Black humor; Country life -- Fiction; Historical fiction; Scotland -- Fiction
Note II., p. 90.--DARK LADYE.
The Dark Ladye is one of those tantalizing fragments, in which Mr.
Coleridge has shown us what exquisite powers of poetry he has suffered
to remain uncultivated. Let us be thankful for what we have received,
however. The unfashioned ore, drawn from so rich a mine, is worth all to
which art can add its highest decorations, when drawn from less abundant
sources. The verses beginning the poem which are published separately,
are said to have soothed the last hours of Mr. Fox. They are the stanzas
entitled LOVE.
Note III., p. 252.--MAGO-PICO.
This satire, very popular even in Scotland, at least with one party, was
composed at the expense of a reverend presbyterian divine, of whom many
stories are preserved, being Mr. Pyet, the Mago-Pico of the Tale,
minister of Dunbar. The work is now little known in Scotland, and not at
all in England, though written with much strong and coarse humour,
resembling the style of Arbuthnot. It was composed by Mr. Haliburton, a
military chaplain. The distresses attending Mago-Pico's bachelor life,
are thus stated:--
"At the same time I desire you will only figure out to yourself his
situation during his celibacy in the ministerial charge--a house
lying all heaps upon heaps; his bed ill-made, swarming with fleas,
and very cold on the winter nights; his sheep's-head not to be eaten
for wool and hair, his broth singed, his bread mouldy, his lamb and
pig all scouthered, his house neither washed nor plastered; his
black stockings darned with white worsted above the shoes; his
butter made into cat's harns; his cheese one heap of mites and
maggots, and full of large avenues for rats and mice to play at
hide-and-seek and make their nests in. Frequent were the admonitions
he had given his maid-servants on this score, and every now and then
he was turning them off; but still the last was the worst, and in
the meanwhile the poor man was the sufferer. At any rate, therefore,
matrimony must turn to his account, though his wife should prove to
be nothing but a creature of the feminine gender, with a tongue in
her head, and ten fingers on her hands, to clear out the papers of
the housemaid, not to mention the convenience of a man's having it
in his power lawfully to beget sons and daughters in his own
house."--_Memoirs of Mago-Pico. Second edition. Edinburgh_, 1761, p.
19.
EDITOR'S NOTES.
[I-A] p. 1. "David M'Pherson's map." In his "Geographical History,"
London, 4to, 1796.
[I-B] p. 11. "Jenny Dods ... at Howgate." Scott admitted to Erskine that
the name of "Dods" was borrowed from this slatternly heroine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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