double the siller. I wad cast the money in your face, rather than sell my poor beast's life for half-a-crown.”

I had heard or read somewhere, that the loudest speaker in a vulgar quarrel always comes off victorious; and, finding that I could not bring my landlady to reason in any other way, I raised my voice to its utmost pitch, and said in my most determined manner, that if she did not choose to take what I offered, I would give nothing at all, and besides prosecute her for damage done to my rod and line, and the loss of my fly. The woman's choler fell as mine seemed to rise; she remarked, in a subdued tone, "that her husband aye said she was owre hasty in her temper; that she saw I was a gentleman, and wadna wrang a poor body; and that she wad just tak what I liked to gie, though it would be lang indeed before the bairns got a hen like poor Tappie."

With little more ado I finished my breakfast. My hostess had her hen killed for nothing, and the price of it to the bargain; and two trouts to the little girls put an end to the mourning for the unfortunate hen and her helpless babies.

Mr Matthews, when you choose to be At Home in our city, send me notice thereof, and I shall make the above into a very capital law-case for your use, and the decision of the public,for the lawyers of my acquaintance have not yet made up their minds, whether the woman was entitled to damages for the death of her furtive hen, or me, for injury done to my line, and the loss of an innocent fly.

A bird in hand is worth two in the bush says the English proverb, and English proverbs sometimes say true. I was shooting sea-fowl on Portobello sands, at a season when no other shooting is permitted, and for a long time I had wasted powder and patent shot to little purpose. The mews, ducks, and gulls, either flew provokingly high, or at a tormenting distance, and I could not bring one down. In fact, none of them had a mind to be wounded or die that morning, which I thought very strange indeed. At last, however, a large grey gull flew past. I immediately levelled at him, and had the good fortune to see him tumble on the sands before me. I ran

to complete my conquest, hoping he was not mortally wounded, for I wanted one of this species very much to pick up the worms and insects in my garden; but when within a yard of where he lay, and almost ready to stoop for the purpose of lifting him up, he eyed me with a significant glance, and then, half running half flying, seemed to say, "Off we go!-catch me if you can.' I ran pretty fast, but he ran still faster; and after a coursing along the beach, which even arrested the half-naked bathers to witness its termination, my gull friend got over a garden dike at Joppa, and, having placed the highroad between him and me, disappeared in a corn field.

Was there ever any thing more provoking! But this world is full of disappointments; and, after all, it is not so humiliating to be gulled by a gull, as by one of one's own species. Being sufficiently tired by my chace, I left the bathers to dress themselves in peace, and determined to "wend my weary way" back again to town, and to repair the waste of the morning's expedition by a comfortable dinner.

I had walked nearly half way to Edinburgh, and had entered the range of houses called Jock's Lodge, when, to my astonishment and delight, I perceived my friend the gull stalking quietly by the side of the road, and picking his feathers, very much at his ease. "Ah, my good fellow," thought I, "I shall have you at last;" and to leap across the road and catch up the animal, was but the work of a mo ment. I got him under my arm almost unresisting, and having slung my fowling-piece on my shoulder, I gaily ascended the rising ground to the city. I had got but a few yards, however, when one of a few children standing by a door cried out, "Eh, there's a man wi' a gull."-" A gull? odd its very like Jenny Cameron's," was the response of another. “It's just it,” cried a third; and surmise being in creased to conviction among the little whipper-snappers, the whole sung out in chorus, "Jenny! Jenny Cameron! here's a man stealing your gull." Jenny made her appearance forthwith from the door of a little alehouse: "Stop the man wi' my beast," cried Jemmy; "bairns, cry to the sogers to stop that man!" I turned to explain to Mrs Janet, that it could not by any possibility be her gull, for that I had

wounded it at Portobello, and pursued it a good way in the fields. "Nane your lies to me," said Jenny; "ye may have shot at a gull in your day, for aught I ken; but ye havena shot at this ane this ae half year. Ye'll see the mark o' my sheers on the creature's wing," continued she, "and every bairn in the place kens it fu' weil." It came across my mind, that Janet might be in the right after all; and seeing none of the usual marks of powder and lead on the animal, and moreover finding that one of its wings was actually cut, I delivered up my prize, with many apologies for my stupid mistake. "Ay," said Jenny,

as she took the gull, "it was very stupid, nae doubt; but am no thinkin' ye would hae fund out the stupidity, had ye no been puttin in mind o't."

Moral. Remember, O reader! that neither wisdom nor worth are always proof against cunning and knavery; and if, in the course of your peregrinations through life, you are sometimes disappointed in your well-founded expectations, reflect that even the great Christopher Columbus was twice gulled in one day by a foolish animal from the sea-side at Portobello, and be content.

