Ossian Collection > Scottish eccentrics

62 SCOTTISH ECCENTRICS
What house is this, where 's neither coal nor candle,
Where I nothing but guts of fishes handle?
... I sit still in such a straitened roome
Among such grease as would a thousand smother. . . .
In all the earth like unto me is none,
Far from all living I here lie alone,
Where I entombed in melancholy sink,
Choked, suffocated. . . .
In the vast mass of Boyd's unpublished manuscripts there
must be many wonderful gems of absurdity. There is, for
one thing, his preposterous ichthyology of which Mr John
Buchan gives us a taste (from the MS. of Boyd's The
English Academie) in his anthology The Northern Muse:
There is such great varietie
Of fishes of all kind
That it were great impietie
God's hand there not to find.
The Puffen Torteuse, and Thorneback,
The Scillop and the Goujeon,
The Shrimpe, the Spit-fish, and the Sprat,
The Stock-fish, and the Sturgeon . . .
The Periwinkle and Twinfish —
It's hard to count them all;
Some are for oyle, some for the dish;
The greatest is the Whale.
This, however, though somewhat akin, has a pedantic
quality, an insistence on trifling detail, which McGonagall
would have disdained. His very different angle of approach
to such a subject is shown in his stanzas on The Famous
Tay Whale:
'Twas in the month of December, and in the year of 1883,
That a monster whale came to Dundee,
Resolved for a few days to sport and play
And devour the small fishes in the silvery Tay.
He describes the efforts made to harpoon the whale, and
how it was finally towed ashore at Stonehaven, and ends:
And my opinion is that God sent the whale in time of need,
No matter what other people may think or what is their creed;
I know fishermen in general are often very poor,
And God in His goodness sent it to drive poverty from their door.