In 1803, Walter Scott presented a remarkable guest to his friends at an Edinburgh dinner party. The plaid-clad figure, hands stained with tar from doctoring the sheep he had just driven to the market, was James Hogg, poet and Shepard, and one of Scotland's most unusual literary figures. With no schooling after the age of seven, Hogg struggled to form his letters, and taught himself the violin to while away the lonely hours working with his flock. Yet he went on to number literary giants such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Walter Scott among his friends and acquaintances, to become a poet and novelist and to run a short-lived literary magazine called Spy, the tone of which proved too robust for polite Edinburgh society. Having fathered two children he married for the first time aged fifty, to a woman twenty years his junior. Karl Miller's biography restores this overlooked and fascinating figure to his rightful place in the literary history of Scotland.