MY DEAR CHRISTOPHER, I TAKE the liberty of sending back Hogg, which has disgusted me more severely than any thing I have attempted to swallow since Macvey's Ba

con.

He is liker a swineherd in the Canongate, than a shepherd in Ettrick Forest. I shall never again think of him without the image of an unclean thing; and, for his sake, I henceforth forswear the whole swinish generation. Roast pig shall never more please my palate pickled pork may go to the devil-brawn, adieu!-avaunt all manner of hams-sow's cheek,

Fare thee well! and if for ever, Still for ever, Fare thee well! What you can possibly see to admire in Jamie Hogg, is to me quite a puzzle. He is the greatest boar on earth, you must grant; and, for a decent wager, I undertake, in six weeks, to produce six as good poets as he is, from each county in Scotland, over and above the Falkirk Cobler, the Chaunting Tinsmith, Willison Glass, and the Reverend Mr I engage to draw them all up two deep, in front of No. 17, Prince's-street, on the next day of publication; and they shall march round by the Mount of proclamation, and across the Mound, back to their parade. Lieutenant Juillinan shall be at their head-Mr shall officiate as chaplain-and if he pleases,

shall be trumpeter.

But joking apart, of all speculations in the way of printed paper, I should have thought the most hopeless to have been, "a Life of James Hogg, by himself." Pray, who wishes to know any thing about his life? Who, indeed, cares a single farthing whether he be at this blessed moment dead or alive?

It is no doubt undeniable, that the political state of Europe is not so interesting as it was some years ago. But still I maintain that there was no demand for the Life of James Hogg, and that the world at large could have gone on without it. At all events, it ought not to have appeared before the Life of Buonaparte.

Besides, how many lives of himself does the swine-herd intend to put forth? I have a sort of life of the man, written by himself about twenty years ago. There are a good many lives of him in the Scots Magazine—a considerable number even in your own work, my good sir-the Clydesdale Miscellany was a perfect stye with him

hisgrunt is in Waugh-he has a bristle in Baldwin-and he has smuggled himself in a sack of chaff into the Percy Anecdotes. No man from the country has a right thus to become a public nuisance. This self-exposure is not altogether decent ; and if neither Captain Brown nor Mr Jeffrey will interfere, why I will-so please to print this letter.

Take Hogg, and scrape him well for half an hour, and pray what does he prove to be? Why, a very ordinary common-place animal, in my humble opinion, as one may see on the longest day of summer, namely, the 22d of June. In all these lives of his, he keeps drawling and drivelling over his want of education. He could not write, he says, till he was upwards of twenty years of age. This I deny. He cannot write now. I engage to teach any forthcoming ploughman to write better in three weeks. Let Hogg publish a fac-simile of his hand-writing, and the world will be thunderstruck at the utter helplessness of his hand. With respect to grammar, is Hogg aware of this one simple fact, that he never wrote a page approaching to grammar in his life? Give him a sentence, and force him, at the point of the sword, to point out an accusative, and he is a dead man.

Now, I ask you, Christopher, and other good people, if such a man as this has any title to be compared with Robert Burns. The Ayrshire Ploughman could write long before he was twenty. He held the plough before he was in his teens-he threshed corn at thirteen-all the girls in Coil were in love with him before he was twenty-some of them to their cost,-and, at twentyfour, he published a volume of poems, containing, the Twa Dogs, The Cottar's Saturday Night, &c.-works that have made him immortal. After all, he was not a great poet; but he knew what he was about.

To hear Hogg and Burns spoken of in the same year, and written of in the same volume, is sickening indeed. Some silly gentleman has done this, Christopher, in your own Magazine. Why, the idea of such a comparison is enough to make a horse laugh-it is enough to set the whole British cavalry into a guffaw.

Come now, Christopher, and be honest with me. Do you believe that there is a man living who can repeat a single line of Hogg's? If there be, send for a metaphysician to him instantly. Cut off his head, and transmit it to Spurzheim. What the devil is his poetry, as you call it, about? Tell me that, and I will write a sheet in your Magazine every month gratis. Jamie has no ideas. For, if he had, are you so credulous as to believe that one or two would not have spunked out before

now? Draw upon him at sight, or at six months' date-no effects.

But I had no intention, when I took up my pen, to write one syllable about Hogg's genius, as it is called. And pray, what is in his life?-absolutely nothing. He has been in this world, it appears, fifty years, and his existence has been one continued bungle. But the selfconceit of the man is incredible. Lord Erskine is a joke to James Hogg, and often must he have a sore heart to think what the worthy world will do without him some twenty years hence, when he hops the twig. His death will be remembered like a total eclipse of the sun, no doubt; and the people about Selkirk will date any event according to its distance in time from the death of Hogg." I remember it well-it was the year of the national bankruptcy." Ay, ay-the year Hogg died of the cholic."

