SOURCE: Groves, David. “Poetic Mirrors.” In James Hogg: The Growth of a Writer, pp. 54-85. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1988.

[In the following excerpt, Groves evaluates Hogg as a Romantic poet.]

Heroic values and a concern for national unity made The Queen's Wake an ideal poem for a country at war. Yet although its ‘plan proved extremely happy’, Hogg could see that the Wake was still ‘very imperfect and unequal’.¹ During 1814 and 1815, years which brought glimpses of prosperity, James Hogg wrote a series of long poems which culminated in the brilliant and witty parodies of his Poetic Mirror. He also revised The Queen's Wake to make it more saleable, modernising ‘Kilmeny’ and taking Scott's advice in giving a happy ending to ‘The Witch of Fife’.

In 1814 Hogg was living in a rented ‘den under the North Bridge’, ‘in an odd-looking place called St. Ann Street’.² The steep, dark area under the massive bridge was always ‘teeming with life’, and a visitor to the area would ‘discover in a double sense, a lively example of what is known by the upper and lower classes’.³ ‘'Twas there, up a spiral stone stair-case, in a room looking towards the Castle’, John Wilson would later recall, ‘that first I saw my Shepherd's honest face, and … ate along with him cod's head and shoulders’.⁴

These were the poet's most ambitious years. When Gillies dropped in he would find his friend ‘with the old broken ‘Sclate’ always before him’, and the slate ‘covered with very close writing’.⁵ The large schoolboy's relic was the same one Hogg had used many years before on the hills of Ettrick, and would keep until his final days. When writing poety, he usually worked out the lines in chalk before putting them on paper.

The summer of 1814 saw James Hogg fishing and hunting in the Highlands. A severe cold brought him to a friend's house in Athol, where, in ‘a little study, furnished with books’, and overlooking the beautiful River Tay, he wrote the main part of Mador of the Moor. Mador is an allegorical poem set in medieval times and lightly indebted to Spenser's Faerie Queene. Hogg used a modified version of the Spenserian stanza, in which each verse became, for him, ‘a structure of itself, resembling an arch, of which the two meeting rhymes in the middle … represent the key-stone, and on these all the strength and flow of the verse should rest’.⁶ His rhyme-scheme, ababcdcdd, supposedly imitates the curling ‘flow’ of a river, and also gives a very different image of meaningful form through the religious or historical connotations of an ‘arch’ and ‘key-stone’. Each verse carries a sense of process, fluidity, or flow, and a sense of eternity; the two opposite conceptions together symbolise what the poet calls a ‘God of stillness and of motion’, or, in other words, a spirit that is both transcendent and immanent.

Mador of the Moor begins with a vista of horror, ‘Grim as the caverns in the land of death’. The King's nobles slaughter dozens of Highland roe, and then the nobles themselves are ambushed and slaughtered by their enemies. Gradually the five cantos of Mador of the Moor re-shape this ‘dire confusion’ or ‘rent and formless mass’ into a poet's idea of form symbolised by circles, wheels, an ‘ancient ring’, ‘courtly ring’, and fairy ‘rynge’, and by the union of opposites like male and female, sun and river, reason and beauty, and art and nature. The circle reconciles opposites and undermines the notion of independent categories. Disguised as Mador, a travelling minstrel, the young King makes love to Ila Moore, leaves her, and in the end marries her. The opening lines set up Hogg's basic equation between Ila (a future Queen of Scotland) and the rivers of Scotland:

Thou Queen of Caledonia's mountain floods,
          Theme of a thousand gifted Bards of yore,
Majestic wanderer of the wilds and woods,
          That lovest to circle cliff and mountain hoar.

Ila's wandering journey in search of her lover will follow three rivers in succession: the Dee, the Tay, and the Forth. While Ila represents the river, beauty, and nature, Mador represents the sun, reason, and art;

First on the height, the beauteous morn he hail'd,
          And rested, wondering, on the heather bell.

It seems that when Mador sleeps, his slumber is ‘So deep’

                              that the hand of death
Arrests not more the reasoning faculty.

Mador of the Moor is a lively, light poem, ‘now comic, now tender’,⁷ in the words of one disapproving critic. Responding thoughtfully and creatively to the allegorical tradition, Hogg differs from Spenser in trying to encircle or accommodate nature, rather than subduing it. He rejects the notions of courtly love and human perfectibility, turning away from ‘men all pure, and maidens all divine’ to paint more divided characters ‘whose virtues and defects combine’. When Mador first comes to Ila's cottage, we see and hear his inept fiddling and Ila's busy-body mother and gruff father:

The Minstrel strain'd and twisted sore his face
          Beat with his heel, and twinkled with his eye
But still, at every effort and grimace,
          Louder and quicker rush'd the melody;
          The dancers round the floor in mazes fly,
With cheering whoop, and wheel, and caper wild
          The jolly dame did well her mettle ply!
Even old Kincraigy, of his spleen beguiled,
Turn'd his dark brow aside, soften'd his looks and smiled.

Every stanza invokes Hogg's thematic symbolism of the sun and the river. Old Kincraigy is both Ila's father, and the name of a mountain near the River Dee. False love is a ‘sediment’, a poor poet is a ‘babbler foul’, Ila's childhood a ‘spring … clouded and o'erpast’, she tries to ‘brook’ her fears for her baby, and her love for her father is ‘unbrookable’. ‘Nature's own language flowed’, at the end of this ‘onward tale’. The river and sun together represent the poet's idea of the power, complexity, and vastness of human consciousness; when suffering ‘mounts’, as we hear in Canto Four, ‘to o'erwhelming height’,

Oft, to itself superior, mind hath shone.
          That broken reed, Dependence, overcome,
Where dwells the might that may the soul unthrone,
Whose proud resolve is moor'd on its own powers alone?

The visible universe becomes a metaphor for the creative mind, in this passage. Subtle reminders of the sun and the river—‘mounts’, ‘shone’, ‘reed’, ‘moor'd’—symbolise both the fertility of nature and the imagination of the poet, who loves ‘amid the burning stars to sail, / Or sing with sea-maids down the coral deep’. Consciousness is able to harness the energies of nature, and can apparently redeem or humanise the chaos of life by creating significant form, which Hogg presents as a kind of cyclical journey embracing the heavens, the earth, and ‘the coral deep’.

It is quite fitting that Mador seduces Ila one summer, is found by her and her baby the next summer, and promises, at the end, that although kingly duties are calling him ‘to distant land’, still ‘next when summer flowers the highland lea / I will return, and seek my woodland home’. Like the sun, he will return each summer. The sun's upward path through the sky, and the rivers' journey through the earth down to the sea, can be seen as two halves of a whole; the two opposite journeys make up another ‘ring’ symbolising the cyclical rhythms of nature and the ultimate union of human, natural, and supernatural.

