what sport!

As well might rowting swine preside at court.'

Of the preface not much is to be said. It is the work of a dull idiot, as will be perceived by the following extract:

"This is a point in Sir Walter's character which is well worthy of note; it shews how the strongest minds, if they I get a thraw' in youth, are precisely those that retain it most stubbornly. Sir Walter was sung into a reverence for aristocracy in his cradle. He grew up amid the first fervent glow of the antiGallican spirit. His sympathies received a bent which his feudalised imagination led him to cherish and exaggerate, instead of seeking to counteract it. He felt the glamour of caste dispersing like mist before the sun, and he sought to wrap the elusive mantle round our hills again. It was this that made him take pleasure in enacting the feudal baron at Abbotsford; it was this that made him cling to those great families with which he claimed clanship; it was this that made him take pride even in a questionable alliance with nobility; it was this that made him happy amid the tomfooleries of the king's welcome to Edinburgh; it was this that in his latter day, when his mind was enfeebled by disease, caused him to be haunted by the dread of a violent and bloody revolution. Sir Wal. ter Scott was, in some respects, a Horace Walpole on a greater scale, throwing a heart into his play; his greater depth of feeling, his more powerful intellect and passions, render that in him tragical which in the other was only ludicrous."

The only assertions of fact contained in this stupid passage are direct lies. Sir Walter Scott did not enact the feudal baron at Abbotsford - he did not cling to any great families - he claimed clanship with no family but with those with which he was connected-(it will be seen further on, that so far from his paying undue reverence to noble names, he looked on the squirely family of Mr. Scott of Harden as the head of his house, ranking it in that particular before the Duke of Buccleuch); and he took no pride in any connexion with nobility, and would have disdained to claim a questionable alliance. As for Sir Walter's politics, we shall not defend them against such an assailant. We know, and all the world knows, that when the Gallican spirit was the spirit of military tyranny, iron oppression, and mortal hatred of Great Britain, he was anti-Gallican. We know, too, that he denounced the

revolutionary madness of the first year of Grey rule, and exposed to a people too much excited by the arts of unprincipled demagogues to listen to him, the futility of the expectations which they were taught to entertain as to the consequences of the Reform-bill. It is, however, begging the question rather too impudently to assume that Sir Walter was wrong. As for the parallel between Sir Walter and Horace Walpole, we leave it to the derision of our readers. There is scarcely a single point in common between the men. They were as dissimilar in mind as in body. But we have wasted words enough upon a jackass.

The second portion is the sketch of the Shepherd's life, which we have pronounced to be American. The evidence is internal. An allusion to Franklin is introduced quite à propos des bottes (p. 5). Hogg's brother's family is, we are told, "situated at Silver Lake, in Pennsylvania, where they have found a liberal friend and generous landlord in Robert H. Rose " (p. 6). We are assured that "there is not a modern poem in our language which has had a greater circulation in the United States than the Queen's Wake" (p. 31); and that though nobody ever dreamt of buying the Pilgrims of the Sun in Europe, " a very large edition of it was sold in America" (p. 35). We are told (p. 47), that an American farmer would have been daunted at the expense of some of Hogg's speculations; and so forth. All these things may be very interesting to the Americans, but to no one else; and they plainly denote that this sketch of Hogg's life has been transmitted across the Atlantic. But what decides not only the country but the date, is the following:

which will run from ten to twelve volumes. For though I was a poor shepherd more than half a century ago, I bave still got no farther than a poor shepherd to this day.'

The same letter contained a proposition to transfer the copyright of all his English publications, as they came out. But this, by the copyright law of the United States, was impracticable. The laws shut out the productions of foreign writers from a participation in the advantages of American publication.

"Mr. Hogg was, of course, informed of the difficulties in the way, in consequence of the discrimination by our law between the productions of foreigners and native citizens."

A letter written to New York, March 7, 1834, could not receive an answer in Altrive until May 7, 1834, if so soon. How could any body, then, in this country obtain possession of the copy of Hogg's letter, so as to publish it in June in Glasgow? The fact is, that this sketch of Scott was sent out by Hogg in March last, to eke out the contents of his Queer Book; and that the Yankee, having no relish for that work, thought he might make something by lumping Scott and Hogg together for the States; and a copy being caught here, the same idea occurred to somebody in Glasgow, and hence the reprint.

The biography is written in that fussy style in which our American brethren so much delight. For instance, the first sentence is as follows:

"Those persons who, by the force of genius, have overcome the difficulties attending an humble origin, or have risen above the disadvantages of a defective education, have always been very properly considered extraordinary characters."

This is a grand discovery indeed! We rather think, however, that it was known in former times that persons who display genius in any manner are extraordinary characters. A careful perusal of the works which we see every day, convinces us that it is very extraordinary when we find genius in them.

This deep remark is followed by philosophical reflections, equally profound, on the various stages of civilisation, one portion of which we subjoin:

"In our own times, in this most civilised age of the world, the same feeling of admiration has sometimes aided extraordinary talent to attain unexampled We have beheld individuals

success.

working their way upward from the humblest class of society to the first places in literature and the first rank in arms. These instances do not take away from our wonder at each new example; for there is far more difficulty in our day in rising above the common level, than at those eras in which less information was distributed, and less restraint prevailed of actual knowledge upon the imaginings of genius."

We doubt this position very much indeed. The first rank in literature in our times has been attained by men of birth and family, or, at all events, of careful, learned, and expensive education. He who has achieved the first birth in arms among us is the son of an earl. His great antagonist was of gentle blood, and received the regular education which fitted him for the course he had to pursue. A few of the marshals rose from the ranks; but these are the exceptions, and may be easily accounted for. But be this as it may, in our literature it is quite certain, with the single exception of Burns (who did not, after all, reach the first place), that the remark is untrue. It is, however, of no importance.

The sketch of Hogg's life contains nothing but what we have had published in a hundred forms already. There is the old lie of Hogg having been born on the anniversary of Burns's birth-day, and the wonderful adventure of the midwife. We have also the lies about his father's farming speculations at Ettrick House and Ettrick Hall-of his founding Blackwood's Magazine — of the various persecutions by enemies and maligners-of his extreme popularity with the fair sex-of the divers presents of articles of plate which adorn his cottage of the ill fate of the Brownie of Bodsbeck-with a thousand other ingenious inventions, with which Hogg has already favoured the world so often, that we are somewhat inclined to think he partly believes them himself. But is there never to be an end of writing these stories? The great epochs of the Shepherd's life — his being taken from school at six years old, when able only to read the Proverbs of Solomon and the Shorter Catechism--his going to service as a cowherd at seven for a ewe lamb and a pair of shoes, when he describes himself as being somewhat eccentric and fond of running about; a most singular circumstance in gentlemen of