Page:Essays in miniature.djvu/37

 Rh excellent poem, that you are never publishing it, while I am starving for money, and cannot even afford a Christmas goose to my friends?" When a new edition of The Queen's Wake was printed in Edinburgh, a very handsome quarto selling for a guinea—which seems a heartbreaking price—Murray with his usual generosity subscribed for twenty-five copies; whereupon we find Hogg promptly acknowledging this munificence by begging him to persuade others to do likewise. "You must make a long pull and a strong pull in London for subscriptions," he writes, with enviable composure, "as you and Mr. Rogers are the principal men I have to rely on." There is something very tranquillizing in the gentle art of shifting one's burdens to other shoulders. Genius flourishes like the mountain oak when it can strike root in the money-boxes of less gifted friends.

If tact and patience were both required in soothing Hogg's petulant vanity and in providing for his extravagant habits, the task