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Indiana University Studies 



help to make this ballad the very essence of uncanny realism. 

 Two compositions of a very different kind are The Farewell 

 to Ettrick and The Author's Address to his Old Dog Hector. 

 No shepherd is ever without his dog, but no shepherd, one 

 fancies, ever loved dogs with a love like this shepherd. Dogs 

 are on every page of his life and works. No tenderer, more 

 sympathetic tribute of genuine affection for the four-footed 

 companions of the hills ever flowed from the pen of a poet 

 than this address to ''my auld towzy, trusty friend''. Hogg 

 was ever a master of pathos, and his pathos sprang from his 

 deepest heart. It was the sight of so many dead larks in a 

 London market that inspired the most beautiful of all his 

 lyrics. It is not surprising, then, that the thought of break- 

 ing all the old home ties on the occasion of the emigration to 

 Harris should have prompted such a tender, touching Fare- 

 tvell. Were Hogg's reputation as a poet to rest upon the 

 pages of The Mountain Bard, these three poems alone would 

 constitute a sufficient claim to the title of a poet of true and 

 varied power. 



Hogg never possessed ready money without feeling a re- 

 markable desire to ''blow it in", if such slang be permitted, 

 for no other phrase so well expresses the headless, exuberant, 

 slapdash way in which he set about to spend his little for- 

 tune without consideration. He had acted thus in the Harris 

 scheme in which he recklessly threw away all his earnings of 

 ten years at Blackhouse ; he repeated the experience now ; and 

 he was doomed to do it more than once again as the years 

 rolled on. 



Nothing would do but Hogg must set up as a farmer on 

 his own responsibility as his father had unwisely done before 

 him. Hogg seems to have been a trusty shepherd, but he pos- 

 sessed none of the canny Scotchman's talent for affairs. He 

 expended all the fortune that he had derived from the pub- 

 lication of the two volumes, in a farm in Dumfrieshire that 

 was far beyond his means to stock. It remained but half- 

 stocked, and was also conducted in a careless way that from 

 the first foretold ruin and destruction. Scott tells us that 

 Hogg's partner was shiftless and given to drink; and here is 

 a picture drawn by an eye-witness that not only shows the 

 condition of affairs on the Shepherd's farm but also explains 

 as well much of his inmost character. 



Hogg from being a shepherd on the farm of Mitchel-Slack took, in 

 company with Edie Brydon, the farm of Lockerben. When I paid a 



