The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies

his missionary zeal: "they strive to convince us of a Deity"; although, at first glance, a walking companion does not prove a Deity any more than a common "walker" does. It is possible that he had been reading "the learned Dr. More" original: "Dr. Mor"; referring to Henry More (1614–1687), the Cambridge Platonist, and he may have changed his ideas. His account of a girl who learned, or rather composed, a long poem with the help of "our nimble and courteous spirits," offers an early example of what is now called "an inspirational medium." It is a misfortune that Mr. Kirk did not publish this work, of which he had a copy. Ordinary "spiritual" poetry can be written, as Dr. Johnson said of Ossian James Macpherson's "Ossian" poems were famous 18th-century literary deceptions claiming to be ancient Gaelic epics, "by anyone who abandons their mind to it." When Mr. Kirk argues that Neolithic arrowheads original: "elf-bolts" or similar; Kirk believed prehistoric stone tools were supernatural weapons could not have been thrown "by the full strength of a man," he falls back into his usual strange common sense. He also believes in men who are magically bulletproof, such as Claverhouse John Graham of Claverhouse, a notorious persecutor of Covenanters, whom they had to kill with a silver bullet; like Archbishop Sharp, about whom his pious assassins mistakenly claimed that their bullets had no effect; and like certain soldiers mentioned by Dugald Dalgetty of Drumthwacket A character from Sir Walter Scott’s "A Legend of Montrose". This absurd belief was held very generally by the Covenanters 17th-century Scottish Presbyterians who resisted royal interference in the church. When he is not dealing with his local superstitions or those of his generation, Mr. Kirk recovers his clarity of intellect.

In Purgatory he finds only the pre-Christian Hades, "our Secret Republic," with an ecclesiastical tint: "additional fictions of monks with crazed and amorous heads." Mr. Kirk did not perceive the danger involved in his own argument. If a Highland man with "second sight" the supposed power to see future events or distant happenings corresponds to a Hebrew prophet in his visions and trances, a Hebrew prophet runs the danger of being considered no more significant than a Highland man with second sight. However, it is to Mr. Kirk's credit that he shows no desire to persecute witches (even though he has seen them "pricked" A common 17th-century test where a suspect was poked with needles to find "insensible" spots), and that he argues very fairly from his premises and within his limits. 1 He recognizes the unity of spiritual phenomena and folk beliefs, whether it arises from a common source of delusion in our nature or actually has an origin in the observation of peculiar and rather rare phenomena.

To the Edinburgh edition of 1815 (probably the only one), the editor added the work of Theophilus Insulanus on second sight. It is neither rare nor expensive, and we do not reproduce it here. One case of "telepathy" from Theophilus may be cited:

"Donald Beaton, a resident in Hammir, recounted that, on his journey from Glasgow to the Isle of Skye, he stopped at Tobermory original: "Tippermory", a well-known port on the Isle of Mull." There someone gave him a loin of venison. Donald, whose mother was a seer, wanted to test her powers and wished to have that piece of venison in his hands. "That same night, the seer, who lived with his daughter (Donald's wife), realized that she had seen him enter the house with a shapeless bundle in his hands; she did not know what it was, but it looked like meat, which brought her and her daughter great joy, as they had lost hope of seeing him due to his long absence." This is "telepathy," if telepathy exists at all.

Another picturesque tale shows how, the night before the Rout of Moy, Patrick M'Caskill met the famous M'Rimmon, the piper of M'Leod—

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1. The pricking of witches. It is quite certain that some of these unfortunate old women were pricked "in anesthetized areas" Modern medical explanation for why some suspects did not feel the needles.

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—from the city of Inverness, and saw how he shrank to the size of a child of five or six years old and then expanded back to his athletic proportions. M'Rimmon died in the Rout of Moy, an attempt to surprise and capture Prince Charles Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Jacobite pretender. Before leaving Skye, he had prophesied:

"M'Leod shall return,

But M'Rimmon never shall."

The editor knows of a splendid case of second sight that occurred in Kensington.

The seer was an accomplished English gentleman and at that time mentioned his vision to a witness who remembers it and corroborates his statement. Therefore, the Hebrides and the Highlands do not have a monopoly on second sight.