Born in 1770 to a poor farming family, Hogg began to help with shepherding as a child. In the 1790s he was employed at Yarrow by Willie Laidlaw's father, and began to read and educate himself. A growing enthusiasm for Scottish poetry led to the publication of his dialect Scottish Pastorals in 1801, and to the friendship of Sir Walter Scott, whom he encountered over the Minstrelsy. In later years he published a number of volumes of verse, encouraged by Scott, and in 1824 his masterpiece, The private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. His popularity as a poet was due in part to his background as a shepherd, but this is his only professional treatise, about sheep, their care and diseases. It received a prize from the Highland Society.The surname of 'the Ettrick Shepherd' might be suppposed by English and American readers to have to do with pigs. In fact theword ' hog' in Scotland and parts of England, and as used in this book ('Of the Diseases of Hoggs, or young Sheep'), denotes a sheep older than a lamb but before its first shearing, and this probably reflects the ultimate derivation of the word (see OED).