the Scottish poet, but greatly above his self-important patron. Allan Ramsay, the author of the finest pastoral of any age or country, was bred a hairdresser, and for sometime practised that ignoble employment, yet he lived in a literary city, and the stores of knowledge with which it abounded were open to him; and we know that Burns, so far from being illiterate, had acquired greatly more knowledge at twenty years of age than many of the young men who issue from our universities at the same period. He could not read the Greek and Latin authors in the original, but he knew much of what they contained through the medium of translations, and no man could better estimate their beauties; and he was most intimately acquainted with a number of the more elegant English authors. Hogg was placed at a greater distance from the common avenues to knowledge than any literary man with whose history we are acquainted; and, indeed, calculating from the usual chances, they seemed to be shut against him for ever, even when he had arrived at manhood; for he could then read with difficulty, and could not write at all; and at an age when Terence had delighted Rome by the representation of the Andria, and Burns had composed his Cottar's Saturday Night, he was following his flocks among the mountains, equally ignorant of letters and the ways of the world; but he had genius within him, and the fairest page of the volume of nature lay open before him, and they were to him all in all.

We shall now resume the consideration of the Mountain Bard, which we were obliged to leave unfinished in our last Number from want of room. If this volume really be as meritorious a production as we then endeavoured to represent it, it may be asked why it had so little success on its first appearance? To this failure several causes contributed, not in the least connected with its merits; but the chief of these was the number of poets of the lower orders, who, encouraged by the success of Burns, swarmed in almost every village and parish of Scotland. Among this class the mania of poetry seemed to have become an epidemic, that required a salutary check. Some people confounded the Etterick Shepherd with them, and gave themselves

little trouble about the justice or injustice of the sentence; others, not less inconsiderate, compared the Mountain Bard with the first productions of Burns, with whom to attempt and to succeed were the same thing, and because it was unequal to them, they rashly concluded that its author possessed no genius.

It is not our intention at present to institute a comparison between two men, who seem to us to be dissimilar in all respects but originality of genius. For such a parallel a more proper opportunity will occur in the progress of this investigation; we shall only say now that Burns, besides the amazing superiority of execution, has been more fortunate in the choice of his subjects than the self-taught shepherd in these, his earlier productions. His poems generally describe manners, with which the world are more familiar than the legends of the Mountain Bard; and all saw the truth and the beauty of the picture, and received the work with partiality and favour, arising from the circumstances of the man, as well as from its extraordinary merit. We think, however, that each has chosen such subjects as his situation suggested, and it is curious that nature should have conferred on each the qualities of mind most suitable for perfecting his own species of poetry: On Burns, an eloquent pathos, that finds the nearest way to the heart, and never fails of its effect there;-on Hogg, a fancy that loves to hold its moonlight revels among the fays of a haunt ed glen; and as we think we may venture to predict, that Hogg will never equal the Cottar's Saturday Night in the same walk of genius, so we suspect that Burns could not have produced any thing similar to Kilmeny.

In forming to ourselves a fair estimate of Mr Hogg's talent in the composition of these poems, we ought to remember that they are the works of an unlettered shepherd, produced while he was tending his flocks, when his reading was extremely limited; for, though he could not have been placed in a more favourable situation for receiving poetical impressions, and storing up poetical ideas, yet, as language is the instrument by which these are communicated to others,-in order to succeed in poetry, a man must understand the use and the handling

Wi' waesome face, and hingin' head, Thou wad ha'e press'd thee to my knee."

"Yes, my puir beast! though friends me

scorn,

Whom mair than life I valued dear; An' throw me out to fight forlorn,

Wi' ills my heart dow hardly bear, While I have thee to bear a partMy plaid, my health, an' heezle rungI'll scorn the silly haughty heart,

The saucy look, and slanderous tongue. I'll get a cottage 0' my ain,

Some wee bit cannie, lonely biel',
Where thy auld heart shall rest fu' fain,
An' share with me my humble meal.
When my last bannock's on the hearth,
Of that thou sanna want thy share;
While I have house or hald on earth,
My Hector shall ha'e shelter there.
An' should grim death thy noddle save,
Till he has made an end of me,
Ye'll lye a wee while on the grave

Of ane wha ay was kind to thee." p. 183.

