Known as the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’, James Hogg’s talent for writing was discovered by Sir Walter Scott, to whom he had sent poems for The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Hogg came to Edinburgh in 1810, and made his reputation in poetry with The Queen’s Wake (1813). He established friendships with Byron, John Murray, Wordsworth and Southey, and was asked on to the editorial board of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Hogg returned to the Borders in 1817, and combined farming with writing, producing his most significant work, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, in 1824.