During the 1820s and 1830s James Hogg, or "The Ettrick Shepherd," as he was called from his frequent signature of his magazine articles, was almost as well known a Scottish author as Sir Walter Scott. The works his contemporaries valued most highly were his long narrative poems, led by The Queen's Wake (1813), and his many comic, sentimental, and patriotic songs, but perhaps he was even more famous as a fictional character than as an author. From 1822 until his death in 1835 Hogg was featured in the "Noctes Ambrosianae" series of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine as Hogg or the Shepherd, both a "boozing buffoon" (in the apt phrase of J. G. Lockhart, one of the authors of the series) and a rustic genius: a peasant poet of deplorable appearance and manners, social ineptness, ignorance, and vanity as well as poetic eloquence, a virtuoso command of the Scots language, shrewdness, ready wit...