Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/441

 JAMES HOGG 425 ence, went bankrupt ; and the poor shepherd lost all the profits on which he had relied for subsistence and the payment of some old farming debts. This failure introduced him to Blackwood, who was one of the trustees of the bankrupt's estate, and who helped to secure for Hogg about half of the third edition (the other half, he says, had been got rid of somehow in a week), and sold it for him on commission, and ultimately paid him more than double of what he was to have received from the first publisher. About this time he made the acquaintance of Wilson, whose " Isle of Palms " he had extolled in the Scottish Review, and whom he was exceedingly anxious to meet. "All I could learn of him was, that he was a man from the mountains in Wales, or the West of England, with hair like eagles' feathers and nails like birds' claws, a red beard, and an un- common degree of wildness in his looks." Hogg at length wrote inviting him to dine, Wilson came, and the two with Grieve had a jolly evening together. As Hogg modestly puts it : "I found him so much a man according to my own heart, that for many years we were seldom twenty-four hours asunder when in town." Hogg went and spent a month with him at EUeray, and on his way thither made the personal acquaintance of Southey. Hogg, putting up for the night at an inn in Keswick, sent a note to Greta Hall ; Southey came to him, and made him spend two days at the Hall. Let Hogg himself speak : " Before we had been ten minutes together my heart was knit to Southey, and every hour thereafter my esteem for him increased. . . . But I was a grieved as well as an astonished man, when I found that he refused all