Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 9.djvu/48

312 you may write. I give him all the help I can, but he sometimes poses me. For instance, he came yesterday, open mouth, inquiring what great dignified clergyman had distinguished himself at Killiecrankie not exactly the scene where one would have expected a churchman to shine and I found with some difficulty that he had mistaken Major-General Canon, called, in Kennedy's Latin song, Canonicus Gallomdiensis, for the canon of a cathedral." This was ridiculous enough; but we suspect there are hundreds in Scotland who have passed through the High School, and, it may be, the college to boot, who would have fallen into the same mistake. This ignorance of Latin and history was not the only difficulty that Hogg encountered, for he found the Highland peasantry themselves very jealous about giving up their old tokens of Jacobitism to a stranger, fearing that they might be manufactured into a matter of high treason. But he persevered stoutly in his task; and the first volume of the work was brought out in 1819, and the second in 1821. To his industry as a collector was also added his own native poetical talent, for some of the best songs were his own composition; and nothing delighted him so much as the mistake of the Edinburgh Review, when, in its sweeping condemnation of these Jacobite Relics, it made a most favourable exception in behalf of Donald M'Gillavry the produce of his own pen. Hogg, who was wont to praise or blame himself as unscrupulously and frankly as if he had been speaking of some neutral person, regarded the completion of this work with no little complacency, and has said of it in one of his autobiographies, "I am sure I produced two volumes of Jacobite Relics, such as no man in Scotland or England could have produced but myself." Between the interval of the first and second volume of the Relics, he published, in 1820, his " Winter Evening Tales," the greater part of which he had written in early life, when he was a shepherd among the mountains. These tales, though written under such circumstances, are among the best of his prose productions; and none who read them can fail to be struck with the life-like reality and air of truthfulness with which they are pervaded. Let the event narrated be however absurd or impossible, the reader is compelled to swallow it; for while the author writes as if he were deponing upon oath, and descends to the minutest circumstantiality, he goes onward with such earnestness as leaves little room for doubt or disputation.

We have already mentioned the singular manner in which Hogg obtained his little farm at Altrive, upon a merely nominal rent, which, by the way, was never exacted. One would have thought that here, even in spite of the precariousness of authorship, he would have been able to seat himself in comfort under his own vine and fig-tree. But he soon showed that while he had too little prudence to be a money-making poet, he had too much genius to be a plodding successful farmer. He removed to his farm in 1817, and after building upon it a handsome cottage, he took to himself a partner of his home and his cares in 1820, when he had reached the ripe age of forty-eight. After his marriage, finding the farm of Altrive Lake too small for his wants or ambition, he took on lease the larger adjoining one of Mount Benger; but although the profits of his past literary labours enabled him to expend a thousand pounds in stocking it, he soon found that this was not half enough. He therefore encountered such difficulties at the outset as obliged him to renew his literary labours, and continue his dependence upon publishers. Commencing now the trade of novelist in good earnest, he wrote, on the spur of the moment, the "Three Perils of Man, viz., War, Women, and Witchcraft," a strange medley