Edinburgh and London were pleased with the poetry, but suspicious of the subject-matter, when Mador of the Moor appeared in print. One reviewer heard a ‘dignified simplicity’ and language ‘chaste, clear, and strong’, but others thought that a tale of unwed pregnancy was ‘not abounding in the strictest morality’, or complained of Ila's being ‘reduced to too low a state of humiliation’, which obviously was ‘not in harmony’ with the proper nature of poetry. Mr Hogg's ‘great error’, according to the Antijacobin, was his habit of ‘vulgar familiarity’.⁸ Again and again critics insisted that only ‘high’ and ‘proper’ subjects were admissable into verse. Hogg's 1865 editor would complain that Ila, ‘instead of being of a half-noble race’ (as any heroine ought to be), was just ‘an ordinary rural belle, a conquette, and ultimately something worse’, while her lover Mador, ‘in whose demeanour the dignity of royalty should appear’, was sadly lacking in the necessary ‘noble bearing’. Alas, then, ‘What could poetry effect in behalf of such a hero and such a heroine?’⁹ As the Shepherd himself wrote, sarcastically, to a friend in England, ‘you can scarcely imagine the prejudices that poverty and want of education have to encounter in this important age’.¹⁰

Back in Edinburgh in the autumn, James Hogg worked at his marvellous Pilgrims of the Sun. This poem is truly, as one angry reader found, a work of ‘insolent vaunting’.¹¹ Its heroine Mary Lee doubts the teachings of her medieval church and is taken on a tour of the universe by a male angel named Cela. Mary and Cela fly together as ‘swift as fleets the stayless mind’, beyond the elements, beyond the known universe, and beyond gravity, to where

There was no up, there was no down,
          But all was space, and all the same.

Their journey towards the sun is a metaphor for the freedom, capacity, and ‘Unspeakable delight’ of enlightened, expanding consciousness.

In the second part of Pilgrims of the Sun the poet exchanges his native ‘hill-harp’ for the ‘holy harp of Judah's land’. Part Second, then, slightly resembles poems like Paradise Lost and Edward Young's Night Thoughts, which Hogg sees as embodiments of a long tradition rooted in Hebraic or Biblical verse. Hogg's heaven, in contrast to Milton's, contains ‘men of all creeds / Features, and hues’. Mary Lee soon transcends the limits of a ‘stinted mind’ which could believe

                                        that the Almighty's love,
Life, and salvation, could to single sect
Of creatures be confined, all his alike!

Nor is Paradise envisioned as a static territory set apart from process, time, or change; even in its ‘ample circle’,

                                        all were in progression—moving on
Still to perfection. In conformity
The human soul is modelled—hoping still
In something onward! Something far beyond,
It fain would grasp!

Mortal life, apparently, is only ‘the infant stage / Of a progressive, endless pilgrimage’.

The third section of Pilgrims of the Sun uses rhyming couplets and alludes to poems by Dryden, Pope, and Johnson. Mary and Cela are still travelling across the sky, but the worlds they now discover represent moral and social aspects of human existence. The first is a redeemed version of The Rape of the Lock, where ageless lovers are ‘free of jealousy, their mortal bane’:

In love's delights they bask without alloy;
The night their transport, and the day their joy.

Forever devout, constant, and wise, and beautiful, Hogg's ideal women delight in giving birth. They are no longer the victims of either hypocrisy or prudishness, since ‘equal judgment’ prevails between the sexes, and since the ‘many faults the world heap on her head’ will ‘never’ be reiterated here. Cela and Mary next fly to another world, a ‘gloomy sphere’ ‘That wades in crimson’. In this world, which represents the epic poetry of Dryden and Pope, the poet concludes that a soldier is ‘but an abject fool! / A king's, a tyrant's or a stateman's tool’. Indeed, Hogg is more concerned for the ‘honest’ and noble horses, who ‘missed their generous comrades of the stall’. Yet although he dissents from Augustan attitudes towards women and towards military valour, the poet joins in their denunciation of small-minded clergymen, reviewers, and politicians: Mary and Cela

          saw the land of bedesmen discontent,
Their frames their god, their tithes their testament!
And snarling critics bent with aspect sour,
T'applaud the great, and circumvent the poor;
And knowing patriots, with important face,
Raving aloud with gesture and grimace,
Their prize a land's acclaim, or proud and gainful place.

Critics have been slow to understand the basic idea underlying Pilgrims of the Sun. Recently, however, Nelson Smith has called the poem ‘thematically the most ambitious’¹² of all Hogg's works, and Douglas Gifford has joined in citing the ‘strong case for reassessment’.¹³ Essentially, Mary and Cela should be seen as readers, as they travel through literary worlds created by Milton, Dryden, Pope, and other major poets. Their literary flight is a metaphor for the Romantic imagination responding to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English poetry. At each stage of their journey Hogg adopts the appropriate style, imitating whichever poet the two pilgrims are, in effect, reading. James Hogg is expressing both his admiration for Milton, Dryden, Pope, and other poetic predecessors, and his sense of their limitations, since he modifies their worlds by introducing his own simpler, more natural, humanitarian and universal frame of values.

The final section of Pilgrims of the Sun returns the two readers to earth, where all of Ettrick Forest is in mourning for the supposed death of Mary. Her spirit watches as a monk opens her grave to steal the jewels that have been buried with her. Unable to pull the rings off her fingers, the monk takes out his knife, but as soon as it touches her flesh Mary returns to life with a shriek. This materialistic monk has of course never considered the many symbolic connotations of a ‘ring’ in the poems of James Hogg.

The image of a grave-robber is also used by Hogg a decade later in his Confessions of a Justified Sinner, where it represents finite or earthbound critics, editors, or readers. In Pilgrims of the Sun, like the Confessions, the equation between grave-robber and obtuse critic is strongly implied. And at the end of the poem we hear that the story of Mary Lee has been enjoyed ‘by every Border swain’ until its metaphysical lack of gravity comes under attack by pedantic commentators:

          the mass-men said, with fret and frown,
That thro' all space it well was known,
By moon, or stars, the earth or sea,
An up and down there needs must be.

The ‘error’, ‘fraud’, or ‘ignorance’ of these Urizenic ‘mass-men’ imposes a literal-minded and earthbound interpretation that brings the poet back to mundane reality, just as the ring-snatching monk gravely jolts Mary back to her senses and back to the world of gravity she had left behind.

During their travels Mary's and Cela's ‘frame and vision’ are ‘subtilised’ so that they can appreciate ‘the inner regions’ which they explore. The main feature of their expanded awareness is its passivity or receptiveness, its freedon from aggressive intellect, and from dogma, theory, or preconception. Their flight (or, in other words, their thinking) is rapid, effortless, and smooth, as they glide through vast realms,

Bent forward on the wind, in graceful guise,
On which they seemed to press, for their fair robes
Were streaming far behind them.
          So swift and so untroubled was their flight,
'Twas like the journey of a dream by night.

‘[L]eaning forward on the liquid air, / Like twin-born eagles’, the travellers learn to trust the natural and divine power that impels them. Their flight becomes, suggestively, ‘an arch’, ‘Formed like the rainbow’, ‘Circling the pales of heaven’. Normally subjectivity is set against the objective, physical world, but now subjective and objective are continually merging through the fluidity of process. As Mary looks around she sees that

                    the stars and the moon fled west away,
          So swift o'er vaulted sky they shone;
They seemed like fiery rainbows reared,
          In a moment seen, in a moment gone.

