Page:Cousins's Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature.djvu/206

194 him introduced to the poet, and assisted him in collecting material for his Border Minstrelsy. In 1796 he had begun to write his songs, and when on a visit to Edin. in 1801 he coll. his poems under the title of Scottish Pastorals, etc., and in 1807 there followed The Mountain Bard. A treatise on the diseases of sheep brought him £300, on the strength of which he embarked upon a sheep-farming enterprise in Dumfriesshire which, like a previous smaller venture in Harris, proved a failure, and he returned to Ettrick bankrupt. Thenceforward he relied almost entirely on literature for support. With this view he, in 1810, settled in Edin., pub. The Forest Minstrel, and started the Spy, a critical journal, which ran for a year. In 1813 The Queen's Wake showed his full powers, and finally settled his right to an assured place among the poets of his country. He joined the staff of Blackwood, and became the friend of Wilson, Wordsworth, and Byron. Other poems followed, The Pilgrims of the Sun (1815), Madoc of the Moor, The Poetic Mirror, and Queen Hynde (1826); and in prose Winter Evening Tales (1820), The Three Perils of Man (1822), and The Three Perils of Woman. In his late years his home was a cottage at Altrive on 70 acres of moorland presented to him by the Duchess of Buccleuch, where he d. greatly lamented. As might be expected from his almost total want of regular education, H. was often greatly wanting in taste, but he had real imagination and poetic faculty. Some of his lyrics like The Skylark are perfect in their spontaneity and sweetness, and his Kilmeny is one of the most exquisite fairy tales in the language. Hogg was vain and greedy of praise, but honest and, beyond his means, generous. He is a leading character, partly idealised, partly caricatured, in Noctes Ambrosianæ.

 Author:Thomas Jefferson Hogg (1792-1862).—Biographer, s. of John H., a country gentleman of Durham, ed. at Durham Grammar School, and Univ. Coll., Oxf., where he made the acquaintance of, whose lifelong friend and biographer he became. Associate with S. in the famous pamphlet on The Necessity of Atheism, he shared in the expulsion from the Univ. which it entailed, and thereafter devoted himself to the law, being called to the Bar in 1817. In 1832 he contributed to Bulwer's New Monthly Magazine his Reminiscences of Shelley, which was much admired. Thereafter he was commissioned to write a biography of the poet, of which he completed 2 vols., but in so singular a fashion that the material with which he had been entrusted was withdrawn. The work, which is probably unique in the annals of biography, while giving a vivid and credible picture of S. externally, shows no true appreciation of him as a poet, and reflects with at least equal prominence the humorously eccentric personality of the author, which render it entertaining in no common degree. Other works of H. were Memoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff, and a book of travels, Two Hundred and Nine Days (1827). He m. the widow of Williams, Shelley's friend, who was drowned along with him.

 Author:Thomas Holcroft (1745-1809).—Dramatist, s. of a small shoemaker in London, passed his youth as a pedlar, and as a Newmarket stable boy. A charitable person having given him some education he became a schoolmaster, but in 1770 went on the