Kirk - The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies

A seventh son and born bi-lingual, having passed his life amongst the Scottish-Irish, first in Balquhidder, and then in Aberfoyle, no one was better fitted to discourse upon the Secret Commonwealth of Elves and Fairies, where since his last daunder on the Fairy Hill, in 1692 ( circa ), he now resides, than was the writer of this book. The tomb that Walter Scott saw in the east neuk of the kirkyard of Aberfoyle, so good a judge of fairydom as Andrew Lang held for a mockery. It was inscribed, Robertus Kirk, M.A., Lingu Hibern Lumen, for the Reverend Kirk had more than a tincture of the Humanities, and to his English, and the Lingua Hibernica, added Latin, and certainly had more Greek than Shakespeare, for he quotes from the Septuagint (Job xxvi. 5.) in the original.

Andrew Lang, steeped to the lips in all the lore of fairydom, of elves, of doppelgangers, peghts, brownies, banshees, and the second sight, stood sponsor for the edition of 1893.

I, though unworthy, a descendant of men long domiciled within sight of the Fairy Hill, the Sith Bruach of the writer, stand sponsor, in a measure, for the reprint. I do so in full faith and admiration, though an infrequent worshipper of any kind of Gods, but with a lurking tenderness towards Gualichu, having seen his tree in days gone by on the south Pampa below Bahia Blanca, adorned with bits of cast off saddlery, ostrich feathers, and all the flotsam and the jetsam of the Pampa Indians and Matrero Gauchos (of those days) who being realists as are in general every race of plainsmen, offered to their deity only those articles useless to themselves.

I sponsor it, because it is a monument in my opinion of a style of literature that long has disappeared, and has a curiosa felicitas, that shows the writer to have been a man of parts and a believer, quia impossibilis, in all he writes about. Faith it is said consists of the belief in something that we know to be untrue. At least that was the way a child defined it, and from the mouths of babes and sucklings, so we are informed, comes wisdom. Robertus Kirk, M.A., had the true faith that removes mountains, though not sufficient in his case to shift the Fairy Hill from its eternal anchorage, for which and for his book I am indebted to him, and recommend it to all painful readers (in the Elizabethan sense), certain that they will find much in it worthy of being read, marked, learned and inwardly digested.

Lang affixed some of his most characteristic Grass of Parnassus to the edition of 1893.

It now appears to give a generation that seems to have lost faith, both in the Pentateuch and the Apocalypse, something that may be worthy of belief. In the old grey manse of Aberfoyle, not beautified in our authors time with the old Spanish chestnuts, brought from Inchmaholme, as says tradition, and planted by the Reverend Patrick Graham a few years after Kirk went to his owne herd he would have ample leisure to ponder on the fairy clan that in his time peopled the valley of the Avondhu. The weekly sermon, I conjecture, could not have given him much trouble, for I feel certain he had the gift of words, and was not of that weak-backit, schaucle-kneed breed of ministers, sair confined to the paper, whose sermons, at the best, are a mere cauld morality. I like to picture him with his Geneva gown, neatly starched bands, and well sleekit pow, after having waled a text from Malachi or Nahum, drowsing along, for a full hour by his sand glass, placed beside the Bible, to the contentment of his sleepy congregation. There could not have been many thrawn commentators in his day in Aberfoyle, and almost every individual of the congregation must have preferred half-an-hours clash o the kirkyard to a the sermons in the wurrld. If not, they were not the right progenitors of the men of Aberfoyle, that I remember when in the Inn, (it was not in those days called an Hotel), there hung an almanac in the entrance hall, containing the announcement, 12th of August. Grouse Shooting opens. Episcopacy abolished. All the above taken into consideration, it may well be the Reverend Mr. Kirk was but a changeling from his birth, a Leprechaun I think they call it, in the dialect of Erse, spoken in Ireland, and sent on earth as an ambassador from the Secret Commonwealth of Elves and Fairies, to make their ways and customs manifest to us, the grosser mortals, nurtured on beef and brose.