A major contribution to Romantic poetry is contained in these passages, with their profound sense of motion foreshadowing the fantastic chariots of Shelley, Byron, and Poe. Mary and Cela are in a kind of ‘rapid chariot’ moving ‘thro’ mind's unwearied range'. ‘O let us onward steer’, cries Mary, ‘The light our steeds, the wind our charioteer’. Her experience of process teaches Mary to see ‘a God in all’, whom ‘All Nature worshipped’, and to whom even the flowers give ‘unconscious Worship’. The pantheistic undertones, the union of male and female, the metaphor of flight, the Faustian confidence in the power of the human mind, and the implied analogy between artistic creation and divine creation, all indicate a strong Romantic influence in Pilgrims of the Sun, which, according to one critic, ‘Lord Byron in his Cain, and Shelley in his Queen Mab, have palpably imitated’.¹⁴

Pilgrims of the Sun was apparently too daring for any of the Edinburgh publishers, but it greatly impressed John Murray, Byron's London publisher, who offered £500 for the manuscript and the copyright. Hogg preferred to accept £80 and retain the rights, since he hoped to produce his collected poems in the future. However, Murray had second thoughts, and a letter from the Shepherd, written the day after Christmas in 1814, begins, ‘Dear Murray, What the deuce have you made of my excellent poem that you are never publishing it while I am starving for want of money and cannot even afford a Christmas goose to my friends?’¹⁵ When it finally appeared, the critics were sharply divided. The Scots Magazine was ‘best pleased’ with those parts ‘in which [the author] has not quite lost sight of his native earth’. A Boston critic found Pilgrims of the Sun ‘the most original of his works’, yet advised Hogg to give up writing, since ‘There seem … to be insurmountable difficulties in the way of his being a powerful or a popular writer’. A Shrewsbury reviewer could ‘say without hesitation, that it displays so great a share of ‘heaven born genius’, as to assure it an immortality’, and in London Hogg was heralded as ‘the rival or the compeer of Southey and of Wordsworth, of Byron and of Campbell’. The Augustan Review detected ‘very considerable merit’:

The author is said, at one time or another, to have been a shepherd; and, as such, to possess little learning. Granted that he is not classical; but neither is he unlearned—if to have read and understood, as it is obvious Mr Hogg has done, most of the best books in our own language can raise a man above the imputation of being destitute of learning.¹⁶

In his autobiography James Hogg recalls that he first intended his Pilgrims of the Sun as part of ‘a volume of romantic poems, to be entitled “Midsummer Night Dreams”’. Unfortunately a friend convinced him to publish the three parts separately, an arrangement he grew to regret: ‘Among other wild and visionary subjects, the ‘Pilgrims of the Sun’ would have done very well, and might at least have been judged one of the best; but, as an entire poem by itself, it bears an impress of extravagance, and affords no relief from the story of a visionary existence’.¹⁷

The second poem intended for Midsummer Night Dreams was ‘Connel of Dee’, a comic ballad which complements Pilgrims of the Sun in the way that ‘The Witch of Fife’ complements ‘Kilmeny’. The hero, Connel, is the opposite of Mary Lee in every respect. Licentious, libidinous, dissatisfied, and impious, he is taken by a worldly ‘young maiden’¹⁸ to her castle, where they marry and live happily, at least until Connel discovers ‘in his bosom a fathomless void, / A yearning again to be free’.

Mary Lee's daytime journey had been one of freedom, an ascent through the sky, heaven, and poetry. But Connel's night journey is one of enslavement, a descent through a depraved, materialistic society into the purely physical and the element of water. Connel soon tires of his wife's aristocratic connections,

A race whom he hated, a profligate breed,
The scum of existence to vengeance decreed!
          Who laughed at their God and their friend.

He complains of his wife's infidelity, but she merely laughs,

Why that was the fashion!—no sensible man
Could e'er of such freedom complain,

clamping a hand on his mouth and introducing him to a few unpleasant facts:

Peace booby! if life thou regardest beware,
          I have had some fair husbands ere now;
They wooed, and they flattered, they sighed and they sware,
          At length they grew irksome like you.

In the gruesomely comic scene that follows Connel meets his wife's ex-husband, who is chained in a dungeon above a trap-door. The trap-door opens, and the terrified man is beheaded by a pair of mechanical shears. Connel, horrified, flees from the castle to the river; ‘he skimmed the wild paths like a thing of the mind’.

It may not be said that he ran, for he flew,
          Straight on for the hills of the Dee.

Connel's hectic flight from his ‘vision of death’ is a parody of Mary Lee's orderly, smooth, and joyous journey:

Thro' gallwood and bramble he floundered amain,
          No bar his advancement could stay;
Tho' heels-o'er-head whirled again and again,
          Still faster he gained on his way.
          This moment on swinging bough powerless he lay,
          The next he was flying along;
So lightly he scarce made the green leaf to quake,
Impetuous he splashed thro' the bog and the lake,
He rainbowed the hawthorn, he needled the brake,
          With power supernaturally strong.

At last he comes to the Loch of Dee. Still pursued by his wife, ‘Well mounted, with devilish speed’, Connel dives into the water and drowns, yet his mind survives ‘All passive’:

He died, but he found that he never would be
          So dead to all feeling and smart,
No, not though his flesh were consumed in the Dee,
          But that eels would some horror impart.

Just when the rude eels have ‘warped all his bowels about on the tide’, Connel hears his wife calling him. He gathers up his intestines and flees in dismay, only to find that everything has been a dream. His journey has taken him from initial pride and self-sufficiency down to a physical realm of material possession and sexual promiscuity, followed by a further descent into a watery, amorphous element which signifies the unconscious, the fragility of the self, and death. But the ending restores Connel to tranquillity and happiness, when he learns (like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner) to share his experience of the journey with others:

And oft on the shelve of the rock he reclined,
          Light carolling humoursome rhyme,
          Of his midsummer dream, of his feelings refined,
          Or some song of the good olden time.
          And even in age was his spirit in prime.
                    Still reverenced on Dee is his name!
His wishes were few, his enjoyments were rife,
He loved and he cherished each thing that had life,
With two small exceptions, an eel and a wife,
                    Whose commerce he dreaded the same.

‘Connel of Dee’ is an extended metaphor to describe the poet's descent into the unconscious. It perfectly mirrors the ascent of the conscious mind in Pilgrims of the Sun. Taken together, the two main poems of Midsummer Night Dreams form a ring or cycle, just as the two types of journey in Mador of the Moor form a ring that symbolically encircles and unites opposite aspects of human life.

In the years surrounding Waterloo James Hogg was a highly unorthodox and free-wheeling visionary whose best poems try to find universal values and try to relate those values to the Scottish, British, and Christian world in which he lived. His series of Sacred Melodies is set to hymns taken from German synagogues, and follows the story of Israel from past bondage to future freedom, when ‘The happy child’¹⁹ ‘Shall frolic with delight’ and ‘All in love unite’. Perhaps Hogg's most shocking poem is ‘Superstition’, which was intended as a third and final part of Midsummer Night Dreams. This short piece defends ancient Scottish witchcraft and condemns the present conformist and rationalistic ‘cold saturnine morn’.²⁰ The poet admits that ‘every creed has its attendant ills’, but claims that the days of witches

                    were the times for holiness of frame;
          Those were the days when fancy wandered free;
That kindled in the soul the mystic flame,
          And the rapt breathings of high poesy.

‘Superstition’ argues for a continuity of Christian and pre-Christian beliefs. By separating modern religion from its primitive roots, the poet warns, the present age was unintentionally obliterating the basis of faith, which now

In the eye of reason wears into decline;
And soon that heavenly ray must ever cease to shine.

