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Anecdotes of Scott

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When he was 30 years old, Sir Walter Scott went in search of a simple Lowland Scotch shepherd named James Hogg. Scott was pursuing old ballads of the Borderlands and had heard that Hogg knew many himself and that his friends and relatives knew many more. This rumor proved true and within minutes a friendship began spanning three more decades until Scott's death in 1832.

Scott saw more literary talent in "the Ettrick Shepherd" than the shepherd initially did in himself. Under Scott's guidance, Hogg created ballads of great power and popularity. Scott was almost rudely critical of Hogg's prose tales, but Hogg won popularity for those as well. And Sir Walter was not shy about proudly introducing his rural friend into aristocratic and literary circles of Scotland and England.

Glimpses of Scott at work and play, in good and bad health, drinking with friends and romping with children and grandchildren are scattered through Hogg's little Memoirs of his world-famous friend. They seem to have quarreled often about their relative literary merits. Once Hogg was so irritated by Scott's criticism of a recent work that he started to leave Scott's home in a huff. Scott begged him to stay, asking him not to take his frankness amiss. Hogg replied: " ... it is the greatest folly in the world for me to be sae. But one's beuks are like his bairns, he disna like to hear them spoken ill o', especially when he is conscious that they dinna deserve it." Once Scott implied that Hogg aimed too high literarily. Hogg interjected: "Dear Sir Walter, ye can never suppose that I belang to your school of chivalry! Ye are the king o' that school, but I'm the king of the mountain and fairy school, which is a far higher ane nor yours."

It is hard when reading Hogg on Scott not to think of Mark Twain's famously savage attacks on the Baronet in LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI. Both Hogg and Twain (Samuel Clemens) were of simple backgrounds and little formal education. Both saw Walter Scott's faults, especially his deference to the aristocracy and a social world based on class distinctions. Mark Twain even blamed the U.S. Civil War on Scott's IVANHOE and on Scott's filling American Southerners with nonsensical ideas about religion, history, lost causes, dashing hotheaded aristocratic men and willowy young ladies. But Hogg, who knew the Laird of Abbotsford close up, also saw the kindest man he ever knew, the truest friend, the great writer never too busy to drop everything to receive a visitor high or low.

There is no special reason to read James Hogg's Memoirs if you are not very curious about Sir Walter Scott. But if you love Scott and demand to know all there is to know of him, then the Ettrick Shepherd is indispensable. -OOO-