ting the deevil than Donald McGillavry.
Come like a tailor, Donald McGillavry,
Come like a tailor, Donald McGillavry,
Push about, in an' out, thimble them cleverly.
Here's to King James an' Donald McGillavry!

"Love is Like a Dizziness," and the "Boys' Song,"

Where the pools are bright and deep,
Where the grey trout lies asleep,
Up the river and over the lea,
That's the way for Billy and me--

and plenty more charming things will reward the explorer of the
Shepherd's country. Only let that explorer be prepared for pages on
pages of the most unreadable stuff, the kind of stuff which hardly any
educated man, however great a "gomeril" he might be, would ever dream of
putting to paper, much less of sending to press. It is fair to repeat
that the educated man who thus refrained would probably be a very long
time before he wrote "Kilmeny," or even "Donald McGillavry" and "The
Village of Balmaquhapple."

Still (though to say it is enough to make him turn in his grave) if Hogg
had been a verse-writer alone he would, except for "Kilmeny" and his
songs, hardly be worth remembering, save by professed critics and
literary free-selectors. A little better than Allan Cunningham, he is
but for that single, sudden, and unsustained inspiration of "Kilmeny,"
and one or two of his songs, so far below Burns that Burns might enable
us to pay no attention to him and not lose much. As for Scott, "Proud
Maisie" (an unapproachable thing), the fragments that Elspeth Cheyne
sings, even the single stanza in _Guy Mannering_, "Are these the Links
of Forth? she said," any one of a thousand snatches that Sir Walter has
scattered about his books with a godlike carelessness will "ding" Hogg
and all his works on their own field. But then it is not saying anything
very serious against a man to say that he is not so great as Scott. With
those who know what poetry is, Hogg will keep his corner ("not a
polished corner," as Sydney Smith would say) of the temple of Apollo.

Hogg wrote prose even more freely than he wrote verse, and after the
same fashion--a fashion which he describes with equal frankness and
truth by the phrases, "dashing on," "writing as if in desperation,"
"mingling pathos and absurdity," and so forth. Tales, novels, sketches,
all were the same to him; and he had the same queer mixture of
confidence in their merits and doubt about the manner in which they were
written. _The Brownie of Bodsbeck_, _The Th