“Oh, many are the poets that are sown
By nature; men endow’d with highest gifts,
The vision and the faculty divine,
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse.”--WORDSWORTH.
[Sidenote: THE LITERATI OF CROMARTY.]
During even the early part of last century, there were a few of the
mechanics of Cromarty conversant in some little degree with books and
the pen. They had their libraries of from ten to twenty volumes of
sermons and controversial divinity, purchased at auctions or from the
booksellers of the south; and I have seen letters and diaries written
by them, which would have done no discredit to the mechanics of a more
literary age. Donald Sandison’s library consisted of nearly a hundred
volumes; and his son, whom I remember a very old man, and who had at
one time been the friend and companion of the unfortunate Ferguson
the poet, had made so good a use of his opportunities of improvement,
that in his latter days, when his sight began to fail him, he used to
bring with him to church a copy of Beza’s Latin New Testament, which
happened to be printed in a clearer type than his English one. The
people in general, however, were little acquainted with the better
literary models. So late as the year 1750, a copy of Milton’s Paradise
Lost, which had been brought to town by a sailor, was the occasion of
much curious criticism among them; some of them alleging that it was
heterodox, and ought to be burnt, others deeming it prophetic. One
man affirmed it to be a romance, another said it was merely a poem;
but a Mr. Thomas Hood, a shopkeeper of the place, set the matter at
rest by remarking, that it seemed to him to be a great book, full of
mystery like the Revelation of St. John, but certainly no book for
the reading of simple unlearned people like him or them. And yet, at
even this period, Cromarty had its makers of books and writers of
verses; men of a studious imitative turn--prototypes in some respects
of those provincial poets of our own times, who become famous for
nearly half an age in almost an entire county. A few brief notices of
the more remarkable of my town’s-men of this first class may prove
not unacceptable to the reader; for, of all imitators, the poetical
imitator is the most eccentric;--though his verses be imitations, in
character he is always an original.
[Sidenote: JOHNIE O’ THE SHORE.]
On the southern shore of the Bay of Cromarty, two miles to the west
of the town, there stood, about ninety years ago, a meal-mill and the
cottage of the miller. The road leading to the country passed in front,
between the mill and the beach; and a ridge of low hills, intersected
by deep narrow ravines, and covered with bushes of birch and hazel,
rose directly behind. There was a straggling line of alders which
marked the course of the stream that turned the mill-wheel; while
two gigantic elms, which rose out of the fence of a little garden,
spread their arms over both the mill and the cottage. The view of the
neighbouring farm-steadings was shut out by the windings of the coast
and the ridge behind; and to the traveller who passed along the road
in front, and saw no other human dwelling nearer him than the little
speck-like houses which mottled the opposite shore of the bay, this
one seemed to occupy one of the most secluded spots in the parish. Its
inmates at this period were John Williamson, the miller, or, as he was
more commonly termed, Johnie o’ the Shore, and his sister Margaret--two
of the best and most eccentric people of their day in the country-side.
John was a poet and a Christian, and much valued by all the serious
and all the intelligent people of the place; while his sister, who was
remarkable in the little circle of her acquaintance for the acuteness
of her judgment in nice points of divinity, was scarcely less esteemed.
The duties of John’s profession left him much leisure to write and to
pray. During the droughts of summer, his mill-pond would be dried up
for months together; and in these seasons he used to retire almost
every day to a green hillock in the vicinity of his cottage, which
commands an extensive view of the bay and the opposite coast. And
there, in a grassy opening among the bushes, would he remain until
sunset, with only the Bible and his pen for his companions. He was so
much attached to this spot, that he was once heard to say there was no
place in which he thought he could so patiently await the resurrection,
and he intimated to his friends his wish of being buried in it; but, on
his deathbed, he changed his mind, and requested to be laid beside his
mother. It is now covered by a fir-wood, and roughened by thickets of
furze and juniper, but enough may still be seen to justify his choice.
