Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 4.djvu/617

 io-s. iv. DEC. 23,1985.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 611 (Macpherson): "He would tumble in a hog- stye, as long as you looked at him " (Hill's 'Boswell,' i. 432). On 16 September, 1777, speaking of the character of a valetudinarian: " Sir, he brings himself to the state of a hog in a stye'' (Hill, iii. 152). Johnson having likened Gray's Odes to cucumbers raised in a hot- bed, a gentleman unluckily said: '"Had they been literally cucumbers, they had been better things than Odes.' 'Yes, Sir (said Johnson), for a hog' " (Langton's recollections in ' Boswell,' 1780, Hill, iv. 13). In the account of Raasay in his 'Journey to the Western Islands' (1775) Johnson remarks, " I never saw a hog in the Hebrides except one at Dunvegan" (' Works,'edited by Murphy, 1824, viii. 281). Later in the same book we find : "In my memory it was a precept annually given in one of the English almanacks, to kill hogs when the moon was increasing, and the bacon would prove the better in boiling" (ibid., 342). Possibly Boswell was using the word sow in the generic sense mentioned by DK. MURRAY when he translated Mouach, the Erse name of the Isle of Muck, as " the Sows' Island " ('Hebrides,' 18 September). In Johnson's account of their tour (p. 293 of the edition above cited) we read : " The proper name is Muack, which signifies swine. On turning to other writers we find Gilbert White, in ' The Natural History of Selborne ' (1789), using all three words precisely in Dr. Johnson's dictionary sense. Thus in letter 31 (1770) he speaks of the " little pigs " of the hedgehog; "swine"(plural) have been known to be guilty of murder (letter 52,1773); "where hogs are not much in use the coarser animal oils will come very, cheap" (letter 68, 1775); " barrow-hogs have also small tusks, like sows" (letter 74, 1776?); "the natural term of a hog's life is little known ; however, my neighbour kept a half-bred Bantam sow till she was advanced to her seventeenth year " (letter 75, 1776?); this sow produced "once above twenty at a litter; but, as there were near double the number of pigs to that of teats, many died she was allowed to have been the fruitful .parent of three hundred pigs" {ibid.). Cowper's poem entitled 'The Love of the World Reproved ; or, Hypocrisy Detected ' (Globe edition, p.368), is a parable based on the Mussulman's ingeniousevasion of the Prophet's prohibition of pork. It contains the words /;".'/ and twine (singular), but not pig. The poem was printed in Cowper's first volume, 1782, but had already appeared in The Leeds Journal (when ?) with additions by Cowper's friend Newton. One couplet usually assigned to the latter is perhaps the original of the phrase " to go the whole hog" :— But for one piece they thought it hard From the whole hog to be debarred. In 1799 Southey wrote a poem entitled ' The Pig ' (' Poetical Works,' ed. 1849, iii. 65), in which the word seems to be used in its generic sense. " Woe to the young posterity of pork " is the only line which suggests the contrary. DR. MURRAY may perhaps note for registration among the compounds of "pig":- All alteration man could think, would mar His Piy-perfeclion. A better-known poem of Southey's is the ' Ode to a Pig, while his Nose was being Bored ' (date ?), which begins, Hark! hark 1 that pig—that pig ! the hideous note, and developes into an ironical attempt to reconcile the pig to his fate. Whether the operation is usually performed only on the young animals or not, there can be no doubt that Southey here uses the word " pig " for the whole race. It is true he addresses the sufferer with the diminutive form "piggy ": Go to the forest, piggy, and deplore The miserable lot of savage swine! But he uses the adjective " young" in a manner that would be unnecessary with the older meaning of " pig ":— See how the young pigs fly from the great boar, And see how coarse and scantily they dine. " Pig" is descriptive of the animal all through its career : — And when, at last, the closing hour of life, Arrives (for pigs must die as well as men). The word " swine," it may be observed, occurs in this poem both as singular and as plural. A pig, presumably adult, also figures in 'The Devil's Walk' or 'The Devil's Thoughts,' a joint production by Southey and Coleridge before the dawn of the nineteenth century. Stanza viii., which Coleridge claims as his own in his version, runs thus :— Down the river did glide, with wind and with tide, A pig with vast celerity, And the Devil look'd wise as he saw how the while It cut its own throat. " There," quoth he with & smile, " Goes England's commercial prosperity. Sydney Smith wrote in 1807 : " It is now three centuries since an English pig has fallen in a fair battle upon English ground " (' Peter Plvmley's Letters,' No. 5). The same amusing writer, reviewing J. C. Curwen's 'Observa- tions on the State of Ireland,' 1818, in The Edinburgh Review (reference ?), asserted that " all degrees of all nations begin with living