Immediately afterward he adds--"I must apprise you, that, whenever I have occasion to speak of myself and my performances, I find it impossible to divest myself of an inherent vanity." Of this no one can doubt either the truth or the candor of the confession. He tells us that he was the second of four sons of Robert Hogg and Margaret Laidlaw, the wife in Scotland often retaining her maiden name. That his father was a shepherd, but, saving money, had taken the farms of Ettrick-house and Ettrick-hall. At the latter place Hogg was born, he says, on the 25th of January, 1772; but he assigns this date to his birth out of his desire to resemble Robert Burns, so much as even to have been born on the same day and month. He used to boast of this, and even of some similar occurrence, as of having been in some sort of danger at his birth through a storm, and the necessary help for his mother being difficult to procure in night and tempest. He has related, in his life, that he was born on the same day of the same month as Burns, but on referring to the parish registry it did not bear him out, but showed him to have been born on the 9th of December, 1770. He tells us that his father was ruined, and that they were turned out of doors without a farthing when he was six years old, but that a worthy neighboring farmer, Mr. Brydon of Crosslie, took compassion on them, leased the farm of Ettrick-house, one of those Hogg's father had occupied, and put him as shepherd upon it. Here the embryo poet went to the parish school just by for a few months, and then at Whitsuntide was sent out to service to a farmer in the neighborhood, as a herd-boy. The account that he gives of himself, as a lad of seven years old, in this solitary employment on the hills, is curious enough. "My wages for the half-year were a ewe-lamb and a pair of new shoes. Even at that early age my fancy seems to have been a hard neighbor for both judgment and memory. I was wont to strip off my clothes, and run races against time, or rather against myself; and in the course of these exploits, which I accomplished much to my own admiration, I first lost my plaid, then my bonnet, then my coat, and finally my hosen, for as for shoes, I had none." The next winter, he tells us, he went to school again for a quarter, got into a class who read in the Bible, and "horribly defiled several sheets of paper with copy lines, every letter of which was nearly an inch long." This, he says, finished his education, and that he never was another day at school. The whole of his career of schooling he computes at about half-a-year, but says that his old schoolmaster even denied this, declaring that he never was at his school at all! What a stock of education on which to set up shepherd, farmer, and poet!