This volume is designed to present Hogg’s first (very short) collection of poetry, Scottish Pastorals (1801), together with other early poems, and the ’Letters on Poetry’ that he contributed to
The Scots Magazine in 1805-06. Hogg’s first collection of poems, Scottish Pastorals, was published in pamphlet form in 1801, when he was thirty years old. This volume also contains his first
published poem ’The Mistakes of a Night’ (1794), an energetically rumbustious tale of rural courtship and his ’Letters on Poetry’ that appeared in the numbers of The Scots Magazine for May 1805
and January 1806; these have never been reprinted before now. These interesting early documents demonstrate his confident grasp of Shakespeare and eighteenth-century writers including Pope,
Swift, Sterne, Goldsmith, Thomson, and Burns, as well as his passion for theatre. This volume complements The Mountain Bard (first edition 1807) and The Forest Minstrel (first edition 1810)
and, when taken together and read alongside the first v
