James Hogg

Abstract

The Devil’s Elixirs appeared in an abridged English translation in 1824. The translator was R. P. Gillies, who moved in the same Edinburgh literary circles as James Hogg, ‘the Ettrick Shepherd’, whose Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner was also published in that year. John Carey was the first critic to notice the probable relation between the two dualistic fictions.¹ Apart from the pervasive thematic similarities, there are striking parallels in matters of detail. There seem to be strong verbal echoes of the description of the Painter’s apparently baleful haunting of Medardus in the relationship between Robert Wringhim and his demonic double, Gil-Martin; as Medardus pushes Count Victor off the Devil’s Seat, so the Sinner makes an attempt on his brother’s life on the edge of a precipice on Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh; like Medardus, Wringhim finds that a diabolical dagger has been insinuated into his possession by supernatural means. Beyond this, there is a more organic resemblance at the level of language, in the rhetoric of self-aggrandisement that is employed in the respective memoirs of the two protagonists.