Hogg, JAMES, Scottish poet, was born, in a cottage near the parish church of Ettrick, Selkirkshire, in the year 1770. The exact date of his birth is unknown; and rather singularly he himself asserted it to have been the 25th January 1772. It is beyond question, however, that he was baptised on 9th December 1770. He was the second son of Robert Hogg, farmer and shepherd, by Margaret Laidlaw, who was a distant relative of William or 'Willie' Laidlaw, the amanuensis of Sir Walter Scott and author of 'Lucy's Flitting.' Hogg's education was conducted in a very irregular fashion, owing to his being taken from school at intervals to help his father in tending sheep. His schooling—according to his own statement—amounted in all to about six months; he learned to read the Bible, but not to write. Meanwhile, however, his mother had filled his imagination by telling him 'tales of kings, giants, knights, fairies, kelpies, brownies, &c.' In the intervals of work he seems to have educated himself, and when he was about sixteen years of age a perusal of The Gentle Shepherd and Life and Adventures of Sir William Wallace kindled his poetical fancy. Hogg himself says, however, that it was not till 1796 that he attempted to write verses, and 'for several years his compositions consisted wholly of songs and ballads, made up for the lasses to sing in chorus.' In 1800 one of his poems, 'Donald M'Donald,' having for its subject the threatened invasion of Great Britain by the first Napoleon, was published anonymously. The following year, having visited Edinburgh to sell his employer's sheep, he had printed in pamphlet form Scottish Pastorals, Poems, Songs, &c. Of this small volume a thousand copies were thrown off, but no impression was made upon the public by it. At this time Hogg contemplated emigration to the island of Harris, and wrote a 'Farewell to Ettrick.' His scheme fell through, but he was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of Sir Walter Scott—then Mr Scott, sheriff of Selkirkshire. Having written out several ballads from his mother's recitation, he sent them to Scott, who gave them a place in the third volume of his Border Minstrelsy, which appeared in 1803. The same year Constable, acting on Scott's advice, published a volume of verse entitled The Mountain Bard, and also a treatise of a different kind entitled Hogg on Sheep. The two between them brought him £300, which he sunk in a farm that proved a total failure. After several years of vicissitude, in which he tried, without success, to run large stock farms, Hogg repaired to Edinburgh and entered definitely on a literary career. He published in 1810 a second volume of poems, The Forest Minstrel, which proved a failure, and started a weekly paper, The Spy, which lasted for a few months. Meanwhile he seems to have gone into business as a land-agent, but here again to have met with no success. In 1813, however, he published his greatest work, The Queen's Wake, and at once obtained cordial recognition from the critics, Jeffrey declaring in the Edinburgh Review that 'no doubt can be entertained that he is a poet in the highest acceptance of the term.' Hogg had made the friendship of Harriet, Duchess of Buccleuch, and in accordance with her death-bed request her husband granted him, on the payment of a nominal rent, one of his farms known indifferently as Mossend, Eltrive Lake, or Altrive. Had he given himself up to this farm and to literature Hogg would probably have been a well-to-do as well as a happy man. But he hampered himself by taking the neighbouring farm of Mount Benger, and was more or less in pecuniary difficulties to the end of his days. He was very happy, however, in his domestic life. In 1820 he married Margaret Phillips, the daughter of a tenant-farmer in Annandale, whom he had met at the house of her brother-in-law, Mr Gray, one of the teachers in the High School of Edinburgh. She proved an admirable wife, although she was some twenty years younger than her husband. Hogg now produced in rapid succession a number of works both in verse and prose. Of the former the chief are Mador of the Moor, The Pilgrims of the Sun, Queen Hynde, and the Border Garland; of the latter The Brownie of Bodsbeck, Winter Evening Tales, The Three Perils of Man, and The Three Perils of Woman. It seems doubtful whether he was the sole author, or along with Lockhart the joint-author, of the remarkable Confessions of a Justified Sinner, otherwise known as The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Fanatic, published in his name. Hogg was at this time a well-known figure in Edinburgh society; was the intimate friend of Professor Wilson, Sir Walter Scott, and Lockhart, although he had his differences with all three; wrote considerably for Blackwood's Magazine, and was the basis of the famous 'Shepherd' of the Noctes Ambrosiane. In the end of 1831 he paid a visit to London to arrange for the publication of a complete edition of his works. He remained for some weeks in the metropolis; was entertained to dinner by the Highland Society of London, and in other ways lionised. He died at Altrive, November 21, 1835.
Hogg once described himself to Scott as 'the king of the Mountain and Fairy School' of poetry, and this definition, egotistic though it is, holds good so far as Scotland is concerned. Of his masterpiece, 'Kilmeny,' a leading critic of to-day, Professor Saintsbury, has said that it is 'such poetry as, to take Hogg's contemporaries only, there is none in Rogers or Crabbe, little, I fear, in Southey, and not much in Moore.' Some of his ballads, such as 'The Witch of Fif,' and a few of his songs, especially 'When the Kye Comes Hame,' belong to the immortal part of Scottish if not of English literature. The late Professor Ferrier's description of Hogg as 'after Burns (proximus sed longo intervalo) the greatest poet that had ever sprung from the bosom of the common people' is now the universally accepted verdict of criticism. Hogg's prose is much more unequal than his poetry; a strong though coarsish humour is its most notable characteristic.
The chief authorities on the life of Hogg are his autobiography and Memorials of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, edited by his daughter, Mrs Garden (1885). Professor Wilson prefixed a short Memoir of Hogg to an edition of his works published after his death. Another edition in two large volumes by T. Thomson appeared in 1865. The Memoir of Dr Robert Chambers by Dr William Chambers throws light on Hogg's life in Edinburgh; and see Mrs Oliphant's William Blackwood and his Sons (1897). A notable recent criticism of Hogg is Professor Saintsbury's in his Essays in English Literature (1890).