Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. IV. The Nineteenth Century: Wordsworth to Rossetti
James Hogg (17701835)Critical Introduction by William Minto
[The ‘Ettrick Shepherd,’ born in 1770 in Selkirkshire, where his forefathers had been sheep-farmers for generations, was ‘discovered’ by Sir Walter Scott very much in the same way in which Allan Cunningham was discovered by Cromek. Scott struck across him while engaged in his search for The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. The living minstrel, in this case however, was not under the necessity of passing off his own poems as relics of an older time; Scott at once recognised his talent, and gave him a helping hand. Hogg threw aside the crook for the pen, migrated to Edinburgh, and wrote for the magazines and the booksellers. He was one of the projectors of Blackwood’s Magazine in 1817, and became famous as one of the interlocutors in the Noctes Ambrosianae. The Queen’s Wake, on which his poetic reputation chiefly rests, was published in 1813. He died in 1835.]