The View from Castle Rock

settin down nor right spelt,” though this may seem an odd judgment to be made by someone who had been presented-by herself or by Hogg-as a simple old countrywoman with only a minimum of education.
    She was probably both simple and sharp. She had known what she was doing but could not help regretting what she had done.
    And noo they
’
ll never be sung mair.
    She might also have enjoyed showing that it took more than a printed book, it took more than the Shirra of Selkirk, to make a favorable impression on her. Scots are like that, I think. My family was like that.

    Fifty years after Will O’Phaup clasped his children and prayed for protection on All Hallows’ Eve, Hogg and a few of his male cousins-he does not give their names-are to meet in that same high house at Phaup. By this time the house is used as a lodging by whatever bachelor shepherd is in charge of the high-feeding sheep, and the others are present that evening not to get drunk and tell stories but to
read essays.
These essays Hogg describes as flaming and bombastical, and from those words, and from what was said afterwards, it would seem that these young men deep in the Ettrick had heard about the Age of Reason, though they probably didn’t call it that, and about the ideas of Voltaire and Locke and of David Hume, their fellow Scot and Lowlander. Hume had grown up at Ninewells near Chirnside, about fifty miles away, and it was to Ninewells that he retreated when he suffered a breakdown at the age of eighteen-perhaps overcome, temporarily, by the scope of the investigation he saw in front of him. He would still have been alive when these boys were born.
    I could be guessing wrong, of course. What Hogg calls essays could have been stories. Tales of the Covenanters being hunted down at their outdoor services by red-coated dragoons, of witches, of the walking dead. These were lads who would try their hand at any composition, at prose or poetry. John Knox’s schools had done their work, and a rash of literature, a fever of poetry, was breaking out in all classes. When Hogg had been at his lowest point, working as a shepherd on the lonely hills of Nithsdale, living in a rough shelter called a bothy, the Cunningham brothers-the stonemason’s apprentice and poet Allan Cunningham, and his brother James-had come trudging over the countryside to meet him and tell him of their admiration. (Hogg was alarmed at first, thinking they came to charge him with some trouble about a woman.) The three of them left the dog Hector to guard the sheep and settled down to talk of poetry all day, then crawled into the bothy to drink whisky and talk of poetry all night.
    The shepherds’ meeting at Phaup, which Hogg claims that he himself did not manage to attend, in spite of having such an essay in his pocket, was held in winter. The weather had been strangely warm. That night, however, a storm arose which turned out to be the worst in half a century. Sheep were frozen in their pens and men and horses were trapped and frozen on the roads, while houses were buried in snow up to their roofs. For three or four days the storm continued, roaring and devastating, and when it was over, and the young shepherds came down to the valley alive, their families were relieved but in no way pleased with them.
    Hogg’s mother told him plainly that it was a punishment brought on the whole countryside by the Devil’s work being done in whatever reading and conversing was going on at Phaup that night. No doubt many other parents thought the same.
    Some years later, Hogg wrote a fine description of this storm, and it was published in
Blackwoods Magazine. Black-woods
was the favorite reading of the little Brontes, in the rectory at Haworth, and when they each chose a hero to impersonate in their games, Emily chose the Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg. (Charlotte chose the Duke of Wellington.)
Wutbering Heights,
Emily’s great novel, begins with a description of a terrible storm. I have often wondered if there is a connection.

    I don’t believe that James Laidlaw was one of those present at Phaup that night. His letters don’t show anything like a skeptical, or theorizing, or poetical sort of mind. Of course the letters that I have read were written when he was old. People change.
    Certainly he is a joker when we meet him first, by Hogg’s account, in Tibbie Shiel’s inn (which is still there, more than an hour’s walk through the hills from Phaup, just as Phaup is still there, now a bothy