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James Hogg's Forgotten Satire, John Paterson's Mare

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Alan L. Strout*
Affiliation:
Texas Technical College

Extract

In the The Newcastle Magazine, xv (Jan. 1825) I discovered the satire which all students of Hogg know he wrote, but which is thought never to have been published, John Paterson's Mare. In this satire, Hogg allegorically presents the friends and enemies of Blackwood's Magazine (somewhat as he had done in the Chaldee Manuscript), and incidentally introduces, most interestingly, Jeffrey's critical treatment, in the Edinburgh Review, of such contemporaries as Joanna Baillie, Tom Moore, Ritson, Byron, and the Lake Poets.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1937

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References

page 428 note 1 T. Constable, A. Constable and his Literary Correspondents (1873), i, 270, 271.

page 428 note 2 “I have, in almost every number of the Magazine [Blackwood's] for last year,” he informed Henry Mackenzie, November 3, 1818, “been most grossly attacked both in person and in property, but though I possess the means I should consider it quite unworthy to retaliate in the manner of that work, or to permit any Magazine issuing from the presses of my house to follow an example so unprincipled; and I am willing to believe that I shall not suffer in the estimation of those who know me, or those whom I respect, for any such interested and, as I trust, unavailing abuse”: Ibid., ii, 341–342.

page 428 note 3 Memoirs of Adam Black, ed. by Alexander Nicolson (1885), pp. 54–55.

page 428 note 4 S. Smiles, Memoirs of J. Murray (1891), i, 456, and Mrs. Oliphant, Annals of a Publishing House (1897), i, 439.

page 428 note 5 Pencillings by the Way (1835), iii, 162–164.

page 428 note 6 Peter's Letters (1819), ii, 187. On the next page occurs a description of Blackwood.

page 428 note 7 See Mrs. Oliphant, i, 83 ff. “Mrs. Oliphant has misdated Ballantyne's letter regarding the fifth edition 1817, and quite wrongly reflected on him. Scott had sold the copyright to Constable in January 1819”: H. J. C. Grierson, The Letters of Sir Walter Scott (1933), iv 430 note.

page 428 note 8 Smiles, i, 463. Compare Constable's letter to Cadell, June 12, 1818, concerning the Ballantynes: “… These men play a deep & damnable game—& make their own of the author & all concerned. I will do all that propriety & prudence dictates to avoid any open rupture with them”: Grierson, v, 111 note.

page 428 note 9 S. C. Hall, A Book of Memories (1871), p. 330.

page 428 note 10 R. P. Gillies, Memoirs of a Literary Veteran (1851), ii, 231.

page 428 note 11 After their quarrel with Blackwood, Pringle and Cleghorn wrote a short Notice of the Transactions between the Publisher and Editors of the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, which they circulated extensively. Blackwood retorted in a reply of eight pages, entitled Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, in which, after defending himself from the charges of his editors, he reprints, with admirable impartiality, their attack upon himself, the Notice referred to above.

page 428 note 12 Smiles, i, 476.

page 428 note 13 The quotation comes from Blackwood's letter of October 29, 1817, to George Combe: page 4 of his reply. In her Christopher North (1866), p. 161, Mrs. Gordon includes the quotation but does not give the date of the letter nor indicate its source. Mrs. Oliphant also prints part of the letter without giving the source, i, 108–109.

page 428 note 14 Mrs. Oliphant, i, 104.

page 428 note 15 G. W. Niven, in The Scottish Antiquary of April, 1898 (xii, 175–176), in an article entitled A Forgotten Episode in the History of Blackwood's Magazine, shows that the Scots Magazine was not “driven out of the field soon after the appearance of Blackwood's Magazine,” as has been commonly supposed (by Mrs. Oliphant, for example)—but that William Blackwood purchased the copyright, July 12, 1826, at the time of Constable's ruin, and discontinued the periodical. W. J. Couper records that Blackwood paid only £25 for the copyright: The Edinburgh Periodical Press (1908), ii, 82.

page 428 note 16 Page 8 of their Notice.

page 428 note 17 Mrs. Gordon, p. 160, note.

page 428 note 18 Josiah Conder, A Biographical Sketch of the late T. Pringle (1835), p. 17.

page 428 note 19 R. H. Story, Memoir of the Life of the Rev. Robert Story (1862), pp. 76–77.

