Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales "The fiddle and the bow," "The paradise of fools," "Visions and dreams" — Story, Setting & Ideas

Oratorical Cadence and Comic Timing

The lectures were delivered from the platform, and the printed text retains the marks of oral performance: short, punchy sentences, rhetorical questions, and sudden shifts in tone. In 'The Fiddle and the Bow,' Taylor moves from a lyrical description of music as 'language sweeter than was ever uttered by human tongue' to a deadpan joke about a convict whose fiddle 'made the jailer weep.' The comic set-pieces—such as the parade of bald-headed men or the candy-pulling scene—are built on accumulating absurd details, each delivered with the timing of a storyteller pausing for laughter. The preface notes that the lectures are printed 'without the slightest abridgment, just as delivered,' which explains the loose, episodic structure: each section feels like a turn in a longer performance, with no strict narrative arc.

Dialect and Regional Voice

Taylor uses dialect sparingly but effectively to mark character and setting. In 'The Circus in the Mountains,' a mountaineer in 'tow breeches' cuts a hole in the tent to peep, and after being struck by a showman's billy, exclaims: 'Well I'll be durned! hel-lo there stranger! whar wuz you at when the lightnin' struck the show?' The phonetic spelling ('whar,' 'durned') and the rustic simile ('lightnin' struck the show') anchor the scene in a specific Appalachian vernacular. Elsewhere, Taylor adopts a more elevated, almost biblical register for moralizing passages—'If I could get the ear of the young men who pant after politics, as the hart panteth after the water brook'—creating a deliberate contrast between the comic dialect of his characters and the oratorical voice of the lecturer.

Recurring Motifs: Music, Dreams, and the Passage of Time

Three motifs recur across the lectures: music, dreams, and the contrast between past and present. 'The Fiddle and the Bow' treats music as a transformative force, capable of conjuring visions of 'old ocean lashed to fury' or a convict's repentance. 'Visions and Dreams' opens with 'The Happy Long Ago' and moves through 'Dreams of the Years to Come,' framing memory and aspiration as parallel dream-states. The third lecture, 'The Paradise of Fools,' warns against chasing false ideals—wealth, political ambition, the circus's glamour—while the narrator himself admits to being 'conjured' and 'mesmerized' by a violinist's performance. This self-awareness gives the lectures a reflective undercurrent beneath the humor.

Readers should approach Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales as a record of late-nineteenth-century American oratory, not as a unified narrative. The lectures reward attention to shifts in register—from folksy anecdote to sentimental apostrophe—and to the way Taylor uses dialect to create comic distance. The book's structure, with its numbered sections and descriptive headings, was added 'merely for the convenience of the reader,' but it also reveals the lecturer's craft: each segment is a self-contained turn, designed to provoke laughter or reflection before the next begins.

Sometimes a book lingers like an old tune you can’t name—Gov. Bob Taylor’s fiddle stories felt that way, all warmth and wistfulness. That same quiet ache returned in The Peak in Darien, With Some Other Inquiries Touching Concerns of the Soul and the Body An Octave of Essays — A Closer Reading, as if both writers were asking the same gentle question about what we carry forward from our dreams.