On one side it descends somewhat abruptly into a narrow ravine, through
the bottom of which there runs a little tinkling streamlet; on the
other, it slopes gently towards the shore. We look on the one hand,
and see, through the chance vistas which have been opened in the wood,
the country rising above us in long undulations of surface, like waves
of the sea after a storm, and variegated with fields, hedge-rows, and
clumps of copse-wood. On the other, the wide expanse of the bay lies
stretched at our feet, with all its winding shores and blue jutting
headlands: we look down on the rower as he passes, and hear the notes
of his song and the measured dash of his oars; and when the winds
are abroad, we may see them travelling black over the water before
they wave the branches that spread over our heads. Many of the poet’s
happiest moments were passed in the solitude of this retreat; and from
the experience derived in it, though one of the most benevolent of men,
and at times one of the most sociable, whenever he wished to be happy
he sought to be alone. In going to church every Sabbath, instead of
following the public road, he used invariably to strike across the
beach and walk by the edge of the sea; and, on reaching the churchyard,
he always retired into some solitary corner, to ponder in silence among
the graves. To a person of so serious a cast, a life of solitude and
self-examination cannot be a happy, unless it be a blameless one; and
Johnie o’ the Shore was one of the rigidly just. Like the Pharisees of
old, he tithed mint, and anise, and cumin; but, unlike the Pharisees,
he did not neglect the weightier matters of the law. It is recorded of
him, that on descending one evening from his hillock, he saw his only
cow browsing on the grass-plot of a neighbour, and that, after having
her milked as usual, he despatched his sister with the milk to the
owner of the grass.
Ninety years ago, the press had not found its way into the north
of Scotland, and the people were unacquainted with the scheme of
publishing by subscription. And so the writings of Johnie o’ the Shore,
like those of the ancients before the invention of printing, existed
only in manuscript; and, like them too, they have suffered from the
Goths. A closely written fragment of about eighty pages, which once
composed part of a bulky quarto volume, is now all that survives of his
works, though at his death they formed of themselves a little library.
One of the volumes, written wholly in prose, and which minutely
detailed, it is said, all the incidents of his life, with his thoughts
on God and heaven, the world and himself, fell into the hands of a
distant relative who resided somewhere in Easter-Ross. It must have
been no small curiosity in its way, and for some time I was flattered
by the hope that it still existed and might be recovered; but I have
come to find that it has shared the fate of all his other volumes. The
existing fragment is now in my possession. It bears date 1743, and is
occupied mostly with hymns, catechisms, and prayers. His models for
the hymns seem to have been furnished by our Scotch version of the
Psalms; his catechisms were formed, some on the catechisms of Craig and
the Palatine, and some on that of the Assembly Divines; his prayers
remind me of those which are still to be heard in the churches of our
northern parishes on “the day of the men.” Some of his larger poems are
alphabetical acrostics;--the first line of the first stanza of each
beginning with the letter A, and the first line in the last with the
letter Z. Most of them, however--and the fact is a singular one, for
John and his sister were stanch Presbyterians--are commemorative of
the festival-days of the English Church. There are hymns for Passion
Friday, for Christ’s Incarnation-day, for Circumcision-day, and for
Christmas:--a proof that he must have had little in him of that
abhorrence of Prelacy which characterized most of the Presbyterians of
his time. And he seems, too, to have been of a more tolerating spirit;
and, in the simple benevolence of his heart, to have come perhaps as
near the truth on some dark points as men considerably more skilled
in dialectics, and more deeply learned. “There are some people,”
remarks the querist in one of his catechisms, “who say that those who
have never heard of Christ cannot be saved?” “It is surely not our
business,” is the reply, “to search into the deep things of God, except
so far as He is pleased to reveal them; and, as He has not revealed to
us that He condemns all those who have not heard of Christ, it is rash
to say so, and uncharitable besides.”[9]
One of the most curious poems in the manuscript, is a little piece
entitled “An Imagination on the Thunder-claps.” It was written before
the discoveries of Franklin; and so the imagination is rather a wild
one--not wilder, however, than some of the soberest speculations of
the ancients on the same phenomena. The green hillock on this occasion
appears to have been both his Observatory and his Parnassus;--he seems
to have watched upon it every change of the heavens and earth, from
the first rising of the thunder-clouds until they had broken into a
deluge, and a blue sky looked down on the red tumbling of streams as
they leaped over the ridges, or came rushing from out the ravines.