page 428 note 20 Leitch Ritchie, Memoirs of T. Pringle, prefixed to The Poetical Works of T. Pringle (1839), p. lxxiv.

page 428 note 21 Ibid., pp. civ-cv.

page 428 note 22 R. B. Adam, Works, Letters and Manuscripts of James Hogg (1930), p. 16, and Mrs. Garden, Memorials of James Hogg (1887), p. 269.

page 428 note 23 R. B. Adam, p. 18.

page 428 note 24 F. W. Haydon, B. R. Haydon: Correspondence and Table-Talk (1876), ii, 67.

page 428 note 25 Andrew Lang, The Life and Letters of J. G. Lockhart (1897), i, 157.

page 428 note 26 Scott in a letter to Blackwood, September 21, 1817, expressed his intention of being “completely neutral” in the break between Blackwood and his editors, “reserving the privilege of contributing any trifling assistance to either or to both publications”: Mrs. Oliphant, i, 146.

page 428 note 27 This letter appears both in R. B. Adam, p. 7, and in Robert Carruthers' Abbotsford Notanda, a supplement to Robert Chambers' Life of Sir W. Scott (1871), p. 146.

page 428 note 28 J. P. Grant, Memoir and Correspondence of Mrs. Grant of Laggan (1844), ii, 192.

page 428 note 29 Early Letters of T. Carlyle, ed. by C. E. Norton (1886), i, 131 and 134.

page 428 note 30 R. P. Gillies, “Some Recollections of James Hogg,” Fraser's Magazine (October, 1839), xx, 428.

page 428 note 31 T. Thomson, Life of the Ettrick Shepherd, Works of the Ettrick Shepherd (1865), i, xliii.

page 428 note 32 J. G. Lockhart's Scott (1837), iv, 127.

page 428 note 33 Fraser's Magazine, xx, 428.

page 428 note 34 Mrs. Gordon, p. 188.

page 428 note 35 H. J. C. Grierson, Letters of Sir W. Scott (1932), v, 150. Carruthers gives a garbled version in Abbotsford Notanda, p. 148.

page 428 note 36 Ibid., v, 154.

page 428 note 37 The “Life” of The Ettrick Shepherd Anatomized, etc. By An Old Dissector [Dr. J. Browne] (1832), p. 32.

page 428 note 38 Grierson, v, 154–157.

page 428 note 39 Ibid., v, 252 and 257.

page 428 note 40 Henry Cockburn, Memorials of his Time (1909), p. 359.—See also J. Gordon Weir's “The Case of the Beacon and the Sentinel,” The Walter Scott Quarterly (January, 1928), pp. 194–201.

page 428 note 41 In 1818 Lockhart and Wilson challenged the anonymous author of Hypocrisy Unveiled to a duel: see Mrs. Gordon, p. 191 note. Wilson wrote the Reverend Robert Morehead at the time, “Should I ever suspect any man, I will send with privacy a friend to him; he may be a man of some nerve, and if ever he avows himself he will require them all”: Mrs. Gordon, p. 196. In 1820 Scott feared that Wilson or Lockhart might be drawn into a duel with M'Culloch, editor of the Whig newspaper The Scotsman: Lang's Lockhart, i, 239. Again, after Wilson's furious attack in Blackwood's Magazine on Hunt's Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries in 1828, Scott wrote in his Journal, February 23,1828, “I think it may come to a bloody arbitrament, for if L[eigh] H[unt] should take it up as a gentleman, Wilson is the last man to flinch. I hope Lockhart will not be dragged in as second or otherwise.”

page 428 note 42 Mrs. Oliphant, i, 274–275.

page 428 note 43 Dublin University Magazine, xxiii (January, 1844), 90: article by E. V. Kenealy.

page 428 note 44 Grantley Berkeley, in his My Life and Recollections (1865), ii, 63 ff., gives a vivid description of the affair: he says that three shots were exchanged and that Maginn (who appeared unused to duelling) was apparently wounded. Robert Chambers in his Book of Days (1863), ii, 241, writes that three rounds of shots were exchanged “without doing further damage than grazing the heel of Dr. Maginn's boot and the collar of Mr. Berkeley's coat…” See also Mrs. A. T. (Katherine) Thomson, Recollections of Literary Characters and Celebrated Places (1854), i, 7–8.

