Literary critics of Wordsworth’s elegiac poem, ‘Extempore Effusion Upon the Death of James Hogg’ [hereafter ‘Extempore Effusion’] agree that the poem is concerned with Wordsworth’s memories of Coleridge, Scott, Lamb, Crabbe, and Mrs Hemans: ‘those who had mattered much more to him’ than the subject of the poem, James Hogg. Stephen Gill and William Ruddick ventriloquise Mary Moorman’s statement of 1965 that ‘Wordsworth held no very high opinion of Hogg either as a poet or as a man’. According to Moorman, Wordsworth had ‘a limited admiration’ of The Queen’s Wake, and thought [Hogg] ‘possessed of no ordinary power’, but ‘too illiterate to write in any measure or style that does not savour of balladism’. He classed him and Scott together as guilty of ‘insupportable slovenliness and neglect of syntax and grammar’. [3] In his examination of ‘Extempore Effusion’, Stephen Gill follows Moorman, and he also cites the ‘Fenwick Note’ to ‘Extempore Effusion’ where Wordsworth described Hogg as ‘undoubtedly a man of original genius, but of coarse manners and low and offensive opinions’. [4] Ruddick claims the tone of this ‘Fenwick Note’ was given ‘frostily’, [5] and he relies on Wordsworth’s correspondence with Robert Pearse Gillies, a young Edinburgh lawyer with whom Wordsworth corresponded on literary matters: ‘Wordsworth thought that Hogg’s poems possessed merit up to a point, but declared that Hogg’s best-known poem, The Queen’s Wake, was marred because Hogg “was too illiterate to write in any measure or style that does not savour of balladism” ’. [6] Gill does not indicate that Wordsworth held the same opinion of Scott’s poetry in 1814 as he did of Hogg’s, while Ruddick confuses Hogg’s writing: in the letter he quotes from, Wordsworth was in fact discussing Hogg’s experimental verse drama The Hunting of Badlewe and not the critically acclaimed Queen’s Wake. [7] Wordsworth’s negative criticisms of Hogg and his work lend weight to the argument that ‘Extempore Effusion’ was concerned with those who ‘had mattered much more’ to Wordsworth than Hogg. However, a different perspective can be selected from the same correspondence with Gillies where Wordsworth also discussed Hogg and his poetry in positive terms.

     In 1814, Gillies gave Wordsworth two of Hogg’s works, The Queen’s Wake and The Hunting of Badlewe, and it is Wordsworth’s literary criticism of these, one polished and the other experimental, that has contributed to the continuing negative perceptions filtered through Wordsworth’s later ‘Fenwick Note’ to ‘Extempore Effusion’. However, as the chronological sequence below reveals, Wordsworth’s criticism was more measured and positive than has previously been suggested.

In Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707–1830, Leith Davis finds that Wordsworth’s criticism of Hogg and Scott ‘conflates his economic anxieties with national prejudices’. [11] Davis explains Wordsworth’s criticisms in light of Francis Jeffrey’s hostile reviews of The Excursion in the Edinburgh Review of November 1814, but, as the above criticisms of The Queen’s Wake reveals, Wordsworth finds fault with more than Hogg’s Scottish diction, he also criticises his poetic style, including his use of ‘balladism’, ‘false finery’, syntactical and grammatical errors, and metrical rhythm. Such criticism is not surprising in light of Wordsworth’s experimentation with a new philosophy of poetry in the Lyrical Ballads. Indeed, his radical poetics lead to the recognition of Hogg’s intellectual acumen and poetic ability where he finds that Hogg is ‘an able writer’, ‘a genius’, ‘possessed of no ordinary power’.

     Two recent developments in both Wordsworth and Hogg textual studies enable a fresh analysis of ‘Extempore Effusion’ that re-places Hogg firmly at the centre of Wordsworth’s commemorative poem. Firstly, the Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of The Collected Works of James Hogg (hereafter S/SC Research Edition), an important international collaborative project that was inaugurated in 1995 with The Shepherd’s Calendar. In the ‘Introduction’ to the series, Douglas Mack points out the urgent necessity of the venture,

     The guiding principle behind the S/SC Research Edition is to reveal Hogg as an important writer within the generic community of nineteenth-century British authors through a variety of different textual approaches to the individual volumes in the series, including, ‘unbowdlerising’ texts, reprinting first editions in facsimile, and presenting the first publication of texts from Hogg’s original manuscripts. To date, sixteen volumes and eight paperback reissues have been published by Edinburgh University Press, enabling a serious re-evaluation of Hogg’s work.