It was about this time that James Hogg began to work on his Queen Hynde, ‘an epic poem on a regular plan’ which he believed would turn out to be his ‘greatest work’.²¹Queen Hynde is truly an epic, with its grand scale, its historical battles and journeys, its theme of the founding of a nation, its use of gods, legend, and history, and its confident narrative tone which allows the chronicler both to comment on the moral significance of events, and to draw important parallels with modern life. A fictitious tale based loosely on historical facts, Queen Hynde is Hogg's vision of the freeing of Scotland from Viking domination many centuries before. In addition to this main plot, the work discusses the relation of dreams to reality, the superceding of ‘primitive’ religion by Christianity, and above all the nature of Hogg's Edinburgh audience.

The poet draws quiet parallels between the divisions and limitations of medieval Scotland, and analogous follies which he finds in the readers of his own age. At the start of her reign the beautiful young Hynde is uncertain, inexperienced, and too much the prey of her emotions. These qualities are echoed in the sentimental women readers of Hogg's time, as we understand when the narrator repeatedly breaks in with sarcastic cries of frustration:

          Maids of Dunedin, in despair [Edinburgh]
Will ye not weep and rend your hair?
Ye who, in these o'erpolish'd times,
Can shed the tear o'er woful rhymes;
O'er plot of novel sore repine,
And cry for hapless heroine—
If in such breast a heart may be,
Sure you must weep and wail with me!

Again and again through the long middle section of Queen Hynde the poet gleefully flings his insults at his fashionable, genteel women readers:

And well 'tis known that woman's mind
Is still to noise and stir inclined;
She would be mark'd, and woo'd withal,
Rather to ill than not at all.

These comments, however, should be seen with some appreciation of their irony and their place in the poem as a whole. The poet's alienation from his audience is an appropriate and subtle mirror to the division existing in medieval Scotland as depicted in the scenes of political intrigue and battle. As the poet says to his readers at the beginning of the fifth section, ‘The song is a medley, and model of thee’. It is very fitting, therefore, that when Queen Hynde is forced into exile and the Vikings over-run Scotland, the poet concedes that he has probably offended most of his audience:

          Fair maid of Albyn's latter day,
How brook'st thou now thy shepherd's lay?
Full sorely art thou cross'd, I ween,
In what thou wished'st to have seen;
The amends lies not within my power,
But in thine own, beloved flower!

In other words the reader can understand this poem if she or he will try to find significant themes rather than reading with ‘burning thirst’ in a headlong, sentimental, or literal fashion that only seeks ‘To shed the tear and rue the deed’. ‘Be this thy lesson’, says the narrator simply; ‘pause, and think’.

The end of Book Fifth is the lowest point in the action of Queen Hynde. It marks the complete victory of the Vikings, the flight of the Scottish court, and the death of thousands of Scots in battle. Once again Hogg brings together the two main strands of his epic, by choosing this moment to banish certain groups of his audience. The immature readers he sends into exile include those who

                    without waiting to contend,
Begin the book at the wrong end,
And read it backward! By his crook,
This is a mode he will not brook!
          Next, he debars all those who sew
Their faith unto some stale review;
That ulcer of our mental store,
The very dregs of manly lore;
Bald, brangling, brutal, insincere;
The bookman's venal gazetteer;
Down with the trash, and every gull
That gloats upon their garbage dull!
          He next debars (God save the mark!)
All those who read when it is dark,
Boastful of eyesight, harping on,
Page after page in maukish tone,
And roll the flowing words off hand,
Yet neither feel nor understand;
All those who read and doze by day,
To while the weary time away!
          He next debars all those who dare,
Whether with proud and pompous air,
With simpering frown, or nose elate,
To name the word indelicate!

Having exiled those readers who approach his epic in a trivialising, narrow, or unsympathetic manner, the poet makes peace with his Edinburgh ‘darlings’ and tells them (—a little like Hynde trying to inspire her soldiers—) that ‘We must now pursue / Our theme, for we have much to do’. He also begins to lay aside his resentment of his audience:

          Oft hast thou grieved his heart full sore
With thy sly chat and flippant lore;
Thy emphasis on error small,
And smile, more cutting far than all;
The praise, half compliment, half mock,
The minstrel's name itself a joke!
But yet, for all thy airs and whims,
And lightsome lore the froth that skims,
He must acknowledge in the end
To 've found thee still the poet's friend,
His friend at heart.

The way is now clear for a reconciliation between the artist and his women readers, those ‘dear maids of Scotia wide’, and also for a resurrection and re-unification of Scotland. But these happy consummations are darkened by a surprise event so sudden, cruel, and shocking that even the poet loses his epic tone for a moment:

Well might they say, on such a lot,
Is there a God in heaven or not?

Queen Hynde was not published until the end of 1824, nearly a decade after much of it was written. The critics failed to share Hogg's high opinion of his work. Almost unanimously the reviewers decreed that Queen Hynde was ‘destitute of elegance’, contained ‘low and vulgar images’, and showed only ‘raving dulness’. Despite a Londoner's praise for ‘This wildly beautiful and very original poem’, and the Edinburgh Observer's perceptive comments on Hogg's ‘forcible and homely language’, ‘his very disregard of [false] style, and abhorrence of fastidious delicacy’, most critics were horrified to discover ‘a sad tampering with sacred themes’ which seemed to verge on ‘absolute blasphemy’. An Ayrshire reader pointed out ‘all the vulgarity—all the bad rhymes—all the coarseness—all the indecencies—and all the gross egotism’, adding snobbishly that ‘the sheep-shearer's vulgar style’ was what ‘we might expect to be favoured with when Jamie Hogg attempts to compose an epic poem’. ‘We decline sullying our pages with such offensive matter’, declared the Critical Gazette, which was ‘convinced that to a well regulated mind many passages in Queen Hynde would be considered more reprehensible than any thing to be found in [Shelley's] Queen Mab’.²²

James Hogg never met Shelley, but he became acquainted with many other leading writers of the day. He first met William and Mary Wordsworth at an Edinburgh dinner-party in 1814. Though surprised at the Englishman's appearance—‘grey russet jacket and pantaloons’ and a ‘broad-brimmed beaver hat’—the Shepherd was proud to go with his new friends along the River Yarrow: ‘We went into my father's cot, and partook of some homely refreshment, visited St. Mary's Lake, which that day was calm, and pure as any mirror; and Mrs. Wordsworth in particular testified great delight with the whole scene’.²³ Later that year Hogg rode with John Wilson down to the English lake district, where he was entertained for a few weeks by the Wordsworths, Robert Southey, Thomas De Quincey, and others.

Byron used his connections to help Hogg, and the two men enjoyed reading each other's poetry. ‘Hogg is a strange being’, wrote Byron, ‘but of great, though uncouth, powers. I think very highly of him as a poet’.²⁴ Byron's letters to the Shepherd are robust, hastily-written, and slightly condescending: ‘And so—you want to come to London—it is a damned place—to be sure—but the only one in the world—(at least in the English world) for fun’.²⁵

James Hogg wanted his literary friends to help him financially by writing for a collection of verse which he planned to edit. Although Byron and Wordsworth promised to send poems, they later changed their minds. At this time Hogg was quarrelling violently with Scott, and he began to see that no major writers would support his new venture. His very ambivalent feelings towards Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Wilson are beautifully portrayed in his Poetic Mirror, which he decided, with unusual prudence, to publish anonymously.

