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Meetings at fair and market, blushing betrothments, merry weddings, the joy of young maternity, the lights and shades of domestic life, its bereavements and partings, its chances and changes, its holy death-beds, and funerals solemnly beautiful in quiet kirkyards, these furnish the hints of the immortal melodies of Burns, the sweet ballads of the Ettrick Shepherd and Allan Cunningham, and the rustic drama of Ramsay.
Now I knew we must be in the Debatable Lands, the hunting-ground of the border raiders, beautiful wild land, full of the sound of rivers, voices of the Teviot and the Eden, the Ettrick and the Yarrow, singing together and mingling with the voices of poets who loved them.
Wallace had also a body of archers, from Ettrick forest, but they were attacked in their advance and many of them slain. The English cavalry now again charged. They met with a different reception from their previous one.
As this history of the evolution of the English short-story commenced with a poet, Chaucer, who wrote all save two of his short-stories in poetry, so it fittingly closes with a poet, the Ettrick Shepherd, who wrote most of his short-stories in prose.
His home, if home he had, was at Galashiels; but he went "daundering" about the country, along the green shaws and beside the burns, and was a kind of walking chronicle throughout the valleys of the Tweed, the Ettrick, and the Yarrow; carrying the gossip from house to house, commenting on the inhabitants and their concerns, and never hesitating to give them a dry rub as to any of their faults or follies.
Ma mither weaves in Ettrick, and I herded sheep upon the hills sin' I was able. But I was aye hame at nicht, and she aye keepit a licht in the window when the nicht was dark and her shadow fell upon it, for she aye cam' oot to meet me when she heard me lilt the sang.
I never admired greatly James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd; yet he belongs of double right in the coterie of my wet-day preachers. Bred a shepherd, he tried farming, and he wrote pastorals. The Ettrick Shepherd of the "Noctes Ambrosianæ" is, I fancy, as much becolored by the wit of Professor Wilson as any daughter of a duchess whom Sir Joshua changed into a nymph.
Scott's unwearied interest in James Hogg, despite the waywardness of this imaginative genius, is one of the most beautiful traits in his character. Readers of Mr. Lockhart's Life, do not require to be reminded of the active part he took in promoting the welfare of the "Ettrick Shepherd" on many occasions, from the outset of their acquaintance in 1801 until the end of his life.
The honour of knighthood was afterwards conferred upon the laird; and Meg bore unto him many sons and daughters, and was, as the reader will be ready to believe, one of the best wives in Scotland; while Simon declared that he never saw a better-looking woman in Ettrick Forest, his own wife and daughters not excepted.
In common with nearly all his tales, several of the characters in "Guy Mannering" were founded on real persons; Meg Merrilies was the prototype of a gipsy named Jennie Gordon, and many of the personal features of Dominie Sampson were obtained from a clergyman who once acted as tutor at Abbotsford. The hero was at once recognised by Hogg, the Ettrick shepherd, as a portrait of Scott himself.
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