Death-Wake_ in _Blackwood_. He also knew Aytoun, Professor Ferrier, De
Quincey, Hartley Coleridge, and Hogg, and was one of the first guests
of Tibbie Sheils, on the spit of land between St. Mary's and the Loch
of the Lowes. In verses of this period (1827) Miss Stoddart detects
traces of Keats and Byron, but the lines quoted are much better in
_technique_ than Byron usually wrote.

The summer of 1830 Mr. Stoddart passed in Hogg's company on Yarrow,
and early in 1831 he published _The Death-Wake_. There is no trace of
James Hogg in the poem, which, to my mind, is perfectly original.
Wilson places it "between the weakest of Shelley and the strongest of
Barry Cornwall." It is really nothing but a breath of the spirit of
romance, touching an instrument not wholly out of tune, but never to
be touched again.

It is unnecessary to follow Mr. Stoddart through a long and happy life
of angling and of literary leisure. He only blossomed once. His poem
was plagiarised and inserted in _Graham's Magazine_, by a person named
Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro (vol. xx.). Mr. Ingram, the biographer of
Edgar Poe, observes that Poe praised the piece while he was exposing
Tasistro's "barefaced robbery."

The copy of _The Death-Wake_ from which this edition is printed was
once the property of Mr. Aytoun, author of _Lays of the Scottish
Cavaliers_, and, I presume, of _Ta Phairshon_. Mr. Aytoun has written
a prefatory sonnet which will be found in its proper place, a set of
rhymes on the flyleaf at the end, and various cheerful but unfeeling
notes. After some hesitation I do not print these frivolities.

The copy was most generously presented to me by Professor Knight of