     Secondly, the bibliographic array in the apparatus criticus of Cornell’s edition of Wordsworth’s Last Poems, 1821–50, edited by Jared Curtis et al., [13] reveals that contrary to assumed critical opinion, Wordsworth thought a great deal about Hogg while he composed his poem: thought about Hogg both as ‘a poet and as a man’. In the array, Curtis records nine different manuscript versions and four different published versions, together with an accumulation of over forty variants of Wordsworth’s extempore effusion on Hogg’s death. [14] Moreover, the array records that Wordsworth’s eleven alterations to his third representation of Hogg in the concluding line of the poem are in stark contrast to his unaltered depictions of Scott, Coleridge, Lamb, and Crabbe. [15] Given Wordsworth’s predilection for continuous revision, such an abundance of different versions is unsurprising. However, while Wordsworth’s revisionary habits, most notably for The Prelude, continue to attract keen scholarly debate, the critical reception of the poem to date suggests that an inability to separate Hogg the man from Hogg the author in Wordsworth’s ‘Fenwick Note’ have played their part in critical interrogations of the poem that refuse to take Hogg as its subject seriously. [16] The following examination of Wordsworth’s revisions and alterations to ‘Extempore Effusion’ from the bibliographic array in the Cornell Wordsworth is informed by the S/SC Research Edition principle that Hogg is an important subject within nineteenth-century literary studies.

     Ebba Hutchinson’s recollections have become the context by which subsequent readings of the genesis of the poem have been made:

The poem entitled, ‘The Graves of the Poets’ has not been discovered and Hutchinson’s transcript is also missing. The earliest surviving ‘extempore effusion’, or moment of spontaneous composition, is the version of the poem Wordsworth contributed to John Hernaman, the editor of the Newcastle Journal, on 30 November 1835.

     The opening stanza acknowledges Hogg’s prominent role in Wordsworth’s emotional first visit to the Yarrow Valley late in the summer of 1814, when he claimed ‘The Ettrick Shepherd was my guide’ (l. 4). Wordsworth’s admission remained unaltered from the first version to the last known ‘authorised’ printed version in the fifth volume of The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. [18] So too, lines 10–12 of the poem where Wordsworth referred directly to Hogg’s death went unrevised: ‘And death upon the braes of Yarrow,/ Has closed the Shepherd-poet’s eyes’. This first version was transcribed by Mary Wordsworth and ‘autographed by William’, but misdated ‘Dec [r ]1 [st], 1835’. Hogg died on 21 November, and Wordsworth clearly felt that pre-publication revision was necessary to correct the error. In his second letter to Hernaman hurriedly sent the following day, he requested that the date be altered to ‘Nov [r] 30 [th]’, and with this letter, took the opportunity to include additional stanzas. Wordsworth told Hernaman on 1 December 1835:

     Wordsworth did not rewrite the poem in full but sent the three additional stanzas with his letter. Both in the first eight stanzas and in these additional stanzas the majority of Wordsworth’s revisions alter the tone:

The revision from ‘yet’ to ‘but’ is a repetition that adds a questioning, bewildered quality, and in the same stanza, Wordsworth’s revision in line 35 from ‘For ripe fruit’ to ‘O’er ripe fruit’ alters the over-sentimental attitude suggested through the alliterative f and s sounds, to a more muted expression of loss. Cumulatively, Wordsworth’s revisions reveal him fine-tuning the mood he wished to convey as his reaction to reading in the Newcastle Journal a note announcing Hogg’s death.

