d to think of
him. I know that poets have a privilege of conceit, and that those who
are not poets sometimes assume it; but it is, after all, a sorry
quality by which to win the world's esteem; and when death closes the
record, it is apt to insure a large debit against the dead man.

It may not be commonly known that the Ettrick Shepherd was an
agricultural author, and wrote "Hogg on Sheep," for which, as he tells
us, he received the sum of eighty-six pounds. It is an octavo book, and
relates to the care, management, and diseases of the black-faced
mountain-breed, of which alone he was cognizant. It had never a great
reputation; and I think the sheep-farmers of the Cheviots were disposed
to look with distrust upon the teachings of a shepherd who supped with
"lords" at Abbotsford, and whose best venture in verse was in "The
Queen's Wake." A British agricultural author, speaking of him in a
pitiful way, says,--"He passed years of busy authorship, and encountered
_the usual difficulties of that penurious mode of life_."[32]

This is good; it is as good as anything of Hogg's.

I approach the name of Mr. Loudon, the author of the Encyclopaedias of
Gardening and Agriculture, with far more of respect. If nothing else in
him laid claim to regard, his industry, his earnestness, his
indefatigable labor in aid of all that belonged to the progress of
British gardening or farming, would demand it. I take a pride, too, in
saying, that, notwithstanding his literary labors, he was successful as
a farmer, during the short period of his farm-holding.

Mr. Loudon was a Scotchman by birth, was educated in Edinburgh, and was
for a time under the tutelage of Mr. Dickson, the famous nurseryman of
Leith-Walk. Early in the present century he made his first appearance in
London,--published certain papers on the laying-out of the public
squares of the metropolis, and shortly after was employed by the Earl of
Mansfield in the arrangement of the palace-gardens at Scone. In 1813 and
'14 he travelled on the Continent very widely, making the gardens of
most repute the special objects of his study; and in 1822 he published
his "Encyclopaedia of Gardening"; that of Agriculture followed shortly
after, and his book of Rural Architecture in 1833. But these labors,
enormous as they were, had interludes of other periodical work, and were
crowned at last by his _magnum opus_, the "Arboretum." A man of only
ordinary nerve and diligence would have taken a te