The kye stood rowtin' i' the loan; cattle, lowing, lane
When up they gat and shook their lugs, ears
Rejoiced they werena men but dogs;
And each took aff his several way,
Resolved to meet some ither day.
The satirical tendency becomes more evident in [The Holy Fair]. The personifications whom the poet meets on the way to the religious orgy are Superstition, Hypocrisy, and Fun, and symbolize exactly the elements in his treatment—two-thirds satire and one-third humorous sympathy. The handling of the preachers is in the manner we have already observed in the other ecclesiastical satires, but there is less animus and more vividness. Nothing could be more admirable in its way than the realism of the picture of the congregation, whether at the sermons or at their refreshments; and, as in [Halloween], the union of the particular and the universal appears in the essential applicability of the psychology to an American camp-meeting as well as to a Scottish sacrament—
There's some are fou o' love divine,
There's some are fou o' brandy.
—not to finish the stanza!