Interesting comments on McDiarmid, Matt. I hadn't noticed
all those rezemblances.
I'm not sure I'd describe what the sheepthief crosses
as a neck. It's a point in a river with two stones
that someone could use, despite "these laying such a
distant from each other, that it is not probably that
any of the present generation would leap or jump".
An early quoter of the phrase "incoherent transaction"
was Robert Southey, mentioned together with McDiarmid
and in note 376-377.
The question of authorship is further blurred by the
observation that McDiarmid's dedication is in grammatical
though fulsome English.
There's independent testimony to McDiarmid's existence
and authorship, and to a Colonel O'Reilly as the
person who arranged for the publication and thus
probably wrote the Preface. Or maybe independent--
very frustrating of contributors to /Notes and Queries/
to use initials!
The book is connected with PF's themes of writing in
English as a second language and of translation and
(comic) mistranslation, as one of the N&Q contributors
said McDiarmid's wrote in Gaelic and translated his
writing himself.
Samuel Johnson is connected not only through Ossian;
a modern writer, Archie McKerracher, claims that
McDiarmid was trying to imitate Johnson's style,
which he'd heard translated into Gaelic in sermons
at his church. I only McKerracher's book in snippet
view, but what I could see seemed to involve a good
deal of his imagination, which is why I said
"claims".
Jerry Friedman