page 428 note 45 (a) “I send a piece [in prose or poetry] every, or nearly every month, to the Newcastle Magazine,” Story wrote his friend Gourly, June, 1825: see John James' biography of Story, prefixed to The Lyrical and other Minor Poems of Robert Story (1861), p. xl. “From youth he [Story] had been an admirer and imitator of James Hogg …” Story's Border Ballads of 1824 is dedicated to Hogg. (b) The Preface to The Newcastle Magazine of 1825, iv, ii, states that “Tickler” is edited by “Mr. Storey, of Gargrave.” In October, iv (1825), 478, the article Death of Bob Tickler, Esq., is signed “Robert Storey.” In the Preface to volume ix (1830), W. A. Mitchell thanks Story among others for his aid to him. In December, 1830, ix, 542, Robert Story is accredited with the various dialogues, indeed with the sole possession of the conversational part of the magazine. (c) At least two of Story's poems in his printed work appear also in The Newcastle Magazine. Thus the song “Thou fairest maid that blooms by Tyne,” in Bob Tickler in Newcastle (January, 1825), iv, 28, and the first of Three Sonnets. By Bob Tickler, Esq. (September, 1825), iv, 396, both occur in Story's The Magic Fountain and other Poems (1829), pp. 149, 46.

page 428 note 46 These various quotations come from Mrs. Oliphant, i, 347–350.

page 428 note 47 Ibid., i, 337.

page 428 note 47a The Newcastle Magazine, vii, 499.—In the same magazine of September, 1827, Hogg had previously been accused of plagiarism in an article entitled Origin of a Ghost Story in Blackwood, vi, 396. “In Blackwood's Magazine for August [xxii, 173], there is a story, under the head of Dreams and Apparitions by the Ettrick Shepherd, the origin of which we think we discovered as soon as we had well entered upon its perusal…” The source is given as from Andrew Moreton's Secrets of the Invisible World Disclosed, etc., 1738; the “principal part of the story” from the original is presented in the rest of the article.

page 428 note 48 The Newcastle Magazine, vii, 499.

page 428 note 49 The True Art of Reviewing (January, 1827) vi, 3–7, may be called a moral essay.

page 446 note 1 Bookseller of Edinburgh, for whom Constable worked, February, 1788, to January, 1795, before he set up for himself independently.

page 446 note 2 Horner went to Italy in October, 1816, and never returned.

page 446 note 3 See the woodcut of the blinded stot (i.e., The Scotsman), which introduces Blackwood's Magazine for July, 1820.

page 446 note 4 Jeffrey reviewed the Life of Curran in the Edinburgh of May, 1820. I am not sure that Hogg has this article in mind: it seems to fit as well as any.

page 446 note 5 This is simply a guess. Samuel Rogers or Henry Mackenzie might be indicated.

page 446 note 6 In the Second Series of Hogg's Jacobite Relics of 1821 “Jock the slorp” is mentioned, in Song 17, as one of “The Whigs of Fife.” John Leslie was a native of Fife. Certain supplementary evidence for the identification I omit here.

page 446 note 7 In 1822 Thomas Constable was a boy of ten, and might have been sent on an errand.

page 446 note * In his notes to the “Battle of Sheriffmuir,” the first song in The Jacobite Relics, second series, 1821, Hogg remarks that the tune is very old. “… Long previous to the battle of Sheriffmuir, it got the name of ‘John Paterson's Mare,‘ from a song that was made on a wedding bruise, or horse-race for the bride's napkin …”

“Both the song and tune have always been particular favourites of mine,” he adds in a footnote. “… I subjoin a part of one of the old songs, though not the original one”:

John Paterson's mare

She canna be here,

We nouther hae stable nor hay for her;

Whip her in, whip her out,

Sax shillings in a clout,

Owre the kirk stile an' away wi' her.

Fy whip her in, &c.

The black an' the brown

Ran nearest the town,

But Paterson's mare she came foremost;

The dun an' the gray

Kept farrest away,

But Paterson's mare she came foremost.

Fy whip her in, whip her out,

Sax shillings in a clout,

Owre the kirk stile an' away wi' her.

Fy whip her, &c.

The bay an' the yellow,

They skimmed like a swallow,

But Paterson's mare she came foremost;

The white an' the blue

They funkit and flew,

But Paterson's mare she came foremost.

Fy whip her in, &c.