     The first version of the text comprising the eight stanzas that Wordsworth contributed to the Newcastle Journal on 30 November 1835 had a despondent ending where Wordsworth had questioned his own mortality:

This clearly did not fit well within a poem that purported to be about Hogg’s death. Therefore, as he had indicated to Hernaman, in order to ‘do justice to the occasion that called them forth’ he concluded his revised final stanza with a return to its subject:

The array in the Cornell Wordsworth reveals that Wordsworth was unhappy with the additional concluding stanza. Initially, Wordsworth had concluded with a general lamentation:

This was cancelled to:

Hogg was born in the Ettrick valley in the Scottish Borders in 1770, and he had lived in or close to the next valley, Yarrow, for over twenty years until his death at Altrive Lake, his cottage on the banks of the Yarrow River. Yet Wordsworth’s revision adds more than biographical detail to his extempore effusion. In the first version, the flowing singlet to duplet rhythm evokes a sense of bewilderment, and concludes the questioning sense of loss that infuses the poem in the ‘timid voice that asks in whispers,/ “Who next will drop and disappear?” ’ Through his revised ending the rhythmic pattern is interrupted with the alteration from the pastoral ‘glade’ to an emphatic statement, ‘Poet’, together with a strong ending and exclamatory cry, ‘dead!’ Through his revisions, then, Wordsworth signals deeply felt personal grief over Hogg’s death.

     Wordsworth was still unhappy with his last line however, and he substituted ‘Shepherd’ for ‘Poet’: a revision that did not interrupt the changed rhyme-scheme, but an important change nevertheless. ‘Ettrick Shepherd’ was the mantle Hogg adopted early in his writing career, and the name by which he was internationally known. During his early years as a struggling poet, it was, as Wordsworth signals, an actual reality as well as a literary construct, as Hogg had shepherded on the Blackhouse Heights above the Yarrow River during the 1790s. By revising the personal pronoun that had signalled Hogg’s professional status, to ‘Shepherd’, in the same line as ‘Ettrick’, Wordsworth acknowledged Hogg’s unique biography and humble beginnings, and recognised, through capitalisation, Hogg’s important contribution to nineteenth-century literature.

     In his second letter to Hernaman, Wordsworth emphasised that this final version of the last line was the one that he wished to be printed, as he explained, ‘I have written the last line over again below to prevent a mistake’ (Letters: LY, p. 129). Wordsworth’s contributions appeared together as the poem entitled, ‘Extempore Effusion, Upon reading in the Newcastle Journal, the notice of the death of the Poet, James Hogg’, in the Newcastle Journal of 5 December 1835. However, Wordsworth remained troubled by his revision from ‘Poet’ to ‘Shepherd’, so that when he extended the poem to include a commemorative stanza on Felicia Hemans around the middle of December, he revised his representation of Hogg once more. The extended version of the poem, transcribed by Dora Wordsworth, reveals that Wordsworth was still unhappy with the concluding line, as Wordsworth cancels a revision from ‘Shepherd’ to ‘Poet’ in her handwriting, and re-revises once more to ‘Shepherd’. Jared Curtis draws our attention to Wordsworth’s note, ‘quere Poet’ added at the end of the poem, as Curtis notes: ‘Either his revision of “Poet” to “Shepherd” in this manuscript followed his query, or he contemplated changing back to “Poet” ’. [20]

     In 1837, the now canonical version of the poem entitled ‘Extempore Effusion Upon the Death of James Hogg’ was included in the fifth volume of Poetical Works. It is this ‘latest authorial version’ that comprises the ‘reading text’ of the Cornell Wordsworth, and in this version both the title and the concluding line are altered. As he had signalled in his note at the end of his December 1835 revision, Wordsworth reverts from ‘Shepherd’ to ‘Poet’: a word originally cancelled in the additional stanzas that were forwarded to John Hernaman on 1 December 1835. In this instance, the reversion to ‘Poet’ in the last line of the poem re-emphasised Hogg’s professional status that the revised title had erased.

     But this was not Wordsworth’s final representation of Hogg in his commemorative poem. Helen Darbishire detailed the ‘manuscript variants’ of ‘Extempore Effusion’ in Wordsworth’s marked copy of his 1836 Poetical Works that he used to mark corrections, revisions, and additional verses in the preparation of both his 1840 and 1845 collected editions. In this version (MS 1836/45), line 44 is revised to: ‘And Ettrick mourns her Shepherd Poet dead’. So far as can be established this marked-up copy of the poem has never been published. [21] In her description of the ‘heavily annotated’ volumes Darbishire explained how Wordsworth used them:

At some point, then, between 1838 and 1845, Wordsworth returned to the concluding line of ‘Extempore Effusion’ and marked in pencil ‘her Shepherd Poet’ to replace ‘with her their Poet’.

