‘Dear Sir—I have your letter, and have no doubt in my own mind that a voluntary assessment is the best mode of raising money to procure work for the present sufferers, because I see no other way of making this necessary tax fall equally upon the heritors.... I shall soon have money, so that if you can devise any mode by which hands can be beneficially employed at Abbotsford, I could turn £50 or £100 extra into that service in the course of a fortnight. In fact, if it made the poor and industrious people a little easier, I should have more pleasure in it than in any money I ever spent in my life.—Yours, very truly,
W. S.’
The same year, which was a period of some excitement and discontent, he writes to Laidlaw:
‘I am glad you have got some provision for the poor. They are the minors of the state, and especially to be looked after; and I believe the best way to prevent discontent is to keep their minds moderately easy as to their own provision. The sensible part of them may probably have judgment enough to see that they could get nothing much better for their class in general by an appeal to force, by which, indeed, if successful, ambitious individuals might rise to distinction, but which would, after much misery, leave the body of the people just where it found them, or rather much worse.... Political publications must always be caricatures. As for the mob of great cities, whom you accuse me of despising too much, I think it is impossible to err on that side. They are the very riddlings of society, in which every useful cinder is, by various processes, withdrawn, and nothing left but dust, ashes, and filth. Mind, I mean the mob of cities, not the lowest people in the country, who often, and, indeed, usually, have both character and intelligence.’
Again:
‘I think of my books amongst this snow-storm; also of the birds, and not a little of the poor. For benefit of the former, I hope Peggy throws out the crumbs; and a corn-sheaf or two for the game would be to purpose, if placed where poachers could not come at them. For the poor people, I wish you to distribute five pounds or so among the neighbouring poor who may be in distress, and see that our own folks are tolerably off.’
Scott introduced his friendly factor to Blackwood’s Magazine, and Laidlaw used to compile for it a monthly chronicle of events, besides occasionally contributing a descriptive article, which the ‘Great Magician’ overhauled previous to its transmission. There was, in the autumn of 1817, a great combustion in Edinburgh about the Chaldee Manuscript, inserted in the magazine for October. An edition of two thousand copies was soon sold, and fifteen hundred more were printed; so Blackwood writes to Scott. ‘He was dreadfully afraid,’ says Laidlaw, ‘that Mr Scott would be offended; and so he would, he says, were it not on my account.’ The Ettrick Shepherd (who was the original concocter of the satire) was also alarmed. ‘For the love of God, open not your mouth about the Chaldee Manuscript,’ he writes to Laidlaw. ‘There have been meetings and proposals, and an express has arrived from Edinburgh to me. Deny all knowledge, else, they say, I am ruined,’ &c. This once famous production is so local and personal that, although it is now included in Professor Wilson’s works, it is almost unknown to the present generation. The subject is a bookseller’s quarrel, a contest between the rival magazines of Blackwood and Constable, and it is one of the most harmless of all the parodies couched in Scriptural phraseology. Professor Ferrier, the editor of Wilson’s works, says it is quite as good, in its way, as Swift’s Battle of the Books; but this is a monstrous delusion. There are some quaint touches of character in the piece. It may be compared to the parodies by Hone; but it is a sort of profanation to place it on a level with the classic satire of Swift.
It is never too late to do justice. In one of these magazine missives, written in January 1818, Blackwood refers to the Ettrick Shepherd. ‘If you see Hogg, I hope you will press him to send me instantly his Shepherd’s Dog, and anything else. I received his Andrew Gemmells; but the editor is not going to insert it in this number.’ [Had Ebony really an editor, or was he not himself the great sublime?] ‘I expected to have received from him the conclusion of the Brownie of Bodsbeck; there are six sheets of it already printed.’
Now, the latter part of this extract seems distinctly to disprove a charge which Hogg thoughtlessly brought against Mr Blackwood. His novel, the Brownie of Bodsbeck, was published in 1818, and he suffered unjustly, as he states in his autobiography, with regard to that tale, as it was looked upon as an imitation of Scott’s Old Mortality. It was wholly owing to Blackwood, he asserts, that his story was not published a year sooner; and he relates the case as a warning to authors never to intrust booksellers with their manuscripts. But the fact is, Old Mortality was published in December 1816; and we have Blackwood, in the above letter to Laidlaw, stating that he had not, in January 1818—more than a twelvemonth afterwards—received the whole of the ‘copy’ of the Brownie of Bodsbeck. How could he go to press with an unfinished story? How make bricks without straw? The accusation is altogether a myth, or, to use one of the Shepherd’s own expressions, ‘a mere shimmera’ [chimera] ‘of the brain.’
Of Hogg’s prose works, Scott writes: ‘Truly, they are sad daubing, with, here and there, fine dashes of genius.’ The daubing is chiefly seen in the dialogues and attempts at humour; the genius appears in the descriptions of pastoral or wild scenery, as in the account of the ‘Storms,’ and in the fine introduction to the Brownie of Bodsbeck, and in some of the delineations of humble Scottish life and superstition. Hogg is as true and literal as Crabbe. His peasants always speak and think as peasants; but he gives us, sometimes, coarse and poor specimens. It is certain, however, that, even in the worst of his stories, there are gleams of fancy—‘fairy blinks of the sun’—far above the reach of writers immensely his superiors in taste and acquirements.