Like Mr Shuffleton of The Spy, James Hogg once again holds up a mirror to show his contemporary poets in their true colours. The first satire of his Poetic Mirror is ‘The Guerilla’, an exaggerated version of Byron's medieval horror-poems. The ‘hot and restless’ hero, Alayni, will tolerate ‘No rival nor superior’. He leads his Spanish villagers on a raid of vengeance after his lover Kela has been captured and dishonoured by Gauls. After slaughtering his enemies, the bloodthirsty Alayni then murders Kela as well, since she has become ‘a lothful stain’. He then proposes to sacrifice his female captives, but instead his warriors merely debauch them. Still fixated by past events, Alayni visits each tent after nightfall, butchering the women and ripping out the heart of the one warrior who opposes his violence.

Alayni resembles Macgregor of The Queen's Wake: his ‘mind would better suit the raving storm’. A victim of the past and the purely physical, he ignores conscience and has no redeeming sense of form:

But that insatiate yearning of the mind
Still preying, hungering, craving still to prey,
Doom'd never bourn or resting-place to find;
O that must torture, undivulged for aye,
Save in the soul's still voice, the eye's perturbed ray!

Alayni's ‘insatiate yearning’ is Hogg's metaphor for the Byronic temperament. Byron, then, is unfree, insensitive, unfair to women, inhumane, and heartless.

In his next parody, ‘Wat o' the Cleuch’, Hogg makes fun of the typical characters, situations, and comforting moral resolutions of Walter Scott's historical poems. Wat is a kind of Scottish Alayni, a terror to friend and foe alike. Disguised as a monk in order to recapture Roxburgh Castle, Wat is offended when the Abbot at Roxburgh denounces in prayer a certain hot-headed warrior:

A thief he is and coward too,
God's adversary, Wat o' the Cleuch.

The gigantic Wat immediately forgets his disguise, leaning forward ‘with his nostrils breathing ire’ to whisper in the Abbot's ear,

Thou dunghill mass of corruptness!
What devil in hell hath told thee this?

Once he gets inside the castle, the hero hears himself ridiculed by a common minstrel; the minstrel claims that when

Wat o' the Cleuch kneel'd down to pray,
He wist not what to do or say;
But he pray'd for beef, and he pray'd for bree, [soup]
A two-hand spoon and a haggies to pree. [haggis to taste]

Wat instantly throws off his monk's cowl and begins slicing up his detractors. The poem ends merrily with his improbable victory over a whole army of mere Englishmen:

Off went the Southron heads like hail!
Not one by one, nor two by two,
But in whole files he laid them low.

Walter Scott's materialism, credulity, patriotism, and predictability are brought to light in these lines. Scott and Byron may be opposites in many ways, but Hogg is suggesting that they are both possessed by the past and by physical reality.

The funniest parts of The Poetic Mirror are three parodies of Wordsworth's unfinished poem, The Recluse. In the first, ‘The Stranger’, Hogg points out Wordsworth's visual obsession, his mundane realism, and his extravagant, prosaic moralising. A traveller—

Red was the corner of his eye, and yet
It seem'd to beam a glance of living flame

—comes to a ‘peaceful solitary lake’ where he simply wanders into the water and drowns. Later ‘Wordsworth’ leads his fellow-poets James Hogg, Robert Southey, and John Wilson to the spot, shows them the man's skeleton, and launches into a ponderous dissertation on human nature:

‘There lies the channel, and original bed,’
Continued I, still pointing to the lake,
‘From the beginning hollow'd out and scoop'd
For man's affections, else betray'd and lost,
And swallow'd up 'mid desarts infinite.
This is the genuine course, the aim and end
Of prescient reason, all conclusions else
Are abject, vain, presumptuous, and perverse.’

Like his traveller, ‘Wordsworth’ becomes enthralled by the lake, but instead of drowning he stands transfixed at the shore, hypnotised by a portentous shape he sees moving under the water:

          More had I said, resuming the discourse
.....But that, chancing again to turn my eyes
Toward the bosom of that peaceful mere,
I saw a form so ominous approach
My heart was chill'd with horror—through the wave
Slowly it came—by heaven I saw it move
Toward the grizly skeleton! …
At sight of such a hideous messenger,
Thus journeying through the bowels of the deep,
O'er sluggish leaf and unelaborate stone,
All Nature stood in mute astonishment,
As if her pulse lay still—onward it came,
And hovering o'er the bones, it linger'd there
In a most holy and impressive guise.
I saw it shake its hideous form, and move
Towards my feet—the elements were hush'd,
The birds forsook their singing, for the sight
Was fraught with wonder and astonishment.
It was a tadpole—somewhere by itself
The creature had been left, and there had come
Most timeously, by Providence sent forth,
To close this solemn and momentous tale.

If ‘The Stranger’ suggests that Wordsworth's vision is essentially static, ‘The Flying Tailor’ takes the opposite approach, attacking the English poet's capacity for far-fetched comparisons through the metaphor of a ‘Frog-like’ apprentice able to jump long distances ‘o'er the many-headed multitude’. There is such a ‘Rare correspondence, wondrous unity’ between the tailor's ‘bodily and mental form’, that, just as he is a great jumper in the physical sense, so he can also leap, in his thinking, between physical and spiritual, since he possesses ‘the power intuitive / Of diving into character’, thereby finding ‘many a mystic notch’ merely from plying his trade as a tailor:

                                        A pair
Of breeches to his philosophic eye
Were not what unto other folks they seem,
Mere simple breeches, but in them he saw
The symbol of the soul—mysterious, high
Hieroglyphics! such as Egypt's Priest
Adored upon the holy Pyramid,
Vainly imagined tomb of monarchs old,
But raised by wise philosophy, that sought
By darkness to illumine, and to spread
Knowledge by dim concealment—process high
Of man's imaginative, deathless soul.

Unrestrained by common sense, the frog-like ‘Wordsworth’ makes giant leaps, in this passage, from a pair of pants to ancient Egypt to Milton to eternal life.

In ‘James Rigg’, the next parody, Hogg finds Wordsworth fundamentally blind (despite his preoccupation with vision) and solipsistic. James Rigg is a quarry worker who accidentally blinds himself when his dynamite goes off prematurely. Rigg is so slow-witted and ponderous that it takes him several minutes to understand what has happened:

                                        He stood awhile,
Wondering from whence that tumult might proceed,
And all unconscious that the blast had dimm'd
His eyes for ever, and their smiling blue
Converted to a pale and mournful grey.
Was it, he thought, some blast the quarrymen
Blasted at Conniston, or in that vale,
Call'd from its huge and venerable yew,
Yewdale? (though other etymologists
Derive that appellation from the sheep,
Of which the female in our English tongue
Still bears the name of ewe.)
… Or had news arrived
Of Buonaparte's last discomfiture … ?
It next perhaps occurr'd to him to ask,
Himself, or some one near him, if the sound
Was not much louder than those other sounds,
Fondly imagined by him,—and both he,
And that one near him, instantly replied
Unto himself, that most assuredly
The noise proceeded from the very stone,
Which they two had so long been occupied
In boring, and that probably some spark,
Struck from the gavelock 'gainst the treacherous flint,
Had fallen amid the powder, and so caused
The stone t'explode, as gunpowder will do,
With most miraculous force, especially
When close ramm'd down into a narrow bore,
And cover'd o'er with a thin layer of sand
To exclude the air; else otherwise. …

Here James Hogg is of course hitting off Wordsworth's long-windedness, his difficulties in distinguishing between self and other, the scarcity of ‘sparks’ of wit in his poems, and above all his most ‘boring’ work, The Recluse. We are consoled at the end with the news that Rigg, though mildly upset at being blind, learns to compensate with his remaining senses, since ‘gracious Nature’ feeds the soul with images ‘even as if th' external world / Were the great wet-nurse of the human race’. Wordsworth, according to the Shepherd, is a captive of his own personal past, his infancy.

