As a Border minstrel, Hogg ranks next to Scott—­is, in fact, a sort of inferior Scott.  His range was narrower, but he was just as thoroughly saturated with the legendary lore of the countryside, and in some respects he stood closer to the spirit of that peasant life in which popular poetry has its source.  As a ballad poet, indeed, he is not always Scott’s inferior, though even his ballads are apt to be too long and without the finish and the instinct for selection which marks the true artist.  When he essayed metrical romances in numerous cantos, his deficiencies in art became too fatally evident.  Scott, in his longer poems, is often profuse and unequal, but always on a much higher level than Hogg.  The latter had no skill in conducting to the end a fable of some complexity, involving a number of varied characters and a really dramatic action.  “Mador of the Moor,” e.g., is a manifest and not very successful imitation of “The Lady of the Lake”; and it requires a strong appetite for the romantic to sustain a reader through the six parts of “Queen Hynde” and the four parts of “The Pilgrims of the Sun.”  By general consent, the best of Hogg’s more ambitious poems is “The Queen’s Wake,” and the best thing in it is “Kilmeny.”  “The Queen’s Wake” (1813) combines, in its narrative plan, the framework of “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” with the song competition in its sixth canto.  Mary Stuart, on landing in Scotland, holds a Christmas wake at Holyrood, where seventeen bards contend before her for the prize of song.  The lays are in many different moods and measures, but all enclosed in a setting of octosyllabic couplets, closely modelled upon Scott, and the whole ends with a tribute to the great minstrel who had waked once more the long silent Harp of the North.  The thirteenth bard’s song—­“Kilmeny”—­is of the type of traditionary tale familiar in “Tarn Lin” and “Thomas of Ercildoune,” and tells how a maiden was spirited away to fairyland, where she saw a prophetic vision of her country’s future (including the Napoleonic wars) and returned after a seven years’ absence.

  “Late, late in a gloamin’ when all was still,
  When the fringe was red on the westlin hill,
  The wood was sere, the moon i’ the wane,
  The reek o’ the cot hung o’er the plain,
  Like a little wee cloud in the world its lane;
  When the ingle lowed wi’ an eiry leme,
  Late, late in the gloamin’ Kilmeny came hame.”

The Ettrick Shepherd’s peculiar province was not so much the romance of national history as the field of Scottish fairy lore and popular superstition.  It was he, rather than Walter Scott, who carried out the suggestions long since made to his countryman, John Home, in Collins’ “Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands.”  His poems are full of bogles, kelpies, brownies, warlocks, and all manner of “grammarie.”  “The Witch of Fife” in “The Queen’s Wake,” a spirited bit of grotesque, is repeatedly quoted