Part 7

"Mr. Hogg, although apparently in good health, had been ailing for some years previous to his death, with water in the chest. When this was announced to him by his friend, Dr. W. Gray, from India, a nephew of Mr. Hogg, he seemed to laugh at the idea, and pronounced it impossible, as one drop of water he never drank. Notwithstanding, he very shortly after had a consultation with some of the Edinburgh medical folks, who corroborated Dr. Gray's opinion. Mr. Hogg, on his return from town, called upon me in passing, and seemed somewhat depressed in spirits about his health. The Shepherd died of what the country folks call black jaundice, on the 21st November, 1835, and was buried on the 27th, in the church-yard of Ettrick, within a few hundred yards of Ettrick-house, the place where he was born. It was a very imposing scene, to see Professor Wilson standing at the grave of the Shepherd, after every one else had left it, with his head uncovered, and his long hair waving in the wind, and the tears literally running in streams down his cheek. A monument has been erected to the memory of Hogg by his poor wife. At this the good people of the forest should feel ashamed. Mr. Hogg was confined to the house for some weeks, and, if I recollect right, was insensible some days previous to his death. He has left one son and four daughters; the son, as is more than probable you are aware, went out to a banking establishment, in Bombay, some two years ago. Mr. Hogg left a considerable library, which is still in the possession of Mrs. Hogg and family. With regard to the state of his mind at the time of his death, I am unable to speak. I may mention, a week or two previous to his last illness, he spent a few days with me in angling in the Tweed; the last day he dined with me, the moment the tumblers were produced, he begged that I would not insist upon him taking more than one tumbler, as he felt much inclined to have a tumbler or two with his friend Cameron, of the inn, who had always been so kind to him, not unfrequently having sent him home in a chaise, free of any charge whatever. The moment the tumbler was discussed, we moved off to Cameron's; and by way of putting off the time until the innkeeper returned from Peebles, where he had gone to settle some little business matter, we had a game at bagatelle; but no sooner had we commenced the game, than poor Hogg was seized with a most violent trembling. A glass of brandy was instantly got, and swallowed; still the trembling continued, until a second was got, which produced the desired effect. At this moment, the Yarrow carrier was passing the inn on his way to Edinburgh, when Mr. Hogg called him in, and desired him to sit down until he would draw an order on the Commercial Bank for £20, as there was not a single penny in the house at home. After various attempts, he found it impossible even to sign his name, and was, therefore, obliged to tell the carrier, that he must, of necessity, defer drawing the order until next week. The carrier, however, took out his pocket-book, and handed the Shepherd a five-pound note, which he said he could conveniently want until the following week, when the order would be cashed. A little before the gloaming, Mr. Hogg's caravan cart landed for him, which he instantly took possession of; but, before moving off, he shook hands with me, not at all in his usual way, and at the same time stated to me, that a strong presentiment had come over his mind, that we would never meet again. It was too true. I never again saw my old friend, the Shepherd, with whom I had been intimately acquainted since the year 1802.

"Yours truly,

"P. BOYD."

I went over his house at Altrive with much interest. His little study is in the center of the front of the house, and within that is the equally small bedroom where he died. The house has been much improved, as well as the garden about it, since his time, for all agree that Hogg was very slovenly about his place. However, as Lockhart has justly observed, there will never be such another shepherd.

He has a brother still living, William Hogg, who has always been considered a very clever man. He lives somewhere in Peebleshire, as a shepherd. His widow and family live in Edinburgh.

