And with all their extravagances of expression and questionable taste, the numerous stories which Southey delighted to versify on themes demoniac and diabolical, from the Devil's Walk to the True Ballad of St Antidius, are fraught with farcical import, and have an individual ludicrousness all their own. That he could succeed tolerably in the mock-heroic vein, may be seen in his parody on Pindar's ariston men hydor, entitled Gooseberry Pie, and in some of the occasional pieces called Nondescripts. Nor do we know any one of superior ingenuity in that overwhelming profusion of epithets and crowded creation of rhymes, which so tickle the ear and the fancy in some of his verses, and of which we have specimens almost unrivalled in the celebrated description of the cataract of Lodore, and the vivaciously ridiculous chronicle of Napoleon's march to Moscow.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Southey was no purist in his phraseology at times. The not very refined monosyllable in the text may, however, be tolerated as having a technical relation to the fiddle-strings by hypothesis.
[3] This patrician Bawdrons is not forgotten in Southey's verse; thus—
Our good old cat, Earl Tomlemagne,
Is sometimes seen to play,
Even like a kitten at its sport,
Upon a warm spring-day.
TRACKS OF ANCIENT ANIMALS IN SANDSTONE.
Many of our readers must have heard of the interest excited a few years ago by the discovery, that certain marks on the surface of slabs of sandstone, raised from a quarry in Dumfriesshire, were the memorials of extinct races of animals. The amiable and intelligent Dr Duncan, minister of Ruthwell, who had conferred on society the blessing of savings-banks for the industrious poor, was the first to describe to the world these singular chronicles of ancient life. The subject was afterwards brought forward in a more popular style by Dr Buckland, in his lively book, the Bridgewater Treatise on Geology. Since then, examples of similar markings have been found in several other parts of Europe, and a still greater number in America.
Dumfriesshire is still the principal locality of these curious objects in our island; and they are found not only in the original spot—the quarry of Corncockle Muir, but in another quarry at Craigs, near the town of Dumfries. Ample collections of them have been made by Sir William Jardine, the famed naturalist, who happens to be proprietor of Corncockle Quarry, and by Mr Robert Harkness of Dumfries, a young geologist, who seems destined to do not a little for the illustration of this and kindred subjects. Meanwhile, Sir William Jardine has published an elegant book, containing a series of drawings, in which the slabs of Corncockle are truthfully represented.[4]