may admit a French
word which has no English equivalent), that is to say, the stock phrases
which Heaven knows who first minted and which will pass till they are
worn out of all knowledge. It has two great poets--one in the
vernacular, one in the literary language--who are rich enough to keep a
bank for their inferiors almost to the end of time. The depreciation of
it by "glaikit Englishers" (I am a glaikit Englisher who does not
depreciate), simply because it is unfamiliar and rustic-looking, is
silly enough. But its best practitioners are sometimes prone to forget
that nothing ready-made will do as poetry, and that you can no more take
a short cut to Parnassus by spelling good "guid" and liberally using
"ava," than you can execute the same journey by calling a girl a nymph
and a boy a swain. The reason why Burns is a great poet, and one of the
greatest, is that he seldom or never does this in Scots. When he takes
to the short cut, as he does sometimes, he usually "gets to his
English." Of Hogg, who wrote some charming things and many good ones,
the same cannot be said. No writer known to me, not even the eminent Dr.
Young, who has the root of the poetical matter in him at all, is so
utterly uncritical as Hogg. He does not seem even to have known when he
borrowed and when he was original. We have seen that he told Scott that
he was not of his school. Now a great deal that he wrote, perhaps
indeed actually the major part of his verse, is simply imitation and not
often very good imitation of Scott. Here is a passage:--

Light on her airy steed she sprung,
Around with golden tassels hung.
No chieftain there rode half so free,
Or half so light and gracefully.
How sweet to see her ringlets pale
Wide-waving in the southland gale,
Which through the broom-wood odorous flew
To fan her cheeks of rosy hue!
Whene'er it heaved her bosom's screen
What beauties in her form were seen!
And when her courser's mane it swung,
A thousand silver bells were rung.
A sight so fair, on Scottish plain,
A Scot shall never see again.

I think we know where this comes from. Indeed Hogg had a certain
considerable faculty of conscious parody as well as of unconscious
imitation, and his _Poetic Mirror_, which he wrote as a kind of humorous
revenge on his brother bards for refusing to contribute, is a fair
second to _Rejected Addresses_. The amusing thing is that he often
parodied where he