Читать книгу The Three Perils Of Man - James Hogg - Страница 5

1 This is the account of Robert Chambers, who attended at least one of these gatherings in his brother William Chambers’s Memoir of Robert Chambers, Edinburgh, 1872, p. 258.

2 From Hogg’s letters of the early 1820s it would appear that he at first thought the romance one of his happiest ventures – ‘in my best stile indeed better than my best’. But by the time of the Domestic Manners (1834) his self-confidence was severely shaken by Scott’s criticism. In addition to the self-deprecating account of the romance there, he says in his Reminiscences of Former Days:

In 1822, perceiving that I was likely to run short of money, I began and finished in the course of a few months, ‘The Three Perils of Man, viz. War, Women, and Witchcraft!’ Lord preserve us! what a medley I made of it! for I never in my life rewrote a page of prose; and being impatient to get hold of some of Messrs. Longman and Co.’ s money or their bills, which were the same, I dashed on, and mixed up what might have been made one of the best historical tales our country ever produced, such a mass of diablerie as retarded the main story, and rendered the whole perfectly ludicrous.

3 For an account of Hogg’s use of history in the novel, see the Introduction to the Notes at the end of this volume (p. 540).