* * * * *

In many of my visits to the homes and haunts of the poets, I have fallen in with persons and things which I regret that I could not legitimately introduce, and which yet are so full of life, that they deserve to be preserved. Exactly such a person did I meet with at Altrive Lake, at Mr. Scott's, the successor of Hogg. It was a jolly wool-buyer. He was a stout, fine, jovial-looking man, one of that class who seem to go through the world, seeing only the genial side of it, and drawing all the good out of it, as naturally as the sun draws out of the earth flowers and fruit. The hearty fellow was sitting at luncheon with Mr. Scott as I went in, and I was requested to join them. His large, well fed person, and large, handsome face, seemed actually to glow and radiate with the fullness of this world's joyousness and prosperity. His head of rich, bushy, black hair, and his smooth, black suit, both cut in town fashion, marked him as belonging to a more thronged and bustling region than these tawny, treeless, solitary hills. The moment I mentioned Hogg, and my object in visiting Altrive and Ettrick, the stranger's countenance lit up with a thorough, high-flowing tide of rosy animation. "Eh, but ye should ha' had me in Ettrick wi' ye! I know every inch of all these hills, and the country round. Haven't I bought the wool all over this country these twenty years? Hogg! why, sir, I've bought his wool many a time, and had many a merry 'clash' and glass of toddy wi' him at this verra table." Nothing would do, but I must accept half his gig thence to Galashiels that evening, a distance of twenty miles. It was a very friendly offer, for it saved me much time. Our drive was a charming one, and my stout friend knowing all the country, and apparently, every body in it, he pointed out every thing, and had a nod, a smile, a passing word, for every one that we met, or passed in their cottages by the road-side. He pointed out the piece of a wall, the only remains of Hogg's old house, at Mount Benger, adding,--"Ay, I bought his wool!" We descended the vale of Yarrow, passing through the beautiful woods of _Hangingshaw_. "Ye'll remember," said he, "what was said by some English noblemen in the rising in '45, when they heard that the lairds of _Hangingshaw_ and _Gallowshiels_ were among the Scotch conspirators. These are ominous names, said they, we'll have nothing to do with 'em; and withdrew, and thereby saved their own necks." So we went on, every few hundred yards bringing new histories of my jolly friend's wool-buying, and of matters which seemed nearly as important in his eyes. There was Newark tower, a beautiful object, standing on a lofty green mound on the other side of the Yarrow, the banks of which are most beautifully wooded. The tower, indeed, is included in the pleasure-grounds of Bowhill, a seat of the Duke of Buccleugh's, within sight; and you see neat walks running all along the river side for miles amid the hanging woods, and looking most tempting. Opposite to Newark, my friend pointed out a farmhouse. "Do you know what that is?" "A farmhouse," I replied. "Ay, but what farmhouse, that's the thing? Why, sir, that's the house where Mungo Park lived, and where his brother now lives." He then related the fact recorded in Scott's Life, of Sir Walter finding Mungo Park standing one day in an abstracted mood, flinging stones into the Yarrow; and asking him why he did that, he told Scott that he was sounding the depth of the river, it being a plan he had discovered and used on his African tour; the length of time the bubbles took coming to the top indicating the comparative depth, and showing whether he might venture to ford the stream or not. Soon after, Park again set out for Africa, never to return. "There, too, I buy the wool," added my companion. "But do you see," again he went on, "the meadow there below us, lying between those two streams?"--"Yes."--"Well, there meet the Ettrick and Yarrow, and become the Tweed; and the meadow between is no other than that of _Carterhaugh_; you've heard of it in the old ballads. I buy all the wool off that farm." I have no doubt, if the jolly fellow had fallen in with the fairies on Carterhaugh, he would have tried to buy their wool.

Ever and anon, out of the gig he sprung, and bolted into a house. Here there was a sudden burst of exclamation, a violent shaking of hands. Out he came again, and a whole troop of people after him. "Well but Mr. ----, don't you take my wool this time!" "Oh! why not? What is it? what weight? what do you want?" "It is so and so, and I want so much for it." "Oh, fie, mon! I'll gie ye so much!" "That's too little." "Well, that's what I'll gie--ye can send it, if ye like the price;" and away we brushed, the man all life and jollity giving me a poke in the side with his elbow, and a knowing look, with--"He'll send it! It won't do to spend much time over these little lots;" and away we went. At one house, no sooner did he enter, than out came a bonny lass with a glass and the whisky-bottle, and most earnestly and respectfully pressing that I should take a glass! "What could the bonny girl mean by being so urgent that I should take some of her whisky?" "Oh," said he, laughing heartily, "it was because I told her that ye were a Free-church minister frae London, and they're mighty zealous Free-church folk here."

At Selkirk my jolly friend put himself and horse to a great deal of labor in ascending the steep hill into the town, which we might have avoided, that I might see the statue of Sir Walter Scott, by Richie, in the market-place. This, however, was but part of his object. Leaving the gig at the inn, he said we must just look in on a friend of his. It was at a little grocer's shop, and, in a little dusky parlor, he introduced me to a young lady, his wife's sister, and we must have some tea with her. The young lady was a comely, quiet, dark-complexioned person, who seemed to have a deal of quiet sense, and some sly humor; just such a person as Scott would have introduced into one of his stories as a Jenny Middlemass; or the like; and it was most amusing to sit and listen to all their talk, and jokes, and his mystifications, and her quick detection of them, and their united mirth over them. The good man finally landed me in Galashiels, and there I had no little difficulty in getting away to my inn; as he thought of nothing less than my staying to supper with him, and hearing a great deal more of all the country round, of Scott and Burns, Hogg and wool-buying, trading and tradition, the old glories of border reiving, and new glories of Galashiels, and its spinning and weaving, without end.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