In these essays it has been our object to trace the progress of an extraordinary and self-elevated genius, and to mark the circumstances in his situation which retarded or promoted the developement of its powers. Our remarks, therefore, have been rather historical than critical; yet we think the Mountain Bard, with all its defects, gave certain indications of the poetical eminence to which its author has since attained, and which the world has long ago recognized, though in some instances, perhaps, rather reluctantly. Hitherto we have considered his works, to a certain extent at least, with a relation to the situation in which they were produced; and we think it only justice to say, that no man so circumstanced ever composed poems of such merit. As we know he despises eulogy as much as he is raised above it, we shall henceforth bring him to the bar of an impartial criticism, without reference to any thing but the work before us; and we are satisfied the result will be as honourable to him as delightful to us.

When he began to write poetry he little thought of becoming author by profession, and he was led to it at last by necessity, not from choice. On the publication of the Mountain Bard, after various adventures, he rented a sheep-farm in Dumfries-shire; but from a succession of bad seasons, by which his little flock perished, and from other misfortunes which it is

not the object of this memoir to enumerate, he was driven out from the possession in great destitution, and suffered severe anguish from the total overthrow of his hopes. In this season of despondency, he would have gladly hired himself as a shepherd, and again returned to the humble state of a servant, but the scandal of poetry had now attached to his name, and he could not find a master, as all judged that the man who had addicted himself to that thriftless trade, was unfit for any thing else, and to it they liberally ascribed the failure of his schemes, rather than to the inclemency of the seasons, and the rack-rent of his farm. Nothing was now left to him but to endeavour to earn that morsel of bread by literature, which seemed to be denied to him in any other way; and thus circumstanced, he repaired to Edinburgh, not a deserter from his flocks, as he has been represented in some of our literary journals, but actually an exile from his native mountains.

But in whatever he was unfortunate, no man was ever happier in the possession of friends, and though they were then far from being numerous, that deficiency was fully balanced by their devoted attachment; and to this the valuable qualities of the man contributed not less than the admiration of his genius.

The first work that he published, after settling in Edinburgh, was the Forest Minstrel, a volume of songs written chiefly before he left the country. Not above two thirds of them are his own, the rest having been contributed by friends; and though some of them are good, the book attracted little notice, and is indeed the least meritorious of all his performances. Lucy's Flittin', one of the most beautiful songs in the volume, is the production of Mr W. Laidlaw. It displays such true pastoral simplicity and natural pathos, that we think it deserves to be better known, and we believe that our readers will thank us for its insertion.

""Twas when the wan leaf frae the birk tree was fa'in',

An' Martinmas dowie had wind up the That Lucy row'd up her wee kist, wi' her year, a'in't,

An' left her auld master, an' neibers sac dear.

The next undertaking in which Mr Hogg engaged was the Spy, a weekly paper in its form and mode of publication, at least, in imitation of the Spectator. This was the most extraordinary of all his enterprises. The public remembered that all the great periodical works of the country had been the joint productions of the most distinguished literary men of the age in which they were published. They knew that Addison, and Steele, and Johnson, and Mackenzie, were not only men of great original genius, but of cultivated and accomplished minds, deeply read in ancient and modern literature, and extensively acquainted with mankind; and it was considered temerity, bordering on madness, that a man, newly escaped from his flocks and his mountains, ere his garments were purified from the smoke of the shepherd's cottage, should dare to follow in their path. The taste of the people had been improved by the style of the Spectator;-their moral feelings had been elevated by the religious and philosophical spirit of its graver papers, and in its lighter effusions they had been amused by a wit unalloyed by malice, and a humour free from grossness ;-they had been instructed in their most important duties by the dignified and eloquent lessons of the Rambler; and in the Mirror and the Lounger they had been delighted and refined by a tenderness of sentiment, and a sweetness of composition that aimed at their improvement through the heart and the fancy; but what were they to expect from the critic whose reading was confined to a few old ballads, and whose knowledge of mankind was limited to a country wedding or a village fair. Such were the feelings with which the work was received, and they were natural enough; but the public was not aware of the powers of the man who now stepped forward to claim their notice. It was, besides, not even the aim of the editor to imitate those standard works, much less to enter into any rivalship with them, but rather to give sketches of country life and manners, and to write tales into which they should be introduced. He received little assistance in the progress of the work; greatly more than one-half of the papers being written by himself, and almost all the poetry; and strange as it may appear, in spite