Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/421

 JAMES HOGG 405 "whom I believed to be greatly delighted with my strains. At all events, they never complained, which the biped part of my neighbours did frequently, to my pity and utter indignation." At length, having passed the stage of farm drudge of all work, he arrived at the dignity of shepherd to Laidlaw of Willenslee, and here, in his eighteenth year, got his first perusal of Allan Ramsay's " Gentle Shepherd " and Blind Harry's " Life and. Adventures of Sir William Wallace," as modernised by Hamilton of Gilbertfield; both, until recently, almost as common in the cottages of the Scottish peasantry as the Bible itself. He was immoderately fond of them, but re- gretted deeply that they were not in prose, so as to be more intelligible, or even in the metre of the Psalms. In fact, he had nearly lost what little power of reading he had acquired— the Scottish dialect quite confounded him ; so that before he got to the end of a line, he had generally lost the rhyme of the pre- ceding ; " and if I came to a triplet, a thing of which I had no conception, I commonly read to the foot of the page without perceiving that I had lost the rhyme altogether. I thought the author had been straitened for rhymes, and had just made a part of it do as well as he could without them. Thus, after I got through both works, I found myself much in the same pre- dicament with the man of Eskdalemuir, who had borrowed Bailey's Dictionary from his neighbour. On returning it, the lender asked him what he thought of it. ' I dinna ken, man,' replied he ; * I have read it all through, but canna say that I under- stand it; it is the most confused book that ever I saw in my life ! ' . . . Mrs. Laidlaw also gave me