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 volume of Hogg's Collected Letters, these volumes in the Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg allow readers to gain a comprehensive overview of Hogg's career as a poet up until 1810, the year in which (aged 39) he moved to Edinburgh to begin a career as a professional writer.