ABSTRACT
The last version of the ‘First Meeting’ includes a number of revisions, some of which serve to accentuate a sense of opposition in the interplay of the participants. While James Hogg’s prose versions exude an air of plain speaking, it would be mistaken to underestimate the highly stylized nature of much of the narrative. The nature of Hogg’s relationship with Scott in the middle years has been the subject of a number of critical commentaries. Amongst the salient points noted is Scott’s greater willingness to promote Hogg as a peasant poet, usually by means of some form of patronage, than to accept him fully as a writer operating like himself in a commercial situation. Scott’s concern that Hogg secure a position in life, capable of sustaining himself and family, offensive as it might seem to the latter’s self-confidence in his own ‘genius’, was no doubt well intentioned as well as pragmatically sound in the circumstances of the time.
