ced as a purveyor of ballads, not a few of which his
mother, Margaret Laidlaw, knew by heart. This old lady it was who gave
Scott the true enough warning that the ballads were "made for singing
and no for reading." Scott in his turn set Hogg on the track of making
some money by his literary work, and Constable published _The Mountain
Bard_ together with a treatise called _Hogg on Sheep_, which I have not
read, and of which I am not sure that I should be a good critic if I
had. The two books brought Hogg three hundred pounds. This sum he poured
into the usual Danaids' vessel of the Scotch peasant--the taking and
stocking of a farm, which he had neither judgment to select, capital to
work, nor skill to manage; and he went on doing very much the same thing
for the rest of his life. The exact dates of that life are very sparely
given in his own _Autobiography_, in his daughter's _Memorials_, and in
the other notices of him that I have seen. He would appear to have spent
four or five years in the promising attempt to run, not one but two
large stock-farms. Then he tried shepherding again, without much
success; and finally in 1810, being forty years old and able to write,
he went to Edinburgh and "commenced," as the good old academic phrase
has it, literary man. He brought out a new book of songs called _The
Forest Minstrel_, and then he started a periodical, _The Spy_. On this,
as he tells us, Scott very wisely remonstrated with him, asking him
whether he thought he could be more elegant than Addison or Mackenzie.
Hogg replied with his usual modesty that at any rate he would be "mair
original." The originality appears to have consisted in personality; for
Hogg acknowledges one exceedingly insolent attack on Scott himself,
which Scott seems, after at first resenting it (and yet Hogg tells us
elsewhere that he never resented any such thing), to have forgiven. He
had also some not clearly known employments of the factorship or
surveyorship kind; he was much patronised by two worthy hatters, Messrs.
Grieve and Scott, and in 1813 the book which contains all his best
verse, _The Queen's Wake_, was published. It was deservedly successful;
but, by a species of bad luck which pursued Hogg with extraordinary
assiduity, the two first editions yielded nothing, as his publisher was
not solvent. The third, which Blackwood issued, brought him in good
profit. Two years later he became in a way a made man. He had very
diligently sought the pat