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(221) Mr William Greenfield. William Greenfield (2 February 1755–28 April 1827) was, as TOBY states, Hugh Blair’s assistant and successor as Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. He enjoyed quite a brilliant career until he was abruptly dismissed for ‘an offence unnamed though known to be immoral conduct’. The unfortunate Greenfield was excommunicated from the Church of Scotland and retired into obscurity, with Blair resuming his former seat.
(221) Dugald Stewart. Dugald Stewart (22 November 1753–11 June 1828), an influential Scottish philosopher, was born in Edinburgh. He was the son of Matthew Stewart, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh; when the elder Stewart became ill in 1772, he asked Dugald, then only nineteen, to serve as his substitute. Three years later, following his father’s death, he was elected to replace him. In 1792 he published the first volume of the Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind; the second volume appeared in 1814, the third in 1827. The opinions as to the state and educability of animals that TOBY ascribes to him are accurate quotations from Stewart’s Elements, where they appear in section 106.
(227) ‘Musco lapis volutus haud obvolvitur’: attributed, as TOBY notes, to Publilius Syrus, this is more familiar in its English version: ‘Moss grows not on a rolling stone.’
(228) The False Autobiography. This was The Life and Adventures of Toby the SAPIENT PIG, with his Opinions on Men and Manners. Embellished with an elegant frontispiece, descriptive of a literary pig sty, with the author in deep study (London: c. 1805).
As we know he had a standing order with his bookseller, it is tempting to imagine that TOBY must have got hold of this book when it was new. This would date his death to some time after 1806 (but see note below). Some authorities, however, assign this volume to a later date, 1817, in connection with the flurry of appearances by its purported author, Mr Nicholas Hoare, in that year. It is possible that Hoare simply plagiarised an earlier volume; the language on his handbills (many of which advertise the book as well) is quite similar. This ‘pamphlet’—at twenty-four pages, TOBY is correct in so calling it—was apparently written with tongue firmly in cheek, but our hero was unable to overcome the irritation that any other narrative, serious or facetious, might take the place of his own. A copy survives in the John Johnson collection of printed ephemera at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
(229) Laurie and Whittle’s New and Improved English Atlas, Divided into Counties. This book, which appears to have been first issued in 1807, was one of the more compendious guides of its day, and was provided with numerous fold-out maps drawn by the eminent cartographer Benjamin Hoare. As the only specific book, other than the specious autobiography, that TOBY mentions by name, it has a certain pride of place. Its date, set alongside that of the porcine pamphlet, strongly suggests that TOBY could not have died before 1807 or thereabouts. His quotation from Goethe’s Faust, which was first published in 1808, also points to his having survived at least to this period.
(231) The ending of our narrative. Of the later years of our Hero, the historical record contains very little. Apparently, he continued to live in the rooms given him by Dr Cullen in Edinburgh; as noted above, there seems good circumstantial evidence for his having lived at least until 1809, which would put his age at twenty-eight. In the wild, pigs are said to have a life-span of roughly twenty-five years, and if that of the domestic pig is much shorter, it is usually because of causes of death other than those attributable to nature.
TOBY’S Memoir was first published in 1809, and by his own account, it was very warmly received. Of the numerous later editions, many of them rife with all manner of spurious additions and emendations, the less said the better, although their number certainly attests to the book’s widespread popularity. But perhaps the most fitting epitaph is that penned by Thomas Hood, and published in his Comic Annual for 1830. Although it was almost certainly inspired by a different learned pig (and there were by that time many latterday imitators), it never the less captures something of the feeling of TOBY’S passing, and serves (I think) as a fitting conclusion to this volume. I give it here in its entirety:
THE LAMENT OF TOBY,
THE LEARNED PIG
O heavy day! o day of woe!
To misery a poster,
Why was I ever farrow’d—why
Not spitted for a roaster?
In this world, pigs, as well as men.
Must dance to Fortune’s fiddlings,
But must I give the classics up
For barley-meal and middlings?
Of what avail that I could spell
And read, just like my betters,
If I must come to this at last.
To litters, not to letters?
O, why are pigs made scholars of?
It baffles my discerning,
What griskins, fry, and chitterlings
Can have to do with learning.
Alas! My learning once drew cash.
But public fame’s unstable,
So I must turn a pig again,
And fatten for the table.
To leave my literary line
My eyes get red and leaky;
But Giblett doesn’t want me blue,
But red and white, and streaky.
Old Mullins used to cultivate
My learning like a gard’ner;
But Giblett only thinks of lard,
And not of doctor Lardner!
He does not care about my brain
The value of two coppers.
All that he thinks about my head
Is how I’m off for choppers.
Of all my literary kin
A farewell must be taken;
Good-bye to the poetic Hogg!
The philosophic Bacon!
Day after day my lessons fade,
My intellect gets muddy;
A trough I have, and not a desk,
A sty—and not a study!
Another little month, and then
My progress ends, like Bunyan’s;
The seven sages that I loved
Will be chopp’d up with onions!
Then over head and ears in brine
They’ll souse me, like a salmon;
My mathematics turned to brawn,
My logic into gammon.
My Hebrew will all retrograde,
Now I’m put up to fatten;
My Greek, it will go all to grease,
The Dogs will have my Latin.
Farewell to Oxford! and to Bliss!
To Milman, Crowe, and Glossop,
I now must be content with chats
Instead of learned gossip!
Farewell to ‘Town’! farewell to ‘Gown’!
I’ve quite outgrown the latter;—
Instead of trencher-cap, my head
Will soon be on a platter!
O, why did I at Brazen-Nose
Rout up the roots of knowledge?
A butcher that can’t read will kill
A pig that’s been to college!
For sorrow I could stick myself—
But conscience is a dasher;
A thing that would be rash in man
In me would be a rasher!
One thing I ask—when I am dead
And past the Stygian ditches—
And that is, Let my schoolmaster
Have one of my two Hitches.
‘Twas he who taught my letters so
I ne’er mistook or miss’d ’em;
Simply by ringing at the nose,
According to Bell’s system.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The Editor would like to extend his thanks to those who were among TOBY’S first and most devoted Friends: Mary Cappello and Jean Walton (in whose home this book first was read aloud), Brendan, Noah and Caeli Carr-Potter, Huw Lewis-Jones and Kari Herbert, Joe Zornado and Denise Leathers. For her persistent faith and skill in representing this book, I am indebted to my wonderful agent, Malaga Baldi. And to Jamie Byng, who at once understood and embraced TOBY’S st
ory, and has since worked with such extraordinary energy to bring it to the world at large, I will always be deeply grateful.
I would also like to thank my editor Jenny Lord, along with Norah Perkins, Hazel Orme and all the rest of the talented staff at Canongate Books. That TOBY’S narrative is being published by a Press whose offices are—quite literally—a stone’s throw from his actual home, seems to me almost an act of Fate, whose unpredictable fingers, sooner or later, manage to fit every Tale into its Telling. Thanks also to my classicist colleague Gary Grund for assistance with the Latin passages. And last, but very far from least, this book is for the closest of my Animal companions, Harvey and Chester.
ENDNOTE
1. This, I should like to add, was the once piece of bad advice I ever Reciev’d from Mr Sheldon, as this ‘small concern’ was later to be known as The Times of London, and be the principal organ of the Metropolis.