Though quite serious himself, his uncouth phraseology will hardly fail
in eliciting the smile of the reader.
AN IMAGINATION ON THE THUNDER-CLAPS.
Lo! pillars great of wat’ry clouds
On firmament appear,
And mounting up with curléd heads,
Towards the north do steer.
East wind the same doth contradict,
And round and round they run;
And earth and sea are dark below,
And blackness hides the sun.
Like wrestling tides that in the bay
Do bubble, boil, and foam,
When seas grow angry at the wind,
And boatmen long for home;
Ev’n so the black and heavy clouds
Do fierce together jar--
They meet, and rage, and toss, and whirl,
And break, and broken are.
Up to the place where fire abides
These wat’ry clouds have gone
And all the waters which they hold
Are flung the fire upon.
And the vex’d fire boils in the cloud,
And lifts a fearful voice,
Like rivers toss’d o’er mighty rocks,
Or stormy ocean’s noise.
It roars, and rolls, and hills do shake,
And heavens do seem to rend;
And should the fierce unquenchéd flame
Through the dark clouds descend,
Like clay ’twould grind the hardest rocks,
Like dust the strongest brass,
And prostrate pride and strength of man
Like pride and strength of grass.
And now the broken clouds fall down
In _groff_ rain from on high;
And many streams do rise and roar,
That heretofore were dry.
And when the red speat will be o’er,
And wild storm pass’d away,
Rough stones will lie upon the fields,
And heaps of sand and clay.
But I, though great my sins, am spared,
These fields to turn and tread:
Which surely had not been the case
If Jesus had not died.
_Quod_ JOHNIE O’ THE SHORE.
[Sidenote: MEGGIE O’ THE SHORE.]
Johnie’s sister Margaret (after his death she seems to have fallen
heir to his title, for she then became Meggie o’ the Shore) survived
her brother for many years, and died at an extreme old age, about the
year 1785. The mill, on its falling into other hands, was thrown down,
and rebuilt a full half mile further to the west, but the cottage was
spared for Meggie. She had always been characterized by the extreme
neatness of her dress and her personal cleanliness, by her taste in
arranging the homely furniture of her cottage, and her hospitality: and
now, though the death of her brother had rendered her as poor as it is
possible for a contented person to become, she was as much marked by
her neatness, and as hospitable as ever. On one occasion, a Christian
friend who had come to visit her (the late Mr. Forsyth of Cromarty),
was so charmed with her conversation, as to prolong his stay from
noon until evening, when he rose to go away. She asked him, somewhat
hesitatingly, whether he would not first “break bread with her.” He
accordingly sat down again; and a half cake of bread and a jug of water
(it was all her larder afforded) were set before him. It was the feast
of the promise, she said, “Thy bread shall be given thee, and thy water
shall be sure.” Her circumstances, she added, were not quite so easy as
they had been during the lifetime of her brother, but the change was
perhaps for the better; for it had led her to think much oftener than
before, when rising from one meal, that God had kindly pledged Himself
for the next.
Meggie lived in a credulous age, and she was one of the credulous
herself. Like most of her acquaintance, she heard at times the voices
of spirits in the dash of waves and the roar of winds, and saw wraiths
and dead-lights; but she was naturally courageous, and had a strong
reliance on Providence; and so, with all her credulity, she was not
afraid to live alone, with, as she used to say, only God for her
neighbour. On a boisterous winter evening, two young girls who were
travelling from the country to the town, were forced by the breaking
out of a fierce snow-storm to take shelter in her cottage. She received
them with her wonted kindness, and entertained them as she had done
her friend. They heard the waves thundering on the beach, and the wind
howling in the woods, but peace and safety were with them at Meggie’s
fireside. About midnight there was a pause in the storm, and they could
hear strange sounds, like the cries of people in distress, mingling
with the roar of the sea. “Raise the window-curtain,” said Meggie, “and
look out.” The terrified girls raised the curtain. “Do you see aught?”
