in Angling Songs, by Miss Stoddart, the poet’s daughter (Blackwoods, Edinburgh, 1889).  Mr. Stoddart was born on St. Valentine’s Day 1810, in Argyll Square, Edinburgh, nearly on the site of the Kirk of Field, where Darnley was murdered.  He came of an old Border family.  Miss Stoddart tells a painful tale of an aged Miss Helen who burned family papers because she thought she was bewitched by the seals and decorated initials.  Similar follies are reported of a living old lady, on whose hearth, after a night of destruction, was once found the impression of a seal of Mary of Modena.  I could give only too good a guess at the provenance of those papers, but nobody can interfere.  Beyond 1500 the family memories rely on tradition.  The ancestors owned lands in the Forest of Ettrick, and Williamhope, on the Tweed hard by Ashestiel.  On the Glenkinnon burn, celebrated by Scott, they hid the prophets of the Covenant “by fifties in a cave.”  One Williamhope is said to have been out at Drumclog, or, perhaps, Bothwell Brig.  This laird, of enormous strength, was called the Beetle of Yarrow, and was a friend of Murray of Philiphaugh.  His son, in the Fifteen, was out on the Hanoverian side, which was not in favour with the author of The Death-Wake.  He married a daughter of Veitch of The Glen, now the property of Sir Charles Tennant.  In the next generation but one, the Stoddarts sold their lands and took to commerce, while the poet’s father won great distinction in the Navy.  The great-great-grandfather of the poet married a Miss Muir of Anniston, the family called cousins (on which side of the blanket I know not) with Robert II. of Scotland, and, by another line, were as near as in the sixth degree of James III.

As a schoolboy, Mr. Stoddart was always rhyming of goblin, ghost, fairy, and all Sir Walter’s themes.  At Edinburgh University he was a pupil of Christopher North (John Wilson), who pooh-poohed The Death-Wake in Blackwood.  He also knew Aytoun, Professor Ferrier, De Quincey, Hartley Coleridge, and Hogg, and was one of the first guests of Tibbie Sheils, on the spit of land between St. Mary’s and the Loch of the Lowes.  In verses of this period (1827) Miss Stoddart detects traces of Keats and Byron, but the lines quoted are much better in technique than Byron usually wrote.

The summer of 1830 Mr. Stoddart passed in Hogg’s company on Yarrow, and early in 1831 he published The Death-Wake.  There is no trace of James Hogg in the poem, which, to my mind, is perfectly original.  Wilson places it “between the weakest of Shelley and the strongest of Barry Cornwall.”  It is really nothing but a breath of the spirit of romance, touching an instrument not wholly out of tune, but never to be touched again.

It is unnecessary to follow Mr. Stoddart through a long and happy life of angling and of literary leisure.  He only blossomed once.  His poem was plagiarised and inserted in Graham’s Magazine, by a person named Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro (vol. xx.).  Mr. Ingram, the biographer of Edgar Poe, observes that Poe praised the piece while he was exposing Tasistro’s “barefaced robbery.”