He may have been reading “the learned Dr
- Date of account
- Written 1691; later edited edition
- Source
- The secret commonwealth of elves, fauns & fairies
- Reference
- The secret commonwealth of elves, fauns & fairies · selected passage 33
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English/Scots historical text
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
He may have been reading “the learned Dr
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyHe may have been reading “the learned Dr. Mor” (More the Platonist), and may have altered his ideas. His account of a girl who learned, or rather composed, a long poem by aid of “our nimble and courteous spirits,” affords an early example of what is called “an inspirational medium.” It is unlucky that Mr. Kirk did not publish this work, of which he had a copy. The ordinary “spiritual” poetry may be written, as Dr. Johnson said of _Ossian_, “by any one who would abandon his mind to it.” When Mr. Kirk maintains that Neolithic arrow-heads could not have been executed “by all the Airt of man,” he relapses from his usual odd common-sense. He also believes in men who are magically shot-proof, like Claverhouse, who had to be shot by a silver bullet; like Archbishop Sharp, on whom his pious assassins erroneously held that their bullets took no effect; and like certain soldiers mentioned by Dugald Dalgetty of Drumthwacket. This absurd belief was very generally held by the Covenanters. Where his local superstitions and those of his generation are not concerned, Mr. Kirk recovers his clearness of intellect.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
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