A quaint and interesting if not supremely important figure among the poets of this period, and, if his poetry and prose be taken together, a very considerable man of letters,--perhaps the most considerable man of letters in English who was almost totally uneducated,--was James Hogg, who was born in Ettrick Forest in the year 1772. He was taken from school to mind sheep so early that much later he had to teach himself even reading and writing afresh; and, though he must have had the song-gift early, it was not till he was nearly thirty that he published anything. He was discovered by Scott, to whom he and his mother supplied a good deal of matter for the _Border Minstrelsy_, and he published again in 1803. The rest of his life was divided between writing--with fair success, though with some ill-luck from bankrupt publishers--and sheep-farming, on which he constantly lost, though latterly he sat rent free under the Duke of Buccleuch. He died on 21st November 1835. Even during his life Hogg underwent a curious process of mythopoeia at the hands of Wilson and the other wits of _Blackwood's Magazine_, who made him--partly with his own consent, partly not--into the famous "Ettrick Shepherd" of the _Noctes Ambrosianae_. "The Shepherd" has Hogg's exterior features and a good many of his foibles, but is endowed with considerably more than his genius. Even in his published and acknowledged works, which are numerous, it is not always quite easy to be sure of his authorship; for he constantly solicited, frequently received, and sometimes took without asking, assistance from Lockhart and others. But enough remains that is different from the work of any of his known or possible coadjutors to enable us to distinguish his idiosyncrasy pretty well. In verse he was a very fluent and an exceedingly unequal writer, who in his long poems chiefly, and not too happily, followed Scott, but who in the fairy poem of "Kilmeny" displayed an extraordinary command of a rare form of poetry, and who has written some dozens of the best songs in the language. The best, but only a few of the best, of these are "Donald Macdonald," "Donald M'Gillavry," "The Village of Balmanhapple," and the "Boy's Song." In prose he chiefly attempted novels, which have no construction at all, and few merits of dialogue or style, but contain some powerful passages; while one of them, _The Confessions of a Justified Sinner_, if it is entirely his, which is very doubtful, is by far the greatest thing he wrote, being a story of _diablerie_ very well designed, wonderfully fresh and enthralling in detail, and kept up with hardly a slip to the end. His other chief prose works are entitled _The Brownie of Bodsbeck_, _The Three Perils of Man_, _The Three Perils of Woman_, and _Altrive Tales_, while he also wrote some important, and in parts very offensive, but also in parts amusing, _Recollections of Sir Walter Scott_. His verse volumes, no one of which is good throughout, though hardly one is