Coleridge, whose simple, unworldly character is as well known as his genius, seems to have inherited his particular disposition from his father. His father was the Rev. John Coleridge, the vicar of Ottery St. Mary, in Devonshire. He was a learned man, the head master of the free grammar-school at Ottery, as well as vicar. He had been previously head master of the school at South Molton, and was one of the persons who assisted Dr. Kennicott in his Hebrew Bible. "He was an exceedingly studious man," says Gillman, on the authority of Coleridge himself, "pious, of primitive manners, and the most simple habits: passing events were little heeded by him, and therefore he was usually characterized as 'the absent man.'" Coleridge was born October 21st, 1772, the youngest of thirteen children, of which nine were sons, one of whom died in infancy. Of all these sons Coleridge is said to have most resembled his father in mind and habit. His mother was, except for education, in which she was deficient, a most fitting wife for such a man. She was an active, careful housekeeper and manager, looked well after worldly affairs, and was ambitious to place her sons well in the world. She always told them to look after good, substantial, sensible women, and not after fine harpsichord ladies. Coleridge used to relate many instances of his father's absence of mind, one or two of which we may quote. On one occasion, having to breakfast with his bishop, he went, as was the practice of that day, into a barber's shop to have his head shaved, wigs being then in common use. Just as the operation was completed, the clock struck nine, the hour at which the bishop punctually breakfasted. Roused as from a revery, he instantly left the barber's shop, and in his haste forgetting his wig, appeared at the breakfast-table, where the bishop and his party had assembled. The bishop, well acquainted with his absent manners, courteously and playfully requested him to walk into an adjoining room, and give his opinion of a mirror which had arrived from London a few days previously, and which disclosed to his astonished guest the consequence of his haste and forgetfulness.

The old gentleman, Coleridge also related, had to take a journey on some professional business, which would detain him from home for three or four days: his good wife, in her care and watchfulness, had packed a few things in a small trunk, and gave them in charge to her husband, with strong injunctions that he was to put on a clean shirt every day. On his return home, his wife went to search for his linen, when, to her dismay, it was not in the trunk. A closer search, however, discovered that the vicar had strictly obeyed her injunctions, and had put on daily a clean shirt, but had forgotten to remove the one underneath. This might have been the pleasantest and most portable mode of carrying half-a-dozen shirts in winter, but not so in the dog-days.

The poor idolized him and paid him the greatest reverence; and among other causes, for the odd one of quoting the original Hebrew liberally in his sermons. They felt themselves particularly favored by his giving them "the very words the Spirit spoke in;" the agricultural population flocked in from the neighborhood with great eagerness to hear him on this account; and such an opinion did they acquire of his learning, that they regarded his successor with much contempt, because he addressed them in simple English. This worthy old man died when Coleridge was about seven years old only.

He seems to have been a delicate child, of timid disposition. Being so much younger than his brothers, he never came in to be a playfellow of theirs, and thus to acquire physical hardihood and activity. "I was," he says, "in earliest childhood huffed away from the enjoyment of muscular activity in play, to take refuge at my mother's side, or on my little stool to read my book, and to listen to the talk of my elders. I was driven from life in motion, to life in thought and sensation. I never played except by myself, and then only acting over what I had been reading or fancying; or half one, half the other, with a stick cutting down weeds and nettles, as one of the seven champions of Christendom. Alas! I had all the simplicity, all the docility of a child, but none of the child's habits. I never thought as a child, never had the language of a child. I forget whether it was in my fifth or sixth year, but I believe the latter, in consequence of some quarrel between me and my brother, in the first week in October, I ran away from fear of being whipped, and passed the whole night--a night of rain and storm--on a bleak side of a hill on the Otter, and was there found at daybreak without the power of using my limbs, about six yards from the naked bank of the river."

This anecdote has been differently related by Cottle, and by the author of Pen and Pencil Sketches. They state that little Sammy Coleridge, as they call him, when between three and four years of age, had got a thread and a crooked pin from his elder sister Ann, and, unknown to the family, had set out to fish in the Otter. That he had wandered on and on, till, overtaken by fatigue, he lay down and slept. That he continued out all night, to the consternation of the family, and was found by a wagoner the next morning, who, going along the road at four o'clock, thought he heard a child's voice. He stopped, and listened. He now heard the voice cry out, "Betty! Betty! I can't pull up the clothes." The wagoner went to the margin of the river, where he saw, to his astonishment, a little child with a withy bough in his hand, which hung over the stream, pulling hard, and on the very point of dragging himself into the water. The child when awakened, as well as frightened, could only say his name was Sammy, and the wagoner carrying him into Ottery, joy indescribable spread through the town and the parsonage.