she inquired. “There is a bright light,” said the girls, “in the middle
of the bay of Udoll. It hangs over the water at about the height of a
ship’s mast; and we can see something below it like a boat riding at
anchor, with the white sea raging round her.” “Now drop the curtain,”
she replied; “I am no stranger, my lassies, to sights and noises like
these--sights and noises of another world; but I have been taught that
God is nearer to me than any other spirit can be; and so have learned
not to be afraid.” A few nights after, as the story goes, a Cromarty
yawl foundered in the bay of Udoll, and all on board perished.
Meggie was always a rigid Presbyterian, and jealous of innovations in
the Church; and, as she advanced in years, she became more rigid and
more jealous. She is said to have regarded with no great reverence the
young divines that filled up in the parishes around her the places
of her departed contemporaries; and who too often substituted, as
she alleged, the learning which they had acquired at college for a
knowledge of the human heart and of the Bible. She could ill brook,
too, any interference of the State in the concerns of the Kirk:--an
Act of Parliament, when read from the pulpit, she deemed little better
than blasphemy, and a King’s fast a day desecrated above every other.
Her zeal in one unlucky instance brought her in contact with the civil
law. Her favourite preacher was Mr. Porteous of Kilmuir, a divine of
the old and deeply learned cast--eloquent and pious--not unacquainted
with the book of nature, and thoroughly conversant with that of God.
After hearing him deliver, in the church of Nigg, a powerful and
impressive discourse, what was her horror and indignation when she
saw him descending from the pulpit to read from the precentor’s desk
some Proclamation or Act of Council! Had he been less a favourite, or
anybody else than Mr. Porteous, she could have shut her ears and sat
still; as it was, she sprang from her seat, and twitching the paper out
of his hand, flung it to the floor and stamped upon it with her feet.
She was apprehended and sent to the jail of Tain; but she found the
jail a very comfortable sort of place, and, for the three days during
which she was confined to it, she had for her visitors some of the very
best people in the country; among the rest, Mr. Porteous himself, who
had enough of the old Covenanter in him to feel that she had, perhaps,
done only her duty, and that he had very possibly failed in his.
The story of her death is curious and affecting. A friend, in passing
her cottage on a journey to the country called in, as usual, to see
her. She was as neatly dressed as ever, and the little apartment in
which she sat was fastidiously clean; but her countenance was of a
deadly paleness, and there was an air of languor about her that seemed
the effect of indisposition. “You are unwell, Meggie?” said her friend.
“Not quite well, perhaps,” she replied, “but I shall be so very soon.
You must stay and take breakfast with me.” The visitor knew too well
the value of one of Meggie’s breakfasts to refuse, and the simple fare
which her cottage afforded was set before him; but he was disappointed
of the better part of the repast, for she spoke but little, and seemed
unable to eat. “God has been exceedingly good to me,” she remarked,
as she rose when he had eaten to replace in her cupboard the viands
which still remained before him; “with no one to provide for me but
Himself, I have not known what it was to want a meal since the death of
my brother. You return this way in the evening?” said she, addressing
her friend. He replied in the affirmative. “Then promise that you will
not pass without coming in to see me; I am indisposed at present, but I
feel--nay, am certain--that you will find me quite well. Do promise.”
Her friend promised, and set out on his journey. Twilight had set in
before his return. He raised the latch and entered her apartment,
where all was silent, and the fire dying on the hearth. In a window
which opened to the west, sat Meggie, with her brother’s Bible lying
open before her, and her face turned upwards. The faint light of
evening shone full on her features, and their expression seemed to be
that of a calm yet joyous devotion. “I have returned, Meggie,” said
the man after a pause of a few minutes. There was no answer. “I have
returned, Meggie,” he reiterated, “and have come to see you, to redeem
my promise.” Still there was no answer. He went up to her and found she
was dead.
