Scott's Border Minstrelsy Exhibition

“The Jacobite relics of Scotland; being the songs, airs, and legends of the adherents of the House of Stuart”, collected and illustrated by James Hogg, 1819-1821, volume 1 ‘ The Ettrick Shepherd’ James Hogg (1770-1835) is nowadays best remembered for his gothic novel ‘The Confessions of a Justified Sinner’. Hogg was one of the many collaborators who helped Scott create the ‘Minstrelsy’. Scott first came into contact with Hogg while conducting research for his third volume of the ‘Minstrelsy’. Hogg, after reading the first two volumes of the ‘Minstrelsy’, had written down some of his mother’s ballad repertoire and sent them to the editor. Scott later paid a visit to Ettrick and famously heard Hogg’s mother sing the ballad ‘Auld Maitland’. Scott and Hogg immediately struck up a life-long friendship. Hogg, like most other Scottish literary figures of this period, was himself a composer and collector of Scottish popular songs and ballads. His two volume work ‘The Jacobite Relics of Scotland’ has become a classic reference book for Jacobite songs, much as Scott’s ‘Minstrelsy’ has for Scottish ballads. Hogg in fact inherited the idea of creating his collection from Scott. The song ‘Donald McGillivray’ was actually written by James Hogg to see if his own composition would be taken for a traditional Jacobite song by the public. Ironically the advocate Francis Jeffrey (1773-1850) who condemned the ‘Jacobite Relics’ for its lack of ‘taste’ in an article for the ‘Edinburgh Review’, praised this particular song ‘…which, for sly, characteristic Scotch humour, seems to us the best,…’!