Pray, was your friend asleep during the twenty years he herded sheep in Ettrick, and Yarrow, and Polmoody? How do shepherds employ themselves?-Of this he tells us nothing. Day after day-year after year, seems to have passed over his head in a state of mystification, and the honest man is no more able to give an account of them than an old ram, or his dog Hector. Now, all shepherds are not such dolts. Many of them are extremely clever, long-headed, sagacious, well-informed people; and in the present case, the wonderful thing is, that Hogg could have lived so long among such an intelligent class of men, and appeared in the world so utterly ignorant as he is. This is the view of the subject, which I maintain must be taken by all sensible people who read his Memoirs,-and I feel confident that Hogg himself will be startled to find that it is the true one, if he chuses to clap his large, grey, unmeaning eyes on this part of the Magazine.

Well, then-this prodigy tires of the shepherd's life, and comes jogging into Edinburgh; he offers his ballads and balderdash, at sundry times, and in divers manners, to all the booksellers in Edinburgh, high and low, rich and poor, but they are all shy as trouts during thunder-not one will bite. No wonder. Only picture to yourself a stout country lout, with a bushel of hair on his shoulders that had not been raked for months, en

veloped in a coarse plaid impregnated with tobacco, with a prodigious mouthful of immeasurable tusks, and a dialect that set all conjecture at defiance, lumbering suddenly in upon the ele gant retirement of Mr Miller's back

shop, or the dim seclusion of Mr John Ogle! Were these worthies to be blamed if they fainted upon the spot, or run out yelling into the street past the monster, or, in desperation, flung themselves into safety from a back window over ten stories? Mr Hogg speaks of his visits to booksellers' shops at this period with the utmost nonchalance. What would he himself have thought, if a large surly brown bear, or a huge baboon, had burst open his door when he was at breakfast, and helped himself to a chair and a mouthful of parritch? would not his hair have touched the ceiling, and his under jaw fallen down upon the floor? So was it with those and other bibliopoles. It was no imputation on their taste that they, like other men, were subject to the natural infirmity of fear. No man likes to be devoured suddenly in the forenoon-and the question, in such a case, was not respecting the principles of poetical composition, but the preservation of human life.

Baulked in his attempt at publication of poetry, Hogg determines to set the town on fire. To effect this purpose, he commences a periodical work called the Spy, in which he proposes to treat of Life, Manners and Miller. This, I humbly presume to think, was gross impertinence. I have a copy of the Spy, and it is truly a sickening concern. The author makes love like a drunken servant, who has been turned out of place for taking indecent liberties in the kitchen with the cookwench. The Edinburgh young ladies did not relish this kind of thing,-it was thought coarse even by the Blue Stockings of the Old Town, after warm whisky toddy and oysters; so the Spy was executed, the dead body given up to his friends-where buried, remains a secret until this day.

Hogg looks back on this enterprize with feelings of evident exultation, ill disguised under mock humility. Just take notice how he glories in his shame!

"And all this time I had never been once in any polished society-had read next to none was now in the 38th year of my age, and knew no more of human life

or manners than a child. I was a sort of natural songster, without another advantage on earth. Fain would I have done something; but, on finding myself shunned by every one, I determined to push my own fortune independent of booksellers, whom I now began to view as beings ob

6

noxious to all genius. My plan was, to begin a literary weekly paper, a work for which I certainly was rarely qualified, when the above facts are considered. I tried Walker and Greig, and several printers, offering them security to print it for me.No; not one of them would print it without a bookseller's name at it as publisher. 'D-n them,' said I to myself, as I was running from one to another, the folks here are all combined in a body.' Mr finally told me he wished me too well to Constable laughed at me exceedingly, and encourage such a thing. Mr Ballantyne was rather more civil, and got off by subscribing for so many copies, and giving me credit for £10 worth of paper. David Brown would have nothing to do with it, unless some gentlemen, whom he named, should contribute. At length, I found an honest man, James Robertson, a bookseller in Nicolson Street, whom I had never before seen or heard of, who undertook it at once on my own terms; and on the 1st of

September, 1810, my first number made

its appearance on a quarto demy sheet, price four-pence.

"A great number were sold, and many hundred delivered gratis; but one of Robertson's boys, a great rascal, had demanded the price in full for all that he delivered gratis. They shewed him the imprint, that they were to be delivered gratis; so they are,' said he; I take nothing for the delivery; but I must have the price of the paper, if you please.'

