HOGG, JAMES, commonly called the Ettrick Shepherd, was born in the forest of Ettrick in Selkirkshire in 1772, and, as he latterly insisted, on tho 25th of January, the birthday of the poet Burns, although that date appears to have been opposed both to his own previous statements and to other evidence. His forefathers had been shepherds for many generations, and although his father, Robert Hogg, at one time took a lease of two farms and began business as a dealer in sheep, the speculation proved unfortunate, and he was compelled to fall back to his original condition, in which also his son James and three brothers were all brought up. Hogg was fond of giving himself out as nearly altogether self-educated; he has stated that all the instruction ho ever received was from being two or three winters at school before ho had completed his eighth year; but there is reason to believe that in this particular also his account of himself is to be regarded as somewhat poetical. He first began, he tells us, to be known as a maker of songs among the rustic population of his native district in 1796, at which time he was a shepherd in the service of Mr. Laidlaw of Blackhouse. Here we have another coincidence, for that was the very year in which Burns died. The first of his pro ductions that was printed appeared anonymously in 1801, his song of 'Donald MacDonald,' a patriotic effusion on the subject of the threatened French invasion, which immediately became a great popular favourite in Scotland. Soon after, having gone to Edinburgh to sell his masters sheep, he 'gratified his vanity by getting 1000 copies thrown off of a small collection of his verses, which however he was afterwards very sorry he had allowed to see the light.
It was in tho summer of 1801, while he was still with Mr. Laidlaw, that he was discovered by Sir Walter Scott, then engaged in collecting materials for his 'Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.' Hogg contributed a number of old songs or ballads, which he had collected from the reci tation of persons in the forest, to the third volume of the Minstrelsy,' which was published in 1803. That year another collection of his poems, of much superior merit to the former, was published at Edinburgh, under the title of the 'Mountain Bard,' the proceeds of which, with two prizes he got from tho Highland Society for essays on the rearing and management of sheep, put him in possession of about 3001. With this money he took a farm, which soon turned out a ruinous concern. For some time he attempted without success to get employment again as a shepherd, and at last, in February 1810, "in utter desperation," he says, took my plaid about my shoulders, determined, since no better could be, to push my fortune as a literary man." This was the commencement of a life of busy authorship, which may be said to have lasted till his death, although in 1814, after having married, he returned to the country to live on a farm given to him by the Duke of Buccleuch, which soon however, under his management, CAM to yield as little profit to the occupier as rent to the proprietor. We cannot enter into tho long history of his varied but constantly-struggling life, marked as it was by much more than the usual share of fluctuation and casualty, and by many curious passages arising out of his transactions with the booksellers and his intercourse with some of his distinguished literary contemporaries. He has prefixed a full memoir of his own life to an edition of his 'Mountain Bard,' published in 1821; and many fragments of autobiography are to be found scattered up and down in his other works. These various sketches however, it is proper to remark, are very far from being perfectly consistent with each other; and some of the statements have been denounced by other parties implicated in them as complete misrepresentations or fictions.
Of llogg's poetical works, by far the most remarkable is his 'Queen's Wake,' first published at Edinburgh in 1813. It is undoubtedly a very extraordinary performance to have proceeded from a person of the author's opportunities, but it has also merits of a kind that do not require the peculiarity of the circumstances in which it was produced to suite admiration. The wild imagination of come parts, the gentle 1.eatity of others, and the spirited flow of the poem throughout, greatly took the public taste, and it went through many editions both in this country and in America in a few years. The author never attained the life, or even the polish, of this early work in anything he after wards wrote ; although some of hie songs were very happy imitations of the fine old popular poetry of his country, and both in these, and in pasaages of his prose fictions, there is often &humour rich, vigorous, and original, though apt to degenerate into the coarse or extravagant. Of the rest of hie works, the chief are (besides contributions to • Blackwood's 3Iagazina ' and other periodical pnblications)—in poetry, ' Medoc of the Moor," The Pilgrims of the Sun," The Poetic Mirror' (a collection of pieces in imitation of living poets), and 'Queen Hyncle, besides his collection, of pieces partly original, partly ancient, entitled the 'Jacobite Relics of Scotland,' the 'Border Garland,' a 'Selection of Songs,' and the ' Forest Minstrel in prose,' The Brownie of 13odsbeck,' ' Winter Evening Tales,' The Three Perils of Man," The Three Perils of Woman," The Confessions of a Justified Sinner," The Altrive Tales," The Domestic Manners and Private Life of Sir Walter Scott, and a volume of ' Lay Sermons.' Hia death took place at his farm of Altrive, on the 21st of November 1835.
110HENLOHE-INGELFINGEIsT, PRINCE FREDERICK LOUIS, a general of infantry in the service of Prussia, was born January 31st, 1746. Having adopted the military profession, he became a lieutenant general before the Revolution. In this capacity he was appointed to command the vanguard of the Duke of Brunswick in July 1792, and on the 30th of that month he parsed into the French territory. The prince distinguished himself greatly in the first campaigns, and urged his leader to make for the capital. At. the forcing of the lines of Weissenberg, under Wurmser, iu 1793, his courage and energy were conspicuous. In 1795 the king of Prussia gave him the command of the army along the Ems, posted there as a neutral cordon ; he was likewise appointed Inspector-General of the troops in Silesia. In all these military officee his conduct met with the approbation of his supe riors, and when his father's death called him to the rule of his small dominions, the king of Prussia, after presenting him with a sword set with diamonds, conferred on him the government of Brcelau.
In 1806 he was entrusted with the command of the Prussian and Saxon army, ordered to invade Franconia; but the great battle of Jena, October 14, 1806, eo fatal to the arms of Prussia, rendered all his efforts abortive. lie was compelled to retreat on Stettin, and sub sequently to abandon the defence of Berlin and Magdeburg. The rest of Iris career was an unbroken series of reverses : at Lochnitz lie was defeated by Murat, at Prentzlow Grouchy reduced him to such straits as obliged him to capitulate with 16,000 men. After thou disasters his spirit was utterly broken ; he wrote a touching letter to his master, describing the camels of his late surrender ; transferred his principalb tied to his sone, and then having withdrawn to a castle ho possessed in Upper Silesia, spent the last ten years of his life in retirement. At this castle he died on the 26th of February 1817.