     The Cornell Wordsworth array allows greater scope than has previously been available to scholars to examine all of Wordsworth’s revisions and alterations to the multiple versions of his poems. In particular, it reveals how he deliberated and worried about how he could best represent Hogg in the closing words to his commemorative poem. [23] The array raises an important question concerning ‘Extempore Effusion’ and Wordsworth’s relationship with Hogg. Why, when he ‘held no very high opinion of Hogg either as a poet or as a man’, did it matter so much to Wordsworth whether Hogg was represented as a ‘Shepherd’, a ‘Poet’, or a ‘shepherd-poet’? Wordsworth’s revisions raise the possibility that Hogg ‘mattered much more to him’ than has previously been considered; however, they do not explain why Wordsworth was so disturbed. In Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgement of Literary Work, Jerome J. McGann has explored the array as a form of critical discourse that offers ‘special opportunities for those interested in exploiting the critical strategies available to writers’ because ‘narrativized discourse’ in its ‘formal commitment to the maintenance of continuity can throw up obstacles to its critical use’. However, McGann concludes that a return to narrative discourse is inevitable as the ‘critical status of ideological discourse […] can only be assessed in terms of its specific historical frame of reference’. [24] The array in the Cornell Wordsworth reveals the limitations of non-narrative discourse as a form of criticism because it is only by exploring the biographical details of their relationship ‘in its specific historical frame of reference’, which is inevitably narrativised, that we learn the cause of Wordsworth’s insecurities over his representation of Hogg.

     Wordsworth became acquainted with Hogg during the late summer of 1814 when they met in Edinburgh. A few weeks later Hogg met Wordsworth at Rydal Mount where the now frequently recounted anecdote of how their relationship was soured by Wordsworth’s arrogant denunciation of Hogg by posing the question, ‘Poets, where are they?’ in Hogg’s presence, occurred. This significant episode in Wordsworth/Hogg relations is usually described as ‘the triumphal arch scene’ from Hogg’s autobiographical account of the event in his ‘Reminiscences of Former Days: Wordsworth’. The ‘Memoir of the Author’s Life’ that preceded ‘Reminiscences’ was a record of Hogg’s professional life to 1832, and contained his account of his dealings with publishers and patrons, as well as offering his version of the genesis of many of his works. Hogg’s ‘Reminiscence’ of Wordsworth contextualises his verse-parodies in The Poetic Mirror of 1816, where Hogg reveals, for the first time, that his verse-parodies of Wordsworth were generated by an ‘affront’ or snub to his poetic abilities. Hogg claims the ‘anecdote has been told and told again, but never truly; and was likewise brought forward in the “Noctes Ambrosianæ, as a joke; but it was no joke’; his version, he insists, ‘is the plain, simple truth of the matter’. [25] Critics frequently note that Hogg’s later ‘Reminiscence’ is a repetition of an earlier anecdote that first appeared in the seventeenth number of ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ’ of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, in November 1824 (vol. 16, p. 592), and Hogg’s remembrance of the anecdote some eighteen years after the event is used as evidence that he never forgave Wordsworth’s insult. [26] However, the two anecdotes are not identical, and the first version is discussed below in order to establish why Hogg repeated it now.

     Number 17 of ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ’ is concerned with the publication of Conversations of Lord Byron, by Thomas Medwin, and allusions to widely circulated correspondence between Byron and Hogg weave ironically through the conversation; the purpose of which was to cast doubt on Medwin’s Conversations. [27] ‘Mullion’ tells ‘Hogg’, ‘ “I observe, Hogg, that Byron told Medwin he was greatly taken with your manners when he met you at the Lakes. Pray, Jem, was the feeling mutual?” Hogg, “Oo, aye, man—I thought Byron a very nice laud. […] We were just as thick as weavers in no time” ’(p. 591). Hogg never met Byron but he had corresponded with him, and it would appear that he had planned to publish their letters. [28] In one of his letters to Hogg, Byron described the ‘Lake poets’ in unflattering and unprofessional terms: ‘Wordsworth—stupendous genius! damned fool! These poets run about their ponds though they cannot fish. I am told there is not one who can angle—damned fools!’ [29] It is this letter that Medwin expands upon when recounting Hogg’s meeting with Byron. According to Medwin’s retelling, Byron said that he had

The letters containing Byron’s opinion of Wordsworth and Coleridge circulated widely, and their mention in the ‘Noctean’ conversation had a double function. As well as throwing doubt on the authenticity of Medwin’s Conversations, they also compared Byron and Wordsworth through their respective association with Hogg. ‘Hogg’ asks, “O, man, wasna this a different kind of behaviour frae that proud Don Wordsworth’s? Od! How Byron leuch when I tell’d him Wordsworth’s way wi’ me!” ’ And he goes on to recount his meeting with Wordsworth.