Which version of this story is the more correct, who shall decide? Little Coleridge, at the age of ten, was placed in Christ's Hospital in London, through the influence of Judge Buller, who had been educated by his father. This school was then, it seems, conducted in a very miserable and unkind manner. Coleridge was half starved there, neglected and wretched. The first bitter experiences of children who have had tolerable homes, of such as have had a decent house over their heads, and decent parents or friends, is on going to school. There has, no doubt, been much improvement in these as in other respects of late years. Schoolmasters, like other men, have felt the growing influences of civilization and true feeling. But there is yet much to be done in schools. Let it be remembered that fagging and flogging still continue in our great public schools of Westminster, Eton, and others. Riding the other day on the top of an omnibus through London, we could, from that popular eminence, see the master of a naval and military school exercising his vocation with the cane on one of his unhappy scholars. This I presume is a part of what the boys are systematically taught there--the preparatory initiation into the floggings that they are likely to get in the army or navy. That is bad and brutalizing enough, but that we are not yet advanced beyond the absurd idea of driving learning into our gentlemen with the cudgel and the birch, says very little indeed for our advance in true social philosophy. Southey gives a very lively idea of the school change in a boy's life, in his Hymn to the Penates.

"When first a little one I left my home, I can remember the first grief I felt, And the first painful smile that clothed my front With feelings not its own. Sadly at night I sat me down beside a stranger's hearth; And when the lingering hour of rest was come, First wet with tears my pillow."

In The Retrospect he has still more clearly depicted it:--

"Corston, twelve years in various fortunes fled Have passed in restless progress o'er my head. Since in thy vale, beneath the master's rule, I roamed an inmate of the village school."

The place, he tells us, had been the ample dwelling of the lord of the manor, but--

"Here now in petty empire o'er the school, The mighty master held despotic rule; Trembling in silence, all his deeds we saw, His look a mandate, and his word a law; Severe his voice, severe and stern his mien, And wondrous strict he was, and wondrous wise, I ween.

"Even now, through many a long, long year I trace The hour when first with awe I viewed his face; Even now, recall my entrance at the dome,-- 'Twas the first day I ever left my home. Years, intervening, have not worn away _The deep remembrance of that wretched day_.

"Methinks e'en now the interview I see. The mistress's kind smile, the master's glee. Much of my future happiness they said, Much of the easy life the scholars led; Of spacious playground, and of wholesome air, The best instruction, and the tenderest care; And when I followed to the garden door My father, till, through tears, I saw no more,-- How civilly they soothed my parting pain, _And how they never spake so civilly again_."

Bravo! Southey! In these lines how many feelings of how many oppressed little hearts you have given vent to! Improvement, I do believe, has found its way, in a great degree, since then into private schools; but in many of them still, how much remains to be done! How much more may the spirits of masters and mistresses be humanized! How much more the law of love be substituted for the law of severity! It can not be too deeply impressed on the hearts of those who take the charge of children often at a great distance, that there is no tyranny so cowardly and mean as that which is exercised, not over grown men, but over tender children.

Coleridge calls this change, being "first plucked up and transplanted;" and adds--"Oh, what a change! I was a depressed, moping, friendless, poor orphan, half-starved;--at that time the portion of food to the Bluecoats was cruelly insufficient for those who had no friends to supply them." For those who had friends to supply them, the distinction set up was of the most detestable kind. They had luxuries brought in and served up before these poor half-starved little wretches. Charles Lamb, under the title of Elia, describes his own case as one of these favored ones. "I remember Lamb at school, and can well remember that he had some peculiar advantages, which I and others of his schoolfellows had not. His friends lived in town and were at hand, and he had the privilege of going to see them almost as often as he wished, through some invidious distinction which was denied us. The present treasurer of the Inner Temple can explain how it happened. He had his tea and hot rolls in the morning, while we were battening upon our quarter of a penny loaf; our _crug_ moistened with attenuated small beer in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched leathern jack it was poured from. On Mondays, milk porritch, blue and tasteless, and the pease soup of Saturday, coarse and choking, were enriched for him with a slice of 'extraordinary bread and butter' from the hot loaf of the Temple. The Wednesday's mess of millet, somewhat less repugnant--(we had three banyan to four meat days in the week)--was endeared to his palate with a lump of double-refined, and a smack of ginger, or the fragrant cinnamon, to make it go down the more glibly. In lieu of our _half-pickled_ Sundays, or _quite fresh_ boiled beef on Thursdays, strong as caro equina, with destestable marigolds floating in the pail to poison the broth; our scanty mutton crags on Fridays; and rather more savory, but grudging portions of the same flesh, rotten-roasted, or rare, on the Tuesdays--the only dish which excited our appetites, and disappointed our stomachs in almost equal proportion; he had his hot plate of roast veal, or the more tempting griskin, exotics unknown to our palates, cooked in the paternal kitchen."