, while I was left to shift
for myself.... In order to attract his attention from my wife to one who
I thought as well deserved it, I went close up to him with a
scrutinising look and said, 'Gudeness guide us, Sir Walter, but ye hae
gotten a braw gown.'" The rest of the story is not bad, but less
characteristic. Immediately afterwards Hogg tells his own speech about
being "not sae yelegant but mair original" than Addison. Then there is
the other capital legend, also self-told, how he said to Scott, "Dear
Sir Walter, ye can never suppose that I belang to your school of
chivalry! Ye are the king of that school, but I'm the king of the
mountain and fairy school, which is a far higher ane than yours!"
"This," says Professor Veitch, a philosopher, a scholar, and a man of
letters, "though put with an almost sublime egotism, is in the main
true." Almost equally characteristic is the fact that, after beginning
his pamphlet by calling Lockhart "the only man thoroughly qualified for
the task" of writing Scott's life, Hogg elsewhere, in one of the
extraordinary flings that distinguish him, writes: "Of Lockhart's genius
and capabilities Sir Walter always spoke with the greatest enthusiasm:
more than I thought he deserved. For I knew him a great deal better than
Sir Walter did, and, whatever Lockhart may pretend, I knew Sir Walter a
thousand times better than he did."

Now be it remembered that these passages are descriptive of Hogg's Hogg,
to use the always useful classification of Dr. Holmes. To complete them
(the actual texts are too long to give here) it is only necessary to
compare the accounts of a certain dinner at Bowhill given respectively
by Hogg in the _Domestic Manners_ and by Lockhart in his biography, and
also those given in the same places of the one-sided quarrel between
Scott and Hogg, because the former, according to his almost invariable
habit, refused to collaborate in Hogg's _Poetic Mirror_. In all this we
have the man's own testimony about himself. It is not in the least
incompatible with his having been, as his panegyrists contend, an
affectionate friend, husband, and father; a very good fellow when his
vanity or his whims were not touched; and inexhaustibly fertile in the
kind of rough profusion of flower and weed that uncultivated soil
frequently produces. But it most certainly is also not inconsistent, but
on the contrary highly consistent, with the picture drawn by Lockhart in
his great book; and it shows