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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Among the Blackwood Papers left by the late George William Black-wood to the National Library of Scotland are some eighty pages entitled “Original manuscript of the Chaldee MS. by James Hogg, The Ettrick Shepherd, with his Letters relating to it; also Mr. Blackwood's notes thereon, and other Letters....” The National Library of Scotland has most generously sent me microfilms of this material.
1 A book of engravings published by Blackwood. Patrick Fraser Tytler discusses the work in Blackwood's Magazine (Nov., 1817), ii, 205.
1 I have heard my friend Mr. Hogg frequently speaking in very high terms of a Mr. Laidlaw in whom he told me you took an interest. I do not know his address else I would write him with regard to communications on rural affairs with which I understand he is well acquainted. This was to have been (as announced in my prospectus) one of the branches of the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, but Mr. Cleghorn from his connection in another quarter carefully excluded anything of the kind. From the
2 Mrs. Oliphant, I, 146, thinks Scott alludes to Lockhart as “a gentleman whose talents are of the highest order”; but the reference is clearly to Wilson, as I show in the LTLS of Feb. 5,1938, p. 92.
3 Scott wrote Blackwood: “Mr. Laidlaw projects a series of letters under the signature of Maugraby”: Mrs. Oliphant, i, 149: cf. i, 144. In the letter above, the proper noun is written small and in different ink. Apparently the copyist could not make out the word, got help, and even then misspelled it !
4 “Maggy Scott” is the Blackwood group's satiric name for Constable's Scots Magazine. Hogg here refers to Lockhart's “Letter to the Lord High Constable, from Mr. Dinmont”, another satire along with the “Chaldee MS.” on Constable, Pringle, and Cleghom.
5 Thomas Thomson, The Works of the Etlrick Shepherd (Centenary edition), ii, xliii.
6 R. B. Adam, Works, Letters and Manuscripts of James Hogg (1930), p. 7.
7 Hogg's suspicion of Lockhart appears justified. In Andrew Lang's Life and Letters of J. G. Lockhart (1897), i, 157, may be found a letter to Christie of Jan. 27, 1818, in which Lockhart writes: “ ‘The Chaldee Manuscript’ has excited prodigious noise here—it was the sole subject of conversation for two months.... The history of it is this : Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, sent up an attack on Constable, the bookseller, respecting some private dealings of his with Blackwood. Wilson and I liked the idea of introducing the whole panorama of the town in that sort of dialect. We drank punch one night from eight till eight in the morning, Blackwood being by with anecdotes, and the result is before you.” According to the Blackwood apocrypha (see Mrs. Oliphant, i, 118), others had a hand in the revision and expansion of Hogg's original: William Hamilton is said to have contributed one verse and, delighted by his own cleverness, to have “rolled off his chair in fits of laughter.” Captain Tom Hamilton seems more likely to have aided the revisers than his philosophic older brother: one or the other may have contributed the fifteenth vs. of Chapt. n, for it does not appear in Hogg's MS., and it describes “the black eagle”, obviously William Hamilton himself.
8 Apparently the proof slips in the B. M. correspond to the second set of printer's proof sheets in the microfilm: see item 6 in the introductory outline at the beginning of this article. Hogg's MS additions were of course not printed: his three additional verses at the end, which may be found in N & Q, Dec. 28,1935, referred to above, have considerable interest.
9 Hogg crossed out And he, writing So he x So they advised them above.
10 This verse is crossed out and two different substitutes offered in handwriting different from Hogg's. Leaving part of Hogg's original, one of the new verses is: The fiery lynx also that lurkelh behind the white cottage in the mountains and his fellow the dark wolf tltat delightelh in [the times of understanding?] [Several words are crossed out so that no part of them can be read.] The other verse runs: Scorpion that stingeth the faces of men that he might sling the faces of the man which is crafty and of the two beasts. These substitutions (still further changed) become verses 11 and 12 in the proof.
11 Hogg wrote roused up his sluggish spirit, but crossed out sluggish.
12 The revisers have crossed out a part of this verse and added to it so that their revised form reads : And the slow-hound and the beagle after their kind, and the hyena that eschewelh the light but cometh forth at the evening tide to raise up and gnaw the bones of the dead, & is a riddle unto the vain man [words blotted out] all the beasts of the field more than could be numbered, they were so many.
13 In the Nodes Ambrosianae of Dec. 1822 Hogg refers to “the other five chapters of the Chaldee; them that Ebony would not print”—but the words put into his mouth are facetious clearly.
14 Hogg originally wrote for he hath put up his nose from under the earth, but crossed out hath put up his nose and wrote hath looked up instead.
15 See my brief discussion in N & Q, Dec. 28,1935, already mentioned.
16 T. Constable, Archibald Constable and his Literary Correspondents (1873), ii, 359–360.
17 “John Wilson, ‘Champion‘ of Wordsworth”, MP, xxxi (May, 1934), 383–394.
18 See “James Hogg and ‘Maga’”, LTLS, Dec. 14,1935, p. 859.