ABSTRACT
‘Warren in Fairy Land’ is a parody of one of the finest parodists of the Romantic period, James Hogg. However, unlike the later imitation of the Anti-Jacobin’s The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-grinder’ (see ‘Appendix’ below), its formal model is not parodic. Instead, Deacon adapts Hogg’s beautiful poem, ‘Kilmeny’, first published in The Queen’s Wake: A Legendary Poem (1813). Given the relative absence of archaisms, it is likely that Deacon’s model is the version of ‘Kilmeny‘ first published in the third, 1814, edition of the Wake, where Hogg, prompted by Scott, modernised the original version, with its late medieval, Henrysonian language, into modern Scots.
