The Canongate Burns (133 page)

William Graham (1756–1832) was laird at Mossknowe, near Annan. The lines are in the Glenriddell manuscripts.

The aristocratic target of this satirical epigram has not been identified.

This was printed on first publication about someone with the initials ‘D.C.' There is no Burns manuscript, although a transcript exists in the Wisbech and Fenland Museum, Cambridgeshire. Cunningham's story that it was written about a person named Glendinning and that Burns was seen writing it and pushing the epitaph into the soil by the graveside is surely mere folklore.

This is written on a Dumfries innkeeper whose public house was demolished in the early nineteenth century, although, according to Cunningham, the place where it stood was known as the Marquess's Close till the 1830s (Cunningham, Vol. III, p. 310).

John Bushby was Sheriff Clerk to the county of Dumfriesshire and supported Gordon of Balmaghie in the parliamentary election of 1795. Burns wrote
John Bushby's Lamentation
as
The Third Heron
Ballad.
Bushby owned the race course at Tinwald Downs.

Edward Lascelles (1740–1820), who eventually became an army Colonel, was an English M.P. in 1790. This is included in the Gledriddell manuscript collection.

This is supposed to have been inscribed on a window at John McMurdo's house, on the Drumlanrig castle estate of the Duke of Queensberry, McMurdo's employer. See
To John McMurdo
,
With ‘Pound of Lundiefoot Snuff
for additional notes. Mackay gives the above out of chronology of composition, with the earlier work (p. 356).

Gabriel Richardson (1759–1820) was a brewer in Dumfries. Cunningham took the lines from a goblet then in the Richardson family.

Colonel Thomas Goldie was commissary to the Dumfries Sheriff court and President of the ultra-loyalist political group the Loyal Natives in Dumfries. Burns satirises him in
The Second Heron
Ballad
as ‘Colonel Tam'.

A poor man ruined and undone by Robbery and Murder. Being an aweful WARNING to the young men of this age, how they look well to themselves in this dangerous, terrible WORLD.

The tone of the sub-title points to this being a jovial burlesque on the broken love affair between Burns's Excise colleague, John Lewars, and an Agnes Wood, the ‘much-noted WOODS'.

This was supposedly written at Dalswinton when Patrick Miller's daughter told the poet that a drunken judge visiting her father looked at her in their drawing room and, probably assuming she was a servant, asked, ‘Wha's yon howlet-faced thing in the corner?' (See Henley–Henderson, Vol. II, p. 439).

These lines were written on a goblet owned by John Syme according to Cunningham. The text as Kinsley has remarked, is adapted from the Bible, the Second Book of Kings, iv, 40.

This was written about an English traveller Burns met in the King's Arms, Dumfries, who asked if the poet would write something for him. Having found out the traveller's name and age, the poet is supposed to have recited this extempore. Kinsley appears to have read this too seriously, missing the obvious humour, and calls it a ‘tasteless epigram' (Vol. III, p. 1496). There is no manuscript.

Burns is supposed to have written several variations of this epigram, although the variants may be more a symptom of editorial and censorial squeamishness. There is no manuscript by Burns. A transcript by John Syme records ‘Extempore on a young fellow W. I. who had made about
£
10,000 by a lucky speculation and who vaunted of keeping the highest company, &c. N.B. He was of low extraction' (See
The Burns Chronicle
, 1932, pp. 13–14). A crab louse is meant to attach itself to pubic hair.

Burns never claimed this Jacobite song as his own, although it is signed ‘B' in the S.M.M. It has been ascribed to him by most editors as a song he improved. It is about the Scottish defeat at Culloden (Drumossