I wrote a post several years ago called Mixed Metaphors: Mudslinging Authors and Literary Daggers in which I gave examples of the lack of writerly fellowship and sympathy often found in authors writing about other authors. They may not be very kind, but they are often funny, hitting the nail exactly on the head, so to speak.

As I was reading about Scotland this month and reading some famous Scottish authors, I found that the Scots, and their critics, have something of a knack for pithy insults and summations. So, without further ado, here are the verdicts of certain Scottish authors on their kinsmen and on non-Scots and the assessment of other authors in regard to the famed Scots authors.

About those Scots:
A.E. Houseman, poet, on Robert Burns: “If you imagine a Scotch commercial traveller in a Scotch commercial hotel leaning on the bar and calling the barmaid ‘Dearie’, them you will know the keynote of Burns’ verse.”
Virginia Woolf on Sir Walter Scott: “He was the last minstrel and the first salesman for the Edinburgh municipal gas company.”
William Hazlitt on Sir Walter Scott: “Sir Walter Scott, when all is said and done, is an inspired Butler.”
William Wordsworth comparing his poetry to Scott’s novels: Someone having observed that the next Waverley novel was to be ‘Rob Roy’, Wordsworth took down his volume of Ballads, and read to the company ‘Rob Roy’s Grave’; then, returning it to the shelf, observed, “I do not know what more Mr. Scott can have to say upon the subject.”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson on Thomas Carlyle: “Carlyle is a poet to whom nature has denied the faculty of verse.”
George Moore on Robert Louis Stevenson: “I think of Mr Stevenson as a consumptive youth weaving garlands of sad flowers with pale, weak hands.”

The Scots fire back:
Thomas Macaulay on Lord Byron: “From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics, compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness, a system in which the two great commandments were, to hate your neighbor and to love your neighbor’s wife.”
Thomas Macaulay on James Boswell, biographer and another Scotsman: “Everything which another man would have hidden, everything the publication of which would have made another man hang himself, was a matter of exaltation to his weak and diseased mind.”
Thomas Macaulay on John Dryden, poet and playwright: “His imagination resembles the wings of an ostrich.”
Thomas Carlyle on Percy Byshe Shelley: “Poor Shelley always was, and is, a kind of ghastly object; colourless, pallid, tuneless, without health or warmth or vigor. A poor creature, who has said or done nothing worth a serious man taking the trouble of remembering.”
Thomas Carlyle on Algernon Charles Swinburne: “Sitting in a sewer and adding to it.”
Thomas Carlyle on Alfred Lord Tennyson: “To think of him dribbling his powerful intellect through the gimlet holes of poetry.”
Robert Louis Stevenson on Walt Whitman: “A large shaggy dog just unchained scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.”

And finally, this masterpiece of insult was written by Robert Burns to a critic who dared to condemn his poetry for “obscure language” and “imperfect grammar”:

Ellisland, 1791.

Dear Sir:

Thou eunuch of language; thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed; thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms; thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution; thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice; thou cobler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory; thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity; thou butcher, embruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography; thou arch-heretic in pronunciation; thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis; thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences; thou squeaking dissonance of cadence; thou pimp of gender; thou Lyon Herald to silly etymology; thou antipode of grammar; thou executioner of construction; thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded; thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax; thou scavenger of mood and tense; thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance; thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense; thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom; thou persecutor of syllabication; thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus.

R.B.