the
resemblance is astonishing enough; but what is more astonishing is that
any one interested in Hogg's fame should not perceive that the Shepherd
of the _Noctes_ is Hogg magnified and embellished in every way. He is
not a better poet, for the simple reason that the verses put in his
mouth are usually Hogg's own and not always his best. But out of the
_Confessions of a Sinner_, Hogg has never signed anything half so good
as the best prose passages assigned to him in the _Noctes_. They are
what he might have written if he had taken pains: they are in his key
and vein; but they are much above him. Again, unless any reader is so
extraordinarily devoid of humour as to be shocked by the mere
horse-play, it must be clear to him that the Shepherd's manners are
dressed up with extraordinary skill, so as to be just what he would have
liked them to be. As for the drinking and so forth, it simply comes to
this--that the habits which were fashionable when the century was not
yet in its teens, or just in them, were getting to be looked on askance
when it was entering or had entered on its thirties. But, instead of
being annoyed at this Socrates-Falstaff, as somebody has called it, one
might have thought that both Hogg himself and his admirers would have
taken it as an immense compliment. The only really bad turn that Wilson
seems to have done his friend was posthumous and pardonable. He
undertook the task of writing the Shepherd's life and editing his
_Remains_ for the benefit of his family, who were left very badly off;
and he not only did not do it but appears to have lost the documents
with which he was entrusted. It is fair to say that after the deaths,
which came close together, of his wife, of Blackwood, and of Hogg
himself, Wilson was never fully the same man; and that his strongly
sentimental nature, joined to his now inveterate habit of writing
rapidly as the fancy took him, would have made the task of hammering out
a biography and of selecting and editing _Remains_ so distasteful from
different points of view as to be practically impossible. But in that
case of course he should not have undertaken it, or should have
relinquished it as soon as he found out the difficulties. Allan
Cunningham, it is said, would have gladly done the business; and there
were few men better qualified.

And now, having done a by no means unnecessary task in this preliminary
clearance of rubbish, let us see what sort of a person in literature and