About twenty years after her death, the grave in which she had been
buried was opened to admit the corpse of a distant relative. A woman of
my acquaintance, who was then a little girl, was at play at the time
among the stones of the churchyard; but on seeing an elderly female,
a person much of Meggie’s cast of character, go up to the grave, she
went up to it too. She saw the woman looking anxiously at the bones and
there was one skull in particular which seemed greatly to engage her
attention. It still retained a few locks of silvery hair, and over the
hair there were the remains of a linen cap fastened on by two pins.
She stooped down, and drawing out the pins, put them up carefully in a
needle case, which she then thrust into her bosom. “Not death itself
shall part us!” she muttered, as if addressing herself to the pins;
“you shall do for me what you have done for Meggie o’ the Shore.”
[Sidenote: DAVID HENDERSON.]
But, in holding this _tête-à-tête_ with Meggie, I have suffered myself
to lose sight of the poets, and must now return to them. Next in the
list to Johnie o’ the Shore was David Henderson, a native of Cromarty,
born some time in the early part of the last century, and who died in
the beginning of the present. He was one of that interesting class,
concerning whom Nature and Fortune seem at variance; the one marking
them out for a high, the other for a low destiny. They are fitted, by
the gifts of mind bestowed upon them by the one, to think and act for
themselves and others; and then flung by the other into some obscure
lumber-corner of the world, where these gifts prove useless to them at
best, and not unfrequently serve only to encumber them. From Nature
David received talents of a cast considerably superior to those which
she commonly bestows; by Fortune he was placed in one of the obscurest
walks of life, and prevented from ever quitting it. He acquired his
little education when employed in tending a flock of sheep; the
herd-boys with whom he associated taught him to read, and he learned to
write by imitating the letters of one of the copy-books used in schools
upon the smooth flat stones which he found on the sea-shore.
From his earliest years his life was one of constant toil. He was a
herd-boy in his seventh, and a ploughman in his sixteenth year. He was
then indentured to a mason; and he soon became one of the most skilful
workmen in this part of the country, especially in hewing tombstones
and engraving epitaphs. There is not a churchyard within ten miles
of Cromarty in which there may not be seen some of his inscriptions.
His heart was an affectionate one, and open to love and friendship;
and when he had served his apprenticeship, and began to be known as a
young man of superior worth and a good clear head, his company came
to be much courted by the better sort of people. In his twenty-fifth
year he became attached to a young girl of Cromarty, named Annie
Watson, much celebrated in her day for her charms personal and mental.
She was beautiful to admiration, rationally yet fervently pious, and
possessed of a mind at once powerful and delicate. It was no wonder
that David should love such a one; and, as no disparity of condition
formed an obstacle to the union--as she was a woman of sense and he a
man of merit--in all probability she would have made him happy. But,
alas! in the bloom of youth she was taken from him by that insidious
disease, which, while it preys on the vitals of its victims, renders
their appearance more interesting, as if to make their loss the more
regretted. She died of consumption, and David was left behind to mourn
over her grave, and, when his grief had settled into a calm melancholy,
to write a simple ballad-like elegy to her memory. I have heard my
mother say, that it was left by David at the grave of his mistress,
where it was afterwards picked up by a person who gave copies of it
to several of his acquaintance; but I do not know that any of these
are now to be found. I have failed in recovering more than a few
stanzas of it; and these I took down as they were repeated to me by my
mother, who had committed them to memory when a child. They may prove
interesting, rude and fragmentary as they are, to such of my readers
as love to contemplate the poetic faculty wrapt up in the dishabille
of an imperfect education. Besides, the writer may be regarded less as
an insulated individual than as representative of a class. The unknown
authors of some of our simpler old ballads, such as Edom o’ Gordon,
Gilmorice, and the Bonny Earl of Moray, were, it is probable, men of
similar acquirements, and a resembling cast of intellect.
ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF A YOUNG WOMAN.
She’s slain by death, that spareth none,
An object worthy love;
And for her sake was many a sigh,--
No doubt she’s now above.