With ‘Isabelle’ and ‘The Cherub’ Hogg turns to ridiculing the obscure mysticism and portentous numerology of Coleridge. Neither poem makes any attempt to clarify the dimness, the first simply ending with the poet's enigmatic cry,

The hour's at hand, O woe is me!
For they are coming, and they are three!

and the second implying that the poet is just as confused as his reader:

The happy vision is no more!
But in its room a darker shade
Than eye hath pierced, or darkness made;
I cannot turn, yet do not know,
What I would, or whither go.

As one critic observed, Hogg has captured ‘The soft unmeaningness of what Mr. Coleridge terms a conclusion’.²⁶

‘Peter of Barnet’ is a brilliant send-up of the poet laureate Robert Southey's experiments in metre and ballad techniques. After hearing Burns's poem, ‘To a Mountain-Daisy, On turning one down, with the Plough’, the cantankerous and pompous bard rushes out to his fields to find a daisy and instruct his ploughman not to overturn it:

                                        He took a stone,
And placed it tall on end.—Herbert, said he,
When thou plough'st down this ridge, spare me this flower.
I charge thee note it well,—and for thy life
Do it no injury.—Pugh! said the clown,
Such stuff!—I shall not mind it—He went on
Whistling his tune—Oh Peter was most wroth!
He ran in hasty guise around, and looked
For a convenient stone, that he might throw
And smite the ploughman's head.—No one would suit.
Then, turning round to me, he gave full vent
To's rage against the hind, and all was o'er.
In his first heat, he cursed the menial race;
I told you they were all alike, said he,
A most provoking and ungracious set. …

This passage contrasts a sentimental attitude towards nature and the lower classes with the reality of Southey's official Toryism. It also captures Southey's heavy-handed attempts to emulate Burns, whom he greatly admired. The two sides, pretense and reality, are pointedly symbolised in the poet's two uses—equally ineffective—for stones. A ploughman himself, Burns would have been one of that ‘most provoking and ungracious set’ which this bard curses roundly; and in Burns's poem it is Burns himself, as ploughman, who speaks to the daisy after turning it under.

The other parody of Southey is the aptly-titled ‘Curse of the Laureate’. The laureate is engaged in ‘happy slumbering’, dreaming of his literary progeny as they parade before him, when suddenly the celebration is interrupted with the appearance of Francis Jeffrey, a foolish fiend who unaccountably denounces Southey's poems. A friendlier spirit then appears, whispering to ‘Southey’ that his name will last forever, ‘To Milton and to Spenser next in fame’. As the poem ends ‘Southey’ is pronouncing his long ‘awful curse of destiny’ against the critic Jeffrey. Hogg's target in ‘Curse of the Laureate’ is Southey's Curse of Kehama, in which the god Kehama, a proud, tyrannical ruler of the world and of heaven, condemns his enemy to eternal torment; the implication is that Southey resembles Kehama, and that like Kehama the laureate will fall from power and favour after uttering his curse.

Three brief imitations of Hogg's new friend John Wilson conclude The Poetic Mirror. With scathing irony, these pieces capture the disembodied and saccharine qualities of Wilson's Isle of Palms. The ‘Hymn to the Moon’ ends with the distraught ‘Wilson’ abandoned in darkness by his muse:

          Where art thou gone? all of a sudden gone?
Why hast thou left thy pensive worshipper
Sitting in the darkness on the mossy stump
Of an old oak-tree?

Deserted by his imagination, ‘Wilson’ has soon become pedantic and self-important.

The seventh of fourteen pieces in The Poetic Mirror is ‘The Gude Greye Katt’, Hogg's self-mocking parody of his ‘Witch of Fife’ and ‘Kilmeny’. The poet makes fun of his own antiquarian ballad style and his use of fantastic situations, shifting personal identities, and far-fetched metaphors and allegories. The Lairde of Blain has no wife, seven daughters, and a talking cat. His remarkably gifted cat, who is also a beautiful woman, and also the Queen of the Fairies, is examined by an evil, self-serving bishop on a charge of witchcraft. The cat then collars the bishop and carries him through the roof and up across the sky:

The braide ful mone wase up the lyft, [broad full moon]
          The nychte wase lyke ane daye, [night]
As the greate Byschope tuke his jante
          Up throu the milkey-waye.

To his chagrin the bishop is dropped into the volcanic Mount Etna, while the cat continues on her flight. Meanwhile on earth the laird's seven daughters have perished, but by the end of the poem they are dipped in ‘the krystal streime’ and given eternal life.

The symbolism of ‘The Gude Greye Katt’ can be understood in the context of earlier works such as ‘Mr Shuffleton's Allegorical Survey’, ‘Story of Two Highlanders’. and Midsummer Night Dreams. The cat unites human, natural, and supernatural qualities, and represents the imagination of James Hogg. Rational consciousness, whether of Hogg himself or of his readers or critics, is represented by the unfortunate bishop, who can only go part-way on the cat's journey, and is fittingly deposited in Mount Etna, a symbol of literary orthodoxy. The Lairde of Blain is probably James Hogg in his ordinary, public, Edinburgh or Ettrick personality; his seven daughters would then correspond to Hogg's seven books of poetry, for which he is predicting eternal life, even though they may have ‘died’ for the present.

‘The Gude Greye Katt’ is the only poem in The Poetic Mirror to present in full Hogg's version of a symbolic journey of ascent. Flying between the earth and heaven, the complex and gifted cat traces an arc which supposedly reconciles natural, human, supernatural and divine, as well as past (in this case, fifteenth-century Scotland) with present and future. The cat's song as she sweeps across the milky way is so alluring that it brings about a reunion and rejuvenation of nature on earth, with all the animals dancing in rings:

The Murecokis dancit ane seuinsum ryng [Moorcocks danced]
          Arunde the hether bell;
The Foumartis jyggit by the brukis, [Polecats jigged]
          The Maukinis by the kaile, [Hares; cabbage]
And the Otar dancit ane minowaye [minuet]
          As he gaed ouir the daile.

The cat's journey is mainly an ascent, but the other half, the descending journey, is present through the bishop's fall into the black crater, which is also Hell. The full circuit of ascent and descent would make another ‘ryng’, with each half being a mirror-image of the other, as the words of cat and bishop ironically imply:

He cryit, O Pussie, hald your gryp,
          O hald and dinna spaire;
O drap me in the yerde or se, [earth or sea]
          But dinna drap me there. [i.e., in the volcano]
But scho wase ane doure and deidlye katt, [she was]
          And scho saide with lychtsum ayre,
You kno heuin is ane blissit plece, [heaven]
          And all the prestis gang there. [priests]
Och sweete, sweete Pussye, hald your gryp,
          Spaire nouther cleke nor clawe.
Is euir that lyke heuin abone, [above]
          In quhich am lyke to fa'? [I'm like to fall?]

