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Light on her airy steed she sprung,
Around with golden tassels hung.
No chieftain there rode half so free,
Or half so light and gracefully.
How sweet to see her ringlets pale
Wide-waving in the southland gale,
Which through the broom-wood odorous flew
To fan her cheeks of rosy hue!
Whene’er it heaved her bosom’s screen
What beauties in her form were seen!
And when her courser’s mane it swung,
A thousand silver bells were rung.
A sight so fair, on Scottish plain,
A Scot shall never see again.

I think we know where this comes from. Indeed Hogg had a certain considerable faculty of conscious parody as well as of unconscious imitation, and his Poetic Mirror, which he wrote as a kind of humorous revenge on his brother bards for refusing to contribute, is a fair second to Rejected Addresses. The amusing thing is that he often parodied where he did not mean parody in the least, and nowadays we do not want Scott-and-water. Another vein of Hogg’s, which he worked mercilessly, is a similar imitation, not of Scott, but of the weakest echoes of Percy’s Reliques :–

O sad, sad, was young Mary’s plight:
She took the cup, no word she spake,
She had even wished that very night
To sleep and never more to wake.

Sad, sad indeed is the plight of the poet who publishes verses like this, of which there are thousands of lines to be found in Hogg. And then one comes to “Kilmeny,” and the note changes with a vengeance:–

Bonny Kilmeny gaed up the glen;
But it wasna to meet Duneira’s men,
Nor the rosy monk of the isle to see,
For Kilmeny was pure as pure could be.
It was only to hear the yorlin sing,
And pu’ the cress-flower round the spring,
The scarlet hip and the hindberry,
For Kilmeny was pure as pure could be.

. . . . .

Kilmeny looked up with a lovely grace,
But nae smile was seen on Kilmeny’s face;
As still was her look and as still was her ee
As the stillness that lay on the emeraut lea,
Or the mist that sleeps on a waveless sea.
For Kilmeny had been she kent not where,
And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare;
Kilmeny had been where the cock never crew,
Where the rain never fell and the wind never blew.

No matter that it is necessary even here to make a cento, that the untutored singer cannot keep up the song by natural force and has not skill enough to dissemble the lapses. “Kilmeny” at its best is poetry–such poetry as, to take Hogg’s contemporaries only, there is none in Rogers or Crabbe, little I fear in Southey, and not very much in Moore. Then there is no doubt at all that he could write ballads. “The Witch of Fife” is long and is not improved by being written (at least in one version) in a kind of Scots that never was on land or sea, but it is quite admirable of its class. “The Good Grey Cat,” his own imitation of himself in the Poetic Mirror, comes perhaps second to it, and “The Abbot McKinnon” (which is rather close to the imitations of Scott) third. But there are plenty of others. As for his poems of the more ambitious kind, “Mador of the Moor,” “Pilgrims of the Sun,” and even “Queen Hynde,” let blushing glory–the glory attached to the literary department–hide the days on which he produced those. She can very well afford it, for the hiding leaves untouched the division of Hogg’s poetical work which furnishes his highest claims to fame except “Kilmeny,” the division of the songs. These are numerous and unequal as a matter of course. Not a few of them are merely variations on older scraps and fragments of the kind which Burns had made popular; some of them are absolute rubbish; some of them are mere imitations of Burns himself. But this leaves abundance of precious remnants, as the Shepherd’s covenanting friends would have said. The before-mentioned “Donald Macdonald” is a famous song of its kind: “I’ll no wake wi’ Annie” comes very little short of Burns’s “Green grow the rashes O!” The piece on the lifting of the banner of Buccleuch, though a curious contrast with Scott’s “Up with the Banner” does not suffer too much by the comparison: “Cam’ ye by Athole” and “When the kye comes hame” everybody knows, and I do not know whether it is a mere delusion, but there seems to me to be a rare and agreeable humour in “The Village of Balmaquhapple.”