CHAPTER 6 



THE POETIC MIRPvOR, ETC. 



The removal from Edinburgh to Altrive necessitated a cer- 

 tain expenditure of money in stocking the farm. Hogg was 

 bankrupt at the time, and he prepared The Poetic Mirror in 

 order to make the money needed to stock his new farm. His 

 plan was to issue a volume of poems, each poem written by 

 one of the leading popular poets of the day. Many of them 

 were quick to promise assistance, and Byron originally in- 

 tended Lyra for The Poetic Mirror; but few of Hogg's brother 

 bards were as quick to redeem as to give their promises, and 

 Scott absolutely refused to have anything to do with the 

 venture. 



This refusal was the cause of their only serious quarrel. 

 Hogg counted upon Scott's contribution as equivalent to the 

 success of the volume. Scott refused to contribute because 

 he considered it unwise and unmanly for Hogg to make money 

 out of other people's work. Hogg's hasty temper, however, 

 caused him to imagine that Scott's refusal was mere dis- 

 courtesy. He wrote Scott an abusive letter and they were 

 quite estranged for several months. Says Hogg: 



I could not even endure to see him at a distance, I felt so degraded 

 by the refusal, and I was at that time more disgusted with all man- 

 kind than I have ever been before, or have ever been since. 



The result of this quarrel is related below in the words of 

 Mr. Thomson. 



It must have been about this time that the Ettrick Shepherd became 

 a member of the Right and Wrong Club. The present was still a 

 transition period of Scottish Society, in which much of the wildness 

 and irregularity of the latter part of the eighteenth century continued 

 to linger; even the embers of the Hellfire Club were not yet wholly 

 extinguished; and sym2:)osia were frequent among literary characters 

 and men of mark, which only forty years after would have been eschewed 

 hy the common people as disreputable. It was not therefore surprising 

 that the social unsuspecting disposition of the Shepherd should involve 

 him in some one of these vortices, and that for a season he should be 

 whirled about in its giddy revolutions. This Right and Wrong Club 

 was established one evening at dinner, and among some choice spirits, 

 tainted with the leaven of the old school, with their entertainer, a young 

 lawyer, afterwards a distinguished barrister, at their head; and their 

 principle of association was, that whatever any of its members should 



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