1892.] on Tales of the Scottish Peasantry. 491 



to imagine that this quality of fancy is anything less than a cha- 

 racteristic attribute of the minds of many of the Scottish peasantry. 

 It displays itself, for instance, in its simplest form, in their nomen- 

 clature — in the names which they have given either to natural 

 objects, or to places which are characterised by some striking natural 

 feature. For example : a waterfall in Dumfriesshire, where the water, 

 after pouring dark over a declivity, dashes down in white foam 

 among rocks, is known as The Grey Mare's Tail; twin hills in 

 Roxburghshire, which have beautifully-rounded matched summits, 

 have been christened Maiden's Paps. Then, the cirrus, or curl-cloud, 

 is in rustic speech " goat's hair " ; the phenomenon of the Northern 

 Lights, among the fishermen of Shetland, is the " Merry Dancers " ; 

 the Pleiads are the " Twinklers " ; the constellation of Orion, with 

 its star iota pendant as if from a girdle, is the " King's Ellwand," or 

 yard-measure ; the noxious froth which adheres to the stalks of vege- 

 tation at midsummer is the " witches' spittle." 



There is a root of poetry, I think, in this aptitude for giving 

 names ; and, as a matter of fact, in the Lowlands of Scotland, rustic 

 poets and rhymesters are far from uncommon. Nor are the peasantry, 

 in their name-giving, wanting in literary allusiveness — allusiveness, 

 that is, to the only book which has ever obtained universal currency 

 among them. Thus, among the fishermen of the East Coast, the 

 black mark below the gills of a codfish, or haddock, is "Peter's 

 Thumb ; " whilst a coarse field-plant called by botanists Polygonum 

 persicaria, which has its leaves strangely clouded and stained, as with 

 droppings of some dark liquid, is locally known on the Borders as 

 the " Flower that grew at the Foot of the Cross." 



Perhaps the deepest thinkers among a people who have their 

 philosophers as well as their dreamers, are to be found among the 

 hill-shepherds. And it is chiefly through the instrumentality of one 

 of these that we can now enter the Fairyland of the Scottish peasant. 

 James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, was one of those common men, 

 plus genius, who every now and then in the history of literature give 

 to a whole world of floating thought, tradition, fancy, a permanent 

 substantial form. No man in literature is his master in the weird 

 tale. No man but Shakespeare, not even excepting Drayton, has 

 written so well of the fairies. Hogg, was born in the Arcadia of 

 Scotland, Ettrick Forest— where, as Scott tells us, the belief in fairies 

 lingered longer than elsewhere — about the year 1770. As he grew 

 up, the spirit of emulation was stirred in his breast by the example of 

 the poet Burns. And so, as he wandered through the pastoral 

 solitudes keeping his sheep, he carried an ink-horn slung from his 

 neck, and taught himself to write, and so committed to paper his first 

 poem. And as he thus wandered and mused, he tells us that he one 

 day fell asleep upon a green hill-side, to dream the dream of Kilmeny, 

 and to bear her image in his heart for ever after. 



The story of Kilmeny is that of a girl of poetic temperament, 

 a lover of solitude, who, wandering alone at twilight, disappears in a 



2 L 2 



