ats; his narrative faculty was strong, and some of his
smaller pieces, from his sonnets downwards, are delightful things. "Abou
ben Adhem" unites (a rare thing for its author) amiability with dignity,
stateliness with ease; the "Nile" sonnet is splendid; "Jenny kissed me,"
charming, if not faultless; "The Man and the Fish," far above vulgarity.
The lack of delicate taste which characterised his manners also marred
his verse, which is not unfrequently slipshod, or gushing, or trivially
fluent, and perhaps never relatively so good as the best of his prose.
But he owed little to any but the old masters, and many contemporaries
owed not a little to him.

A quaint and interesting if not supremely important figure among the
poets of this period, and, if his poetry and prose be taken together, a
very considerable man of letters,--perhaps the most considerable man of
letters in English who was almost totally uneducated,--was James Hogg,
who was born in Ettrick Forest in the year 1772. He was taken from
school to mind sheep so early that much later he had to teach himself
even reading and writing afresh; and, though he must have had the
song-gift early, it was not till he was nearly thirty that he published
anything. He was discovered by Scott, to whom he and his mother supplied
a good deal of matter for the _Border Minstrelsy_, and he published
again in 1803. The rest of his life was divided between writing--with
fair success, though with some ill-luck from bankrupt publishers--and
sheep-farming, on which he constantly lost, though latterly he sat rent
free under the Duke of Buccleuch. He died on 21st November 1835.

Even during his life Hogg underwent a curious process of mythopoeia at
the hands of Wilson and the other wits of _Blackwood's Magazine_, who
made him--partly with his own consent, partly not--into the famous
"Ettrick Shepherd" of the _Noctes Ambrosianae_. "The Shepherd" has Hogg's
exterior features and a good many of his foibles, but is endowed with
considerably more than his genius. Even in his published and
acknowledged works, which are numerous, it is not always quite easy to
be sure of his authorship; for he constantly solicited, frequently
received, and sometimes took without asking, assistance from Lockhart
and others. But enough remains that is different from the work of any of
his known or possible coadjutors to enable us to distinguish his
idiosyncrasy pretty well. In verse he was a very fluent and an
exc