did not mean parody in the least, and nowadays we do
not want Scott-and-water. Another vein of Hogg's, which he worked
mercilessly, is a similar imitation, not of Scott, but of the weakest
echoes of Percy's _Reliques_:--

O sad, sad, was young Mary's plight:
She took the cup, no word she spake,
She had even wished that very night
To sleep and never more to wake.

Sad, sad indeed is the plight of the poet who publishes verses like
this, of which there are thousands of lines to be found in Hogg. And
then one comes to "Kilmeny," and the note changes with a vengeance:--

Bonny Kilmeny gaed up the glen;
But it wasna to meet Duneira's men,
Nor the rosy monk of the isle to see,
For Kilmeny was pure as pure could be.
It was only to hear the yorlin sing,
And pu' the cress-flower round the spring,
The scarlet hip and the hindberry,
For Kilmeny was pure as pure could be.

. . . . .

Kilmeny looked up with a lovely grace,
But nae smile was seen on Kilmeny's face;
As still was her look and as still was her ee
As the stillness that lay on the emeraut lea,
Or the mist that sleeps on a waveless sea.
For Kilmeny had been she kent not where,
And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare;
Kilmeny had been where the cock never crew,
Where the rain never fell and the wind never blew.

No matter that it is necessary even here to make a cento, that the
untutored singer cannot keep up the song by natural force and has not
skill enough to dissemble the lapses. "Kilmeny" at its best is
poetry--such poetry as, to take Hogg's contemporaries only, there is
none in Rogers or Crabbe, little I fear in Southey, and not very much in
Moore. Then there is no doubt at all that he could write ballads. "The
Witch of Fife" is long and is not improved by being written (at least
in one version) in a kind of Scots that never was on land or sea, but it
is quite admirable of its class. "The Good Grey Cat," his own imitation
of himself in the _Poetic Mirror_, comes perhaps second to it, and "The
Abbot McKinnon" (which is rather close to the imitations of Scott)
third. But there are plenty of others. As for his poems of the more
ambitious kind, "Mador of the Moor," "Pilgrims of the Sun," and even
"Queen Hynde," let blushing glory--the glory attached to the literary
department--hide the days on which he produced those. She can very