As in The Queen's Wake, then, the central poem in The Poetic Mirror provides a standard to help us in understanding the other constituent poems. Hogg is admitting and ridiculing his own egotism, while also insinuating that only his poems achieve a full sense of human freedom, movement, and potential. The singing, flying cat has a vitality and wholeness of vision which is sadly lacking, according to James Hogg, in most of the other poets of the day. We hear the cramped, static quality of those other poets in ‘Wordsworth's’ tell-tale allusion to ‘the unvoyageable sky’, in ‘Coleridge's’ admission that he ‘cannot turn’ and doesn't know ‘What I would, or whither go’, and in ‘Southey's’ fatuous reaction on hearing of the persecution suffered by Burns:

          D—n them! said Peter,—he thrust back his chair,
Dashed one knee o'er the other furiously,
Took snuff a double portion,—swallowed down
His glass at once,—look'd all around the room
With wrathful eye, and then took snuff again.

At the opposite extreme from these stuffy poets is ‘Byron’, whose hero Alayni ends in a frenzy of futile exertion, ‘in maniac guise 'mid bloody broil’. The poet in ‘Wat o' the Cleuch’ may think that his verse is as ‘Free as the summer's cloudless breeze’, but the reality of Scott's repetitive, monotonous poety is more accurately captured in a description of Wat in battle:

With madden'd motion, quite the same
As if his tall gigantic frame
Had been machine, that battle knell
Could set, and keep in movement well.

Whether the bards themselves are static or engaged in a frenzy of motion, Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey are each shown to depict journeys of despair, futile descents into the historical or personal past, or into a purely physical realm represented by battles, lakes, a tadpole or frog, obscurity, darkness, a daisy, or a rock. Only John Wilson is allowed an ascent, and in ‘The Morning Star’ the star's movement through the sky is Hogg's tribute to his friend's poetry, which allegedly moves

Calm onward without breeze or tide,
With stedfast and unaltered motion,
Along the bright and starry ocean.

But like the other parodies of Wilson this one ends on a note of abandonment and confusion, with the star's disappearance and the forlorn poet deserted by imagination and ‘look[ing] in vain’. With the exception of ‘The Gude Greye Katt’, each section of The Poetic Mirror describes a partial journey, a voyage downward or upward which terminates at the lowest or highest point, apparently because the poets are incapable of drawing the symbolic, universal, or social implications which would permit a return to everyday life and a useful communication to others of the experience of the journey.

James Hogg was a genuine Romantic poet, a creator of metaphors and myth to embody difficult truths. The cosmic cycles or rings of his greatest poems convey a wholeness which, as The Poetic Mirror indicates, is intended to preserve the free imagination from a reductive skepticism like that of Byron, and equally from the too-idealistic, saccharine tone of John Wilson's poetry. Other poets may present incomplete segments of descent or ascent, but Hogg tries to draw the full circle of human experience, to reconcile such opposites as reason and instinct, conscious and unconscious, objective and subjective, physical and spiritual, despair and joy, or comic and tragic.

In the mature myth-making of Mador, Midsummer Night Dreams, and The Poetic Mirror, the Shepherd develops images and motifs which were present from his very first poems. The watery element has now become the three rivers in Mador, the Loch of Dee in Midsummer Night Dreams, and the obsession of the ‘lake poets’ in The Poetic Mirror. Each work describes a downward journey into this chaotic realm, followed by a return to community. In these long poems, however, the parabola of descent is coupled with its mirror-image of an ascending journey into knowledge or imagination, as represented by the course of the sun or by the flights of Mary Lee or the good grey cat. A similar mirror-effect can be found in Queen Hynde, with its military unification of Scotland, on one hand, and reconciliation between the poet and his readers, on the other.

Like most of Hogg's best work, the major poems begin with self-confident protagonists who are separated from normal humanity by virtue of rank (like Mador and Queen Hynde), extreme suffering or exile (Ila Moore and Hynde), intelligence or skepticism (Mary Lee), discontent (Connel of Dee), or the pompous pretensions to profundity by the various poets in The Poetic Mirror. Each individualistic self then traces either the upper path of reason, imagination, or spirituality, or the lower path which leads to despair, defeat in battle, the unconscious, or physical nature. The parallels between the two journeys are most clearly shown in Midsummer Night Dreams, with Mary Lee experiencing a joyous disintegration of selfhood through her sensitive reading of poetry, and Connel experiencing a despairing disintegration of selfhood through his encounter with the purely physical, the nightmare, and the eels. However divergent the two paths may be, they converge at the end in a vision of redeemed community, social usefulness and harmony, and an implied notion of a more authentic self which has learned to accept its own relativity, its dependence upon society, nature, love, and process.

In January 1815 James Hogg was granted the rent-free possession of a small farm on Altrive Lake, in his native Ettrick Forest, as a gift from the Duke of Buccleuch. The farm was then stocked with sheep, labourers were hired to do much of the work, and Hogg was free to divide his time between country and city. His summers could now be spent fishing for ‘bull-trout, singing songs, and drinking whisky’.²⁷ A fisherman who travelled through Ettrick in June 1815 records that he ‘surprised [Hogg] in his cottage bottling whisky’.²⁸

On his visits to the capital, the Shepherd would lodge either with the newly-wed Gillies, or at Teviot Row, under the roof of John Grieve, a hat-maker and amateur poet. Here at Grieve's, ‘as business every day called his host abroad, he had the entire house to himself, with store of books and music, from the breakfast hour till dinner time’. Gillies says that this period ‘was about the happiest’ of his friend's life. For the Edinburgh evenings Hogg ‘planned music-parties after his own fancy’; these were jubilant affairs at which the poet sang, played the fiddle, danced, and got devoutly intoxicated. His future wife Margaret Phillips probably attended, as did the wealthy Mrs. Brooke Richmond, a ‘horsewoman and fox huntress’ who ‘delighted in promoting the hilarity of social circles’. A word ‘from her voice’, says Gillies, ‘would at any time rouse the Shepherd to sing the most uproarious of his festive songs’.²⁹ Another guest at these parties recalls drinking French wine ‘till ten o'clock, at which hour we transferred ourselves to the drawing-room, and began dancing reels in a most clamorous and joyous manner, to the music sometimes of the Shepherd's fiddle—sometimes of the harpsichord’.³⁰

Meanwhile the farm at Altrive was becoming a financial strain, especially with an economic depression getting under way in 1816. As the storm worsened Hogg wrote less verse and turned to the short stories and novels which would appeal to a wider, more dependable, less educated market. For the rest of his life most of his income came from short pieces written for Blackwood's and other periodicals. The new audience wanted gossip, personality, and humour, at the expense of imagination, ideas, and wit, yet paradoxically the fiction of his last two decades is James Hogg's greatest artistic achievement.

Hogg was a prolific writer, and only the brevity of this study prevents consideration of his vast number of songs, his verse dramas (which were published but never performed), his masque and anti-masque for the coronation of George the Fourth, his collection of Jacobite Relics, and the many ballads and pastorals of his last two decades. Brief mention may be made of his droll mock-epic called ‘Russiadde; a Fragment of an Ancient Epic Poem’, in which the Shepherd laughs at his own cosmic myth-making. An earthy, Scottish hero named Russ falls in love with the moon, and is taken on her back ‘through the yielding air, / Through bowels of the earth and sea’.³¹ Even down in the underwater bower of Venus, Russ retains his stolid imperturbability:

          Russ was a fisher good and keen,
At many a bout on Tweed had been,
And still he kept an eager eye
On every large one swagging bye.

