John Brown cited it as well and took it to apply to Rob Roy (possibly identifying as Rob Roy a robber McDiarmid described, "a barbarous man ... who was notoriously for savageness of manner").A more recent mention of the phrase is in Vladimir Nabokov's novel "Pale Fire"; the narrator sees McDiarmid's prose as a precursor to "Finnegans Wake", a comparison Nabokov also made in a draft note.