* * *
In dress she lovéd to be neat,
In handsome trim would go;
She lovéd not to be above
Her station, nor below.
* * *
But, in brief sentence, to have done
Of all I have to say--
In midst of all her prospects here,
She on a deathbed lay.
And when she on a deathbed lay,
To her were visits made
By good and reverend elders, who
In her great pleasure had.
For she though in her pleasant youth,
When time speeds sweetly by,
Esteem’d it, trusting in her God,
A blessed thing to die.
And she their questions unto them
Who sought her state to know,
Did answer wisely every one,
In pleasant words and low.
* * *
Her lykewake it was piously spent
In social prayer and praise,
Performéd by judicious men,
Who stricken were in days.
And many a sad and heavy heart
Was in that mournful place;
And many a weary thought was there
On her who slept in peace.
And then the town’s-folk gather’d all
To bear her corpse away,
And bitter tears by young and old
Were shed that mournful day.
And sure, if town’s-folk grievéd sore,
Sore grieve may I and pine;
They much deplored their heavy loss--
But what was theirs to mine?
For her loved voice, I only hear
Winds o’er her dust that sigh
For her sweet smile, I only see
The rank grass waving high.
And I no option have but think
How I am left alone;
With none on earth to care for me,
Since she who cared is gone.
* * *
She was the first that ever I
In beauty’s bloom did see
Departing from the stage of time,
Into eternity.
O may her sex her imitate,
Example from her take,
And strive t’ employ the day of grace,
And wicked ways forsake!
David survived his mistress for more than forty years. For thirty of
these he was an elder of the Church--a man conversant with deathbeds,
and a visitor of the fatherless and the widow. Few persons die so
regretted as David died, or leave behind them so fair a name; nor will
the reader fail to recognise something uncommon in his character when
I tell him, that he was steady and prudent though a poet, and of a
grave deportment, good-natured, and a Christian, though of a ready wit.
He left behind him, treasured up in the memories of his many friends,
shrewd, pithy remarks on men and things--specimens of mind, if I may so
express myself, which exhibit the quality of the mass from off which
they were struck. His wit, too, was equally popular. I have heard some
of his _bon-mots_ repeated and laughed at more than twenty years after
his death; but his writings were so much less fortunate, that there
were few of the people with whom I have conversed concerning him, who
even knew that he made verses, though none of them were ignorant of his
having been a good man.
[Sidenote: MACCULLOCH OF DUN-LOTH.]
The last of the Cromarty poets who lived and wrote before the beginning
of the present century, was Macculloch of Dun-Loth. He was, for nearly
sixty years, a Society schoolmaster in that parish of Sutherlandshire
whose name, for some cause or other, is always attached to his own. But
I shall attempt introducing him to the reader in the manner in which he
has been introduced to myself.
“About twenty-eight years ago,” said my informant, “I resided for a few
weeks with the late Dr. R---- at the manse of Kiltearn. I was lounging
one evening beside the front door, when a singular-looking old man came
up to me, and asked for the Doctor. He was such an equivocal-looking
sort of person, that it was quite a puzzle to me whether I should show
him into the parlour;--he might be little better than a beggar; he
might be worth half a million; but whether a rich man or a poor one,
no one could look at him and doubt of his being a _particular_ man. He
was very little, and very much bent, with just such a grotesque cast of
countenance as I have seen carved on the head of a walking-stick. His
outer man was cased in an old-fashioned suit of raven grey, and he had
immense plated buckles in his shoes and in his breeches. I thought of
the legend of the Seven Sleepers, and wondered where this fragment of
the old world could have lain for the last hundred years. The Doctor
relieved me from my perplexity. He had seen him from a window, and,
coming out, he welcomed the little old man with his wonted cordiality,
and ushered him into the parlour as the poet of Dun-Loth.
“He stayed with us this evening, and never was there a gayer evening
spent in the manse. The Doctor had the art of eliciting all that was
eccentric in the little man’s character, and that was not a little.