"This money, that the boy brought me, consisting of a few shillings and an imand only money I had pocketed, of my mense number of halfpence, was the first own making, since my arrival in Edinburgh in February last. On the publication of the two first numbers, I deemed I had as many subscribers as, at all events, would secure the work from being dropped; but, on the publication of my third or fourth number, I have forgot which, it was so indecorous, that no fewer than seventy-three subscribers gave up. This was a sad blow for me; but, as usual, I despised the fascontinued my work. It proved a fatal overtidity and affectation of the people, and sight for the paper, for all those who had given in set themseves against it with the utmost inveteracy. The literary ladies, in particular, agreed, in full divan, that I would never write a sentence which deserved to be read. A reverend friend of mine has often repeated my remark on being told of this- Gaping deevils! wha cares what

they say! If I leeve ony time, I'll let them see the contrair o' that.'

"My publisher, James Robertson, was a kind-hearted, confused body, who loved a joke and a dram. He sent for me every day about one o'clock, to consult about the publication; and then we uniformly went down to a dark house in the Cowgate, where we drank whisky and ate rolls with a num ber of printers, the dirtiest and leanest looking men I had ever seen. My youthful habits having been so regular, I could not stand this; and though I took care, as I thought, to drink very little, yet, when I went out, I was at times so dizzy, I could scarcely walk; and the worst thing of all was, I felt that I was beginning to relish

it."

I write now, Christopher, to direct your attention to the next grand æra in the life of this extraordinary man,— and let us have it first in his own words.

The next thing in which I became deeply interested, in a literary way, was the FORUM, a debating society, established by a few young men, of whom I was one of the first. We opened our house to the public, making each individual pay a sixpence, and the crowds that attended, for three years running, were beyond all bounds. I was appointed secretary, with a salary of £20 a-year, which never was paid, though I gave away hundreds in charity. We were exceedingly improvident; but I never was so much the better of any thing as that so ciety; for it let me feel, as it were, the pulse of the public, and precisely what they would swallow, and what they would not. All my friends were averse to my coming forward in the Forum as a public speaker, and tried to reason me out of it, by representing my incapacity to harangue a thousand people in a speech of half an hour. I had, however, given my word to my asso ciates, and my confidence in myself being unbounded, I began, and came off with flying colours. We met once a-week: I spoke every night, and sometimes twice the same night; and, though I sometimes incurred pointed disapprobation, was in gene ral a prodigious favourite. The characters of all my brother members are given in the larger work, but here they import not. I have scarcely known any society of young men who have all got so well on. Their progress has been singular; and, I am certain, people may say as they will, that they were greatly improved by their weekly appearances in the Forum. Private societies sig. nify nothing; but a discerning public is a severe test, especially in a multitude, where

See Dr Jamieson once more.

the smallest departure from good taste, or from the question, was sure to draw down disapproval, and where no good saying ever missed observation and applause. If this do not assist in improving the taste, I know not what will. Of this I am certain, that I was greatly the better of it, and I may safely say I never was in a school before. I might and would have written the Queen's Wake had the Forum never existed, but without the weekly lessons that I got there, I would not have succeeded as I did."

in St Cæcilia's Hall, Niddry Street, Now, you and I have been together at meetings of this Society, called the Forum, and am I wrong in saying, that it was a weekly congregation of the most intrepid idiots that ever brayed in public? Hogg tells us, "it was established by a few young men, of

whom I was one of the first!" This is a gross anachronism. He was at this time an old man, of two score and up" he felt the wards. Here he says, pulse of the public," and gauged "precisely what they would swallow and what they would not!" Suppose, my dear Christopher, that you, or any other medical man, (you seem to have dropped the M. D.) by way of feeling the pulse of christian patients, should practice on the left legs of a gang of jack-asses at Leadburn-hills! or judge of the swallow of a convalescent young lady, by amusing yourself with feeding a tame cormorant? or prescribe to a dow ager, fat, fair, and forty, as if you were James Stuart flinging oil cakes to the Dunearn ox? The Public unquestionably has a large and a wide swallow, and a pretty strong bouncing pulse of her own. But the Public would have retched, scunnered,* vomited, swarfed, fallen into successive convulsions, become comatose, and died under one tenth part of the perilous stuff that was both meat and drink to the Forum. The Forum got fat and pursy, red in the face, with a round belly, under circumstances that would have reduced the Public to a walking skeleton. The pulse of the Forum was heard like the tick of an eight-day clock, 60 in the minute, slow but sure, when that of the poor Public would have been 150. The Forum heard unmoved, what would have driven the Public for ever into the deepest retirement, the cell, or the cloister. Why, in com

+ Once more.