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Indiana University Studies 



lately emerged from barbarity, and till this present age the poor illiter- 

 ate people in these glens knew of no other entertainment in the long 

 winter nights than in repeating and listening to these feats of their 

 ancestors which I believe to be handed down inviolate from father to 

 son for many generations, although, no doubt, had a copy been taken 

 of them at the end of every fifty years, there must have been the same 

 difference which the repeater would have insensibly fallen into, merely 

 by the change of terms in that time. I believe it is thus that many 

 very antient songs have been modernized, . . . 



Pardon, my dear Sir, the freedom I have taken in addressing you, — 

 it is my nature and I could not resist the impulse of writing to you 

 any longer. Let me hear from you as soon as this comes to your hand, 

 and tell me when you will be in Ettrick Forest, and suffer me to sub- 

 scribe myself, your most humble and affectionate servant, 



James Hogg. 



It was this letter that brought Scott to the Shepherd's hut 

 and resulted, among other things, in the addition of the bal- 

 lad of Auld Maitland to the collection of the Minstrelsy. 

 Many merry adventures concerning their antiquarian hunt are 

 related in the Autobiography and are also described twenty 

 years later in Lines to Sir Walter Scott. This, tho not their 

 first meeting was the beginning of their friendship which 

 lasted till the death of Sir Walter. For thirty years his kindly 

 nature never lost sight of the self -cultivated shepherd whom 

 he assisted first and last in a thousand ways. 



About this time, Hogg, who was always looking somewhere 

 else, in a mistaken notion that he could thus better his con- 

 dition, undertook a journey to Harris. His acquaintance with 

 the Highlands is connected with an interesting page in his 

 literary career. His first trip thither was in 1793 when he 

 took a flock of sheep from Blackhouse to Strathfillan. In 

 1801 he traveled in the Grampian Mountains and penetrated 

 as far as the sources of the river Dee. A series of five let- 

 ters that appeared in the Scots' Magazine between October, 



1802, and June, 1803, are addressed to S W Esq. 



A fourth tour was similarly described in a series of letters that 

 were printed by Alexander Gardner of Paisley in 1888, with 

 the following Introductory Note : 



The following letters, descriptive of a tour which the Ettrick Shep- 

 herd made in the Highlands in the year 1803 have recently been dis- 

 covered by his daughter, Mrs. Garden, among her father's papers. They 

 were to all appearance intended for the eye of Sir Walter Scott, but 

 whether they were ever read by him is unknown. So far as can be 

 ascertained after the most careful search they have never before been 



