David Macbeth Moir

“The intellectual history of James Hogg is certainly one of the most curious that our age has presented; and when what an unlettered peasant was able to achieve by the mere enthusiasm of his genius, we are entitled to marvel certainly - not that his writing should be full of blemishes - but that his mind ever had power to burst through the Cimmerian gloom in which his earlier years seemed to be hopelessly enveloped.

After a boyhood of poverty, half starvation, and labour, the shepherd-poet in embryo found himself at lenth aged fourteen and the possessor of five shillings - with which he bought a fiddle (!!!) over the catgut of which he kept sawing Scottish tunes, for two or three hours every night, after retiring to his roost in the loft of the cowhouse, where the discord could molest nobody save himself - an antitype of Orpheus - and the rats.”
― David Macbeth Moir, Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the Past Half-Century