Stephenson: The Ettrick Shepherd 69 



actor, so Hogg lacked that genius that would have made him 

 a great creative writer like Scott. His earliest ambition was, 

 not to be a poet, but to be a poet like Burns. It was Scott's 

 open and avowed imitation of the ancient ballads in the third 

 volume of The Minstrelsy that led Hogg into a similar at- 

 tempt, which resulted in The Mountain Bard. And, doubtless, 

 it was in imitation of Scott that he produced The Brownie of 

 Bodsbeck and The Siege of Roxburgh. Tho Hogg occasionally 

 rose above the plane of imitation, it characterizes most of his 

 work, prose as well as verse. It was because he mimiced so 

 well that he deserves so high a place among writers, for he 

 sometimes mimiced the life about him as well as the writings 

 of others. His mimicry of real life is so perfect that it often 

 becomes tedious, lacking, as it does, that art of omission which 

 alone makes realism seem real and is at the same time artistic. 



We know so little of just what Hogg read that we cannot 

 say positively that here or there he intended to imitate just 

 this or that. But, knowing his general tendency, one cannot 

 escape the idea that he was familiar with DeFoe. The Ad- 

 ventures of Captain Johfi Locky is so exactly like Captain 

 Singleton that one could fancy that both sprang from the same 

 brain ; yet the fact that it is so far different that DeFoe might 

 have written them both without laying himself open to the 

 charge of repetition is testimony to the capital skill of Hogg's 

 execution. 



Allan Gordon might have fallen from the pen of DeFoe in- 

 stead of Robinson Crusoe, and still have taken the world by 

 storm. The hero goes north in a whaler which is caught in 

 the ice-floe and lost. He alone escapes to have three years of 

 strange adventures in the northern seas. The ingenuity he 

 displays, the hair-breadth escapes, the touching companion- 

 ship with a polar bear which he rears from a cub, above all, 

 the naive simplicity which makes one believe implicitly for the 

 time being that he is reading a simple tale of fact and personal 

 experience is all DeFoe, nothing more, nothing less. We can 

 fancy that Hogg read Crusoe and said, "I will do that too", 

 jilst as he actually said that he would write like Bums, when 

 he first heard Tarn O' Shanter. And he perfoiTned his task so 

 skilfully that he is almost equal to his copy. 



It is not the present writer's intention to belittle Hogg's 

 work by harping upon this element of imitation. He firmly 

 believes that Hogg's imitations are far better than Scott's 



