the value of a good patronymic. The little piece was not even ephemeral, for it only had a stage existence of one night. It is charming to read, but had not body enough for continued dramatic life; nor does the name of its hero, which turned out to be "Hogsflesh," seem sufficiently cacophonous to afford a raison d'être for the mystery by which it was surrounded. "Hogg" maybe thought less objectionable, as abstract in nature, and indicating the "whole animal." However this may be, it is as the "Ettrick Shepherd" that James Hogg, of whom I now have to say a few words, is generally known. This extraordinary being was born in the forest of Ettrick, in Selkirkshire, Jan. 25th, 1772; was bred up as a shepherd and cowherd, and never had more than six months education in his life. He first began to write ballads at twenty-four years of age, in the very year of the death of Burns, who, as Hogg did not learn till the following one, had been a ploughman-poet,—had been born on the same day of the same month as himself,—and whose Tam O'Shanter, then heard for the first time, fairly ravished its hearer, whose favourite it ever after remained. This was the crisis of his life; the very pivot on which his destinies were to turn. He thought within himself that he, as a shepherd, had more time on his hands than a ploughman; but then wept at the reflection that he was not able to write. However, he resolved to be a poet, and follow in the steps of his great predecessor. We must now pass over a decade during which our Shepherd had written and sung many a song, published the Mountain Bard, and written Hogg on Sheep, for which Constable gave him £86, and the Highland Society a premium,—and arrive at the year 1810. Then it was that poor Hogg, brought to insolvency by the farming speculations into which the unwonted possession of capital had seduced him, "in utter desperation took his plaid about his shoulders," and wended his way to "Embro," to push his fortunes as a literary man. At this epoch he says of himself, "I never had been once in any polished society, had read next to nothing, was now in the thirty-eighth year of my age, and knew no more of human life and manners than a child." In 1813, when forty years of age, he published The Queen's Wake, and in 1832, when he prefaced the solitary volume that 'appeared of the projected Altrive Tales, with so interesting an autobiography, he could enumerate some three-score of volumes as the production of his pen,—which, as he truly says, "if the quality were at all proportionate to the quantity, are enough for any man's life."
Of Blackwood's Magazine, Hogg boasts of being "the beginner and almost sole instigator; and here, in October, 1817, was published the thrice-celebrated 'Chaldee Manuscript,'" of which, at the foot of the portrait before us, he appears as the author. This curious piece, written certainly in part by him, and in part by Wilson and Lockhart, professed to give in Scriptural phraseology, a sort of history of the magazine, in course of which, the seceders, Pringle and Cleghorn, and the supporters of the rival publisher, Constable, together with most of the literary notables of the day, are saterized, or alluded to, under the guise of beasts and birds. The appearance of this witty lampoon caused the greatest excitement; the number of the magazine containing it went off like wildfire. A "second edition" was issued; but lo! the reprehensible jeu desprit was withdrawn, and its place supplied with inoffensive matter. Hence the rage for "private copies," as they were termed; that is, those containing the libellous article, with MS. marginal explanations. These