Love, universal values, community, and profound simplicity are qualities of Hogg's shorter poems and songs. ‘My Emma, my darling’ was published in the 1831 Songs, by the Ettrick Shepherd, although it was written many years before. This delightful, direct piece tells of a youth who invites his sweetheart to

                    fly to the glee of the city again,
Where a day never wakes but some joy it renews,
And a night never falls but that joy it pursues;
Where the dance is so light, and the hall is so bright,
And life whirls onward one round of delight.
Would we feel that we love and have spirits refined,
We must mix with the world, and enjoy humankind.

An unjustifiably neglected ballad is ‘Cary O'Kean’, Hogg's story (based on the Bounty mutiny of 1789) of an Irish sailor who falls in love with a Polynesian girl. O'Kean's speech as he sails away from his homeland is the first of several implied comparisons between the two islands of Ireland and Tahiti:

Adieu! once lov'd country, thy name be forgot,
For interest pervades thee, and feeling is not.
I'll circle the earth, some sweet island to find,
Where primitive innocence models the mind;
Where nature blooms fair on the face of the free.(32)

After the dreadful events of this ballad, the poet concludes with a direct statement of James Hogg's belief in the possibility of reconciling natural and spiritual aspects of human life:

          But there is a feeling engrafted on mind,
A shoot of eternity never defin'd,
That upward still climbs to its origin high;
Its roots are in nature, it blooms in the sky.

James Hogg was fifty years old in 1820, the year of his marriage. His appearance had not improved with age. A Glasgow student saw him in 1818 as a ‘thick, sturdy, blowsy, looking fellow’ who ‘had the appearance of a porter to cudgel our worthy townsman’³³—the townsman being John Douglas, editor of Glasgow's Chronicle newspaper. John Lockhart, one of the new Blackwood's writers, gives this portrait of Hogg:

His face and hands are still as brown as if he lived entirely sub dio. His very hair has a coarse stringiness about it, … and hangs in playful whips and cords about his ears, in a style of the most perfect innocence imaginable. His mouth, … when he smiles, nearly cuts the totality of his face in twain … for his teeth have been allowed to grow where they listed, presenting more resemblance in arrangement, (and colour too,) to a body of crouching sharp-shooters.

Still, the great phrenologist Dr Spurzheim could detect ‘marks of genius in the cranium of the pastoral poet’, according to Lockhart, who pictures the popular craniologist eagerly examining a skeptical Hogg ‘—and some cranioscopical young ladies of Edinburgh are said still to practise in the same way upon the good-humoured owner of so many fine bumps’.³⁴

Notes

1. [James] Hogg, ‘Memoir [of the Author's Life]’, [in Memoir of the Author's Life and Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott, ed. Douglas S. Mack (Edinburgh and London), 1972] p. 30.

2. [Bessie] Gillies, Memoirs, II, 127.

3. Pollock's New Guide Through Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1834), p. 138.

4. ‘Christopher North’, in ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’, XXIX, Blackwood's Magazine, Nov. 1826, p. 770.

5. Gillies, Memoirs, II, 188, 128.

6. Hogg, ‘Memoir’, p. 32.

7. Anon. rev. in Eclectic Review, Feb. 1817, p. 175.

8. Anon. revs. in British Critic, Jan. 1817, p. 97; British Lady's Magazine, Oct. 1816, p. 253; Scots Magazine, June 1816, p. 449; and Antijacobin Review, June 1817, p. 335.

9. Rev. Thomas Thomson, ‘Prefatory Notice’ to Hogg's Mador of the Moor, in The Works of the Ettrick Shepherd, ed. Thomson, 2 vols. (1865; rev. London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, 1874), II, 104.

10. Letter to Bernard Barton, 14 May 1813, NLS 3278, f. 64.

11. G. T., ‘Lines on James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd’, British Lady's Magazine, Dec. 1816, p. 407.

12. [Nelson C.] Smith, James Hogg (Boston, 1980), p. 133.

13. Gifford, rev. of Smith's James Hogg, Scottish Literary Journal, supplement no. 17 (Winter 1982), p. 87.

14. Anon., ‘On the Genius of Hogg’, Literary Speculum, 2 vols. (London, 1822), II, 441.

15. Letter to Murray, 26 Dec. 1814, printed in Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and His Friends, 3 vols. (London, 1891), I, 344.

16. Anon. revs. in Scots Magazine, Dec. 1814, p. 932; North American Review, June 1819, pp. 15, 23; Salopian Magazine, May 1815, p. 239; Eclectic Review, Mar. 1815, p. 280; and Augustan Review, May 1815, p. 30.

17. Hogg, ‘Memoir’, pp. 32, 33.

18. Hogg, ‘Connel of Dee’, in his Winter Evening Tales, 2 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1820), II, 204-22.

19. Hogg, ‘On Carmel's Brow’, in his Sacred Melodies (London, 1815); rpt. in The Poetical Works of James Hogg, 4 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1822), IV, 223-24.

20. Hogg, ‘Superstition’, appended to his Pilgrims of the Sun (Edinburgh and London, 1815), pp. 131-48.

21. Hogg, ‘Memoir’, p. 40.

22. Anon. revs. in Lady's Magazine, Feb. 1825, p. 97; Literary Cynosure, 22 Jan. 1825, p. 14; Westminster Review, Apr. 1825, p. 531; Philomathic Journal, Apr. 1825, p. 161; Edinburgh Observer, 22 Dec. 1824, p. 4; Literary Gazette, 25 Dec. 1824, p. 817; Ayr Correspondent, 31 Dec. 1824, p. 29; and Monthly Critical Gazette, Mar. 1825, p. 343.

23. Hogg, ‘Memoir’, p. 69.

24. Byron, letter to Thomas Moore, 3 Aug. 1814, rpt. in Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Marchand, 12 vols. (London, 1975-82), IV, 152.

25. Byron, letter to Hogg, 1 Mar. 1816, rpt. in Byron's Letters and Journals, V, 38.

26. Anon. rev. in British Lady's Magazine, May 1816, p. 385.

27. Hogg, letter to John Murray, 7 May 1815, rpt. in Strout, Life and Letters of James Hogg, p. 258.

28. Wilson, letter to Jane Wilson, printed in Mary Gordon, ‘Christopher North’: A Memoir of John Wilson (Edinburgh, 1862), p. 186.

29. Gillies, Memoirs, II, 242, 243.

30. [John Gibson Lockhart], Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1819), III, 140-41.

31. Hogg, ‘The Russiadde’, in his Poetical Works (1822), III, 295-359. Unfortunately the commonest edition of Hogg's verse (—Thomson's Works of the Ettrick Shepherd—) omits the second half of ‘The Russiade’.

32. ‘Cary O'Kean, A Poem: By James Hogg’, Scots Magazine, Dec. 1821, pp. 575-81.

33. Anon. rev., ‘Hogg's Three Perils of Woman’, Emmet, 18 Oct. 1823, p. 25.

34. [Lockhart], Peter's Letters, I, 139, and II, 341.