TO ROBERT AINSLIE, ESQ.
[“Up tails a’, by the light o’ the moon,” was the name of a Scottish air, to which the devil danced with the witches of Fife, on Magus Moor, as reported by a warlock, in that credible work, “Satan’s Invisible World discovered.”]
April 26, 1793.
I am d—mnably out of humour, my dear Ainslie, and that is the reason, why I take up the pen to you: ’tis the nearest way (probatum est) to recover my spirits again.
I received your last, and was much entertained with it; but I will not at this time, nor at any other time, answer it.—Answer a letter? I never could answer a letter in my life!—I have written many a letter in return for letters I have received; but then—they were original matter—spurt-away! zig here, zag there; as if the devil that, my Grannie (an old woman indeed) often told me, rode on will-o’-wisp, or, in her more classic phrase, Spunkie, were looking over my elbow.—Happy thought that idea has engendered in my head! Spunkie—thou shalt henceforth be my symbol signature, and tutelary genius! Like thee, hap-step-and-lowp, here-awa-there-awa, higglety-pigglety, pell-mell, hither-and-yon, ram-stam, happy-go-lucky, up-tails-a’-by-the-light-o’-the-moon,—has been, is, and shall be, my progress through the mosses and moors of this vile, bleak, barren wilderness of a life of ours.
Come then, my guardian spirit, like thee may I skip away, amusing myself by and at my own light: and if any opaque-souled lubber of mankind complain that my elfine, lambent, glim merous wanderings have misled his stupid steps over precipices, or into bogs, let the thickheaded blunderbuss recollect, that he is not Spunkie:—that
“Spunkie’s wanderings could not copied be:
Amid these perils none durst walk but he.”—
I have no doubt but scholar-craft may be caught, as a Scotchman catches the itch,—by friction. How else can you account for it, that born blockheads, by mere dint of handling books, grow so wise that even they themselves are equally convinced of and surprised at their own parts? I once carried this philosophy to that degree that in a knot of country folks who had a library amongst them, and who, to the honour of their good sense, made me factotum in the business; one of our members, a little, wise-looking, squat, upright, jabbering body of a tailor, I advised him, instead of turning over the leaves, to bind the book on his back.—Johnnie took the hint; and as our meetings were every fourth Saturday, and Pricklouse having a good Scots mile to walk in coming, and, of course, another in returning, Bodkin was sure to lay his hand on some heavy quarto, or ponderous folio, with, and under which, wrapt up in his gray plaid, he grew wise, as he grew weary, all the way home. He carried this so far, that an old musty Hebrew concordance, which we had in a present from a neighbouring priest, by mere dint of applying it, as doctors do a blistering plaster, between his shoulders, Stitch, in a dozen pilgrimages, acquired as much rational theology as the said priest had done by forty years perusal of the pages.
Tell me, and tell me truly, what you think of this theory.
Yours,
Spunkie.