est
benefactors; to which it might be a sufficient reply, that he was
incapable of perpetrating an ungenerous act. But how stands the fact?
Hogg strained his utmost effort to do honour to the dust of his
illustrious friend! He published reminiscences of him in a small volume,
and in such terms as the following did he pronounce his eulogy:--"He had
a clear head as well as a benevolent heart; was a good man, an anxiously
kind husband, an indulgent parent, and a sincere, forgiving friend; a
just judge, and a punctual correspondent.... Such is the man we have
lost, and such a man we shall never see again. He was truly an
extraordinary man,--the greatest man in the world."[46] Was ever more
panegyrical language used in biography? But Hogg ventured to publish his
recollections of his friend, instead of supplying them for the larger
biography; perhaps some connexion may be traced between this fact and
the indignation of Scott's literary executor! Possessed, withal, of a
genial temper, he was sensitive of affront, and keen in his expressions
of displeasure; he had his hot outbursts of anger with Wilson and
Wordsworth, and even with Scott, on account of supposed slights, but his
resentment speedily subsided, and each readily forgave him. He was
somewhat vain of his celebrity, but what shepherd had not been vain of
such achievements?

Next to Robert Burns, the Ettrick Shepherd is unquestionably the most
distinguished of Scottish bards, sprung from the ranks of the people: in
the region of the imagination he stands supreme. A child of the forest,
nursed amidst the wilds and tutored among the solitudes of nature, his
strong and vigorous imagination had received impressions from the
mountain, the cataract, the torrent, and the wilderness, and was filled
with pictures and images of the mysterious, which those scenes were
calculated to awaken. "Living for years in solitude," writes Professor
Wilson,[47] "he unconsciously formed friendships with the springs, the
brooks, the caves, the hills, and with all the more fleeting and
faithless pageantry of the sky, that to him came in place of those human
affections, from whose indulgence he was debarred by the necessities
that kept him aloof from the cottage fire, and up among the mists on the
mountain top. The still green beauty of the pastoral hills and vales
where he passed his youth, inspired him with ever-brooding visions of
fairy-land, till, as he lay musing in his lonely shieling, the