it by "glaikit Englishers" (I am a glaikit Englisher who does not depreciate), simply because it is unfamiliar and rustic-looking, is silly enough. But its best practitioners are sometimes prone to forget that nothing ready-made will do as poetry, and that you can no more take a short cut to Parnassus by spelling good "guid" and liberally using "ava," than you can execute the same journey by calling a girl a nymph and a boy a swain. The reason why Burns is a great poet, and one of the greatest, is that he seldom or never does this in Scots. When he takes to the short cut, as he does sometimes, he usually "gets to his English." Of Hogg, who wrote some charming things and many good ones, the same cannot be said. No writer known to me, not even the eminent Dr. Young, who has the root of the poetical matter in him at all, is so utterly uncritical as Hogg. He does not seem even to have known when he borrowed and when he was original. We have seen that he told Scott that he was not of his school. Now a great deal that he wrote, perhaps indeed actually the major part of his verse, is simply imitation and not often very good imitation of Scott. Here is a passage:-- Light on her airy steed she sprung, Around with golden tassels hung. No chieftain there rode half so free, Or half so light and gracefully. How sweet to see her ringlets pale Wide-waving in the southland gale, Which through the broom-wood odorous flew To fan her cheeks of rosy hue! Whene'er it heaved her bosom's screen What beauties in her form were seen! And when her courser's mane it swung, A thousand silver bells were rung. A sight so fair, on Scottish plain, A Scot shall never see again. I think we know where this comes from. Indeed Hogg had a certain considerable faculty of conscious parody as well as of unconscious imitation, and his _Poetic Mirror_, which he wrote as a kind of humorous revenge on his brother bards for refusing to contribute, is a fair second to _Rejected Addresses_. The amusing thing is that he often parodied where he did not mean parody in the least, and nowadays we do not want Scott-and-water. Another vein of Hogg's, which he worked mercilessly, is a similar imitation, not of Scott, but of the weakest echoes of Percy's _Reliques_:-- O sad, sad, was young Mary's plight: She took the cup, no word she spake, She had even wished that very night To sleep and never more to wake. Sad, sad indeed is the plight of the poet who publishes verses like this, of which there are thousands of lines to be found in Hogg. And then one comes to "Kilmeny," and the note changes with a vengeance:--