He plied him with compliments and jokes, and rallied him on his
love-adventures and his poetry. The old man seemed swelling like a
little toad, only it was with conceit, not venom. He chuckled, every
now and then, at the more piquant of the Doctor’s good things, with a
strange unearthly gaiety that seemed to savour of another world--of
another age at least; and then he would jest and compliment in turn.
What he said was, to be sure, great nonsense; but then it was the most
original nonsense that might be, full of small conceits and quibbles,
and so old-fashioned that we all felt it could not be other than
the identical nonsense that had flourished in the early days of our
great-grandmothers. The young people were all delighted--the little
old man seemed delighted too, and laughed as heartily as any of us.
Mrs. R----, when a young lady, had been eminently beautiful, and the
poet had celebrated her in a song. It was a miserable composition,
and some of his neighbours, who wrote nearly as ill as himself, made
it the occasion of a furious attack upon him. There were remarks,
replies, and rejoinders beyond number; until at length, by mere dint of
perseverance, the poet silenced all his opponents, and took to himself
the credit of having gained a signal victory. The Doctor brought up
the story of the song, and got him to repeat all the replies and
rejoinders, which he did with much glee. Next morning he took leave of
us, and I never again saw the poet of Dun-Loth.”
Macculloch was, as I have stated, a native of the parish of Cromarty,
and passed the greater part of a long life as a Society schoolmaster,
on a salary of twelve pounds per annum. Out of this pittance he
contrived to furnish himself with a library, which, among other works
of value, contained the whole of the Encyclopædia Britannica in its
second edition. Though full of compliment and gallantry in his younger
days, he was for the last forty years of his life, so thoroughly a
woman-hater, that he would not suffer one of the sex to enter his
cottage, cook his victuals, or wash his linen. His wardrobe consisted
of four suits--one of black, one of brown, one of raven grey, and
one of tartan; and he wore them week about, without suffering the
separate pieces of any one suit to encroach on the week of another.
It has been told me that, in his eightieth year, he attended the
dispensation of the sacrament in the Highland parish of Lairg, dressed
in his tartans--kilt, hose, and bonnet. I do not well know whether to
consider his singularities as those of the rhymer, the most eccentric
of all men, or his predilection for rhyming as merely one of his
singularities. His compositions were mostly satirical; but his only art
of satire was the art of calling names in rhyme; and he seems to have
had no positive pleasure in bestowing these, but to have flung them,
just as he used to do his taws when in school, at the heads of all who
offended him. His death took place about twenty years ago. I subjoin
two of the “pasquils” pointed against him in his war with his brother
rhymers, and the pieces in which he replied to them. They may show,
should they serve no other purpose, what marvellous bad verse could be
written in the classical age of Johnson and Goldsmith, and with what
justice Dun-Loth piqued himself on having vanquished his opponents.
TO DUN-LOTH.
Dunloth, be wise, take my advice,
Silence thy muse in time;
For thy thick skull it is too dull
To furnish prose or rhyme.
But if thy pride will still thee guide
To sing thy horrid lays;
For any sake, my counsel take,
And ne’er attempt to praise.
Thy wit’s too low, thyself says so,
In this we both agree;
The Kilmote flower is, I am sure,
A theme too high for thee.
ANSWER.
To notice much, base trash as such,
I think it were a crime;
Or yet to stoop, thou nincompoop,
For thy poor paltry rhyme.
Thy saucy gee shows thee to be
Like a blind muzzled mole:
Or like a rat chased by the cat
To a dark muddy hole.
The first time I thy place pass by,
For thy poetic lesson,
Thou’lt crouch, be sure, behind the door,
Like a poor yelping messan.
TO ----
How hard is thy lot, fair flower of Kilmote,
To be sung by a poet so dull;
Thy symmetry fine, is a theme too divine
For a blockhead with such a thick skull.
ANSWER.
So hard is thy lot, poor scurrilous sot,
Thy poetry brings thee to shame;
So high to aspire, thou’rt thrust in the mire,
And laugh’d at by all for the same.