As Byron and Hogg had ‘greed like breether’ in the early ‘Noctean’ anecdote, so finally, in death, Wordsworth accepts Hogg into the poetic fraternity.

     Why then, does Hogg continue to be replaced by Coleridge, Scott, Lamb, Crabbe, and Mrs Hemans in studies of ‘Extempore Effusion’? These studies include Gill’s and Ruddick’s literary criticism noted above, and also recent literary anthologies and generic studies of the nineteenth century that reprint the poem without contextual information about Hogg other than a short biographical footnote. For example, in the most recent scholarly pedagogic tool, The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 2A: The Romantics and their Contemporaries, several ‘major’ poets and their poems are contextualised in a series of ‘Perspectives’ that suggest lines of enquiry and themes for consideration along with related ‘companion reading’. Wordsworth’s ‘Extempore Effusion Upon the Death of James Hogg’ is represented in the Longman Anthology, as are four of the six poets he laments: Scott, Lamb, Coleridge, and Hemans. There are no texts by either Crabbe or Hogg. It is Felicia Hemans who represents the ‘contextual’ element to the poem, with extracts from Wordsworth’s biographical commentary of Hemans from the ‘Fenwick Note’ to ‘Extempore Effusion’ included under the heading of ‘Companion Readings’ to her poetry. Hogg’s absence from discussion of Wordsworth’s stately elegy on his death is continued with his exclusion from the ‘Companion Website’ on the ‘Romantic Timeline’, which begins in 1765 with Hargreaves’ invention of the ‘Spinning Jenny’, skips over Hogg’s birth-date of 1770, neglects to list any of his major works, and concludes in 1833, denying even the date of his death to be noted. [40]

     The ‘Fenwick Note’ is clearly perceived to represent Wordsworth’s final opinion on Hogg. Hogg’s humble background is undeniable and explains Wordsworth’s perception of him as ‘rude’ in polite company. However, what were Hogg’s ‘low and offensive opinions’? In April 1832 Wordsworth reacted to Hogg’s ‘Reminiscences’, when he interrupted Dora’s letter to Edward Quillinan in order to explain that Hogg’s anecdote was not entirely true. He told Quillinan:

Wordsworth’s questioning in lines 25–32 of ‘Yarrow Visited, September 1814’ perhaps mirrors their conversation during their Yarrow excursion:

The ‘famous Flower of Yarrow Vale’ is a quotation from the first stanza of Logan’s ‘The Braes of Yarrow’: ‘For never on thy banks shall I/ Behold my Love, the flower of Yarrow’. On the morning of their Yarrow tour, as Wordsworth later explained in his ‘Fenwick Note’ to ‘Yarrow Visited’, he met Dr Robert Anderson, the editor of The Works of the British Poets, in which Anderson had included a memoir and selections of Logan’s poetry. It is therefore possible, and Wordsworth’s direct quotation is highly suggestive, that they had discussed Logan’s association with Yarrow. Hogg’s first book-length publication was entitled The Mountain Bard (1807), his collection of songs was entitled The Forest Minstrel (1810), and Hogg himself appeared as one of the minstrels competing for Mary Queen of Scot’s harp in The Queen’s Wake (1813). [43] His apparent absence from the poem generated by their time together in the Yarrow valley, where Wordsworth bemoans,

has led critics to interpret Wordsworth’s ‘Minstrel’ as referring to that other Border Minstrel, Sir Walter Scott. Stephen Gill has made the case that ‘remembering James Hogg meant remembering the Yarrow’, an association that Gill suggests alludes to the Yarrow setting of Scott’s long poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Gill further suggests that the ‘braes of Yarrow’ (ll. 12–13) in the third stanza of his extemporary verses is an allusion to poems entitled ‘The Braes of Yarrow’, by William Hamilton and John Logan. [45] All of this is true. But Hogg was also present, and Wordsworth’s reference to ‘the braes of Yarrow’ has associations with The Queen’s Wake, recently published to critical acclaim. Hogg mentions Hamilton and Logan amongst a list of notable poets who had written of the Ettrick and Yarrow. For example, in his explanatory notes to ‘Sweet rung the harp to Logan’s hand’, he explains he was ‘alluding to Logan’s beautiful song “The Braes of Yarrow” ’. [46]

     Wordsworth and Hogg’s conversations surrounding Border poetry also surfaced in ‘The Stranger: Being a further portion of The Recluse, A Poem’, one of three verse parodies of Wordsworth’s poetry that Hogg included in The Poetic Mirror in 1816 (London), and one that Hogg admitted he had written during his 1814 visit to the Lake District. [47] It is likely, as Wordsworth continued to assist Dr Anderson with a projected expansion of the British Poets on his return from Scotland to Rydal Mount, their conversations on ‘British Poets’ also continued from Yarrow. [48] The Wordsworthian narrator of ‘The Stranger’ recalls how he had travelled to Windermere with ‘bard obscure’ [Hogg]:

Critics are divided over the figure of ‘The Border Minstrel’, and have suggested Burns or Scott as likely candidates. [49] However, the figure connects to The Queen’s Wake. The setting for Hogg’s major poem is an imaginary bardic competition between Scottish poets for an ornate harp before the court of Mary Queen of Scots in 1561. One of the poets named the ‘Bard of Ettrick’ does not win, but receives an unadorned harp, in consolation. Hogg theorised the origins of the Border ballads through the figure of ‘the Bard of Ettrick’ (one of the competing minstrels) who, ‘grieved the legendary lay/ Should perish from our land for ay’, and who therefore, ‘strikes, beside the pen,/ The harp of Yarrow’s braken glen’ (‘Introduction’, ll. 351–52). In his explanatory ‘Notes’ Hogg glosses ‘the bard of Ettrick’:

     In her study of Hogg’s ballad contributions to Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Valentina Bold has shown how Hogg collected and transcribed

Bold reprints Hogg’s manuscript transcription of ‘The Dowie houms o’ Yarrow’ and indicates Scott’s alterations:

In the literary conversations that Hogg satirically replays in ‘The Stranger’, he reiterates his theory that the Border ballads originated with a Border Minstrel-poet from the Ettrick Valley: ‘he of all the world/ Farthest from genius or from common sense’. Moreover, the interconnectedness of ‘The Stranger’ and the ‘triumphal arch scene’ that Hogg recounts in his 1832 ‘Reminiscence’ reveal how Wordsworth’s social arrogance undermined Hogg’s self-appointed position as an important repository and transmitter of traditional balladry associated with the Yarrow valley. Within the context of Wordsworth’s opinion of Hogg’s ‘self-conceit in delivering confident opinions upon classical literature and other points about w [h] he c [d] know nothing’, his indecisive, careful deliberation in his commemorative poem over his representation of whether Hogg was a ‘Poet’, a ‘Shepherd’, or a ‘shepherd-poet’ becomes an admission that Hogg was right to complain in his Wordsworthian ‘Reminiscence’: ‘It is surely presumption in any man to circumscribe all human excellence within the narrow sphere of his own capacity’ (Altrive Tales, p. 68). [53]

     In his recent S/SC Edition of The Queen’s Wake Douglas Mack suggests that Hogg’s opinions of traditional oral ballads ‘connects powerfully with the kind of poetry advocated by Wordsworth in the 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads ’:

Wordsworth did not intend ‘to give the [Fenwick] notes a prominence calculated to “manipulate” his readers by positioning them “as prefatory indexes to the poems” ’, as Jared Curtis rightly notes. [55] At the same time as the array in the Cornell Wordsworth undermines the ‘Fenwick Note’ to ‘Extempore Effusion’ through the revelation of Wordsworth’s insecure search for the best words to signify Hogg’s stature as ‘a national bard’, each new volume of the S/SC Research Edition uncovers evidence of Hogg’s ‘original genius’. It is time for Wordsworth’s assessment to be accepted, without the qualifying ‘but’.