plot--nothing is left to the imagination. Even in the next century,
when the short-story had come to be recognized in America, through the
example set by Hawthorne and Poe, as a distinct species of literary
art, the productions of British writers were too often nothing more
than compressed novels. In fact, it is true to say that there is more
of short-story technique in the short-story essays of Goldsmith and
Lamb than can be found in many of the brief tales of Dickens and
Anthony Trollope, which in their day passed muster unchallenged as
short-stories.


VIII

But between the irrelevant brief story, interpolated in a larger
narrative, and the perfect short-story, which could not be expanded
and is total in itself, of Hawthorne and Poe, there stands the work
of a man who is little known in America, and by no means popular in
England, that of the Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg. He was born in
Scotland, among the mountains of Ettrick and Yarrow, the son of a
shepherd. When he was but six years old he commenced to earn his
living as a cowherd, and by his seventh year had received all the
schooling which he was destined to have--two separate periods of three
months. Matthew Arnold, when accounting for the sterility of Gray as
a poet, says that throughout the first nine decades of the eighteenth
century, until the French Revolution roused men to generosity, "a
spiritual east wind was blowing." Hogg's early ignorance of letters
had at least this advantage, that it saved him from the blighting
intellectual influences of his age--left him unsophisticated, free
to find in all things matter for wonder, and to work out his mental
processes unprejudiced by a restraining knowledge of other men's