not know to whom the epigram that "everything that is written
in Scotch dialect is not necessarily poetry" is originally due, but
there is certainly some justice in it. Scotch, as a language, has grand
accommodations; it has richer vowels and a more varied and musical
arrangement of consonants than English, while it falls not much short of
English in freedom from that mere monotony which besets the
richly-vowelled continental languages. It has an almost unrivalled
provision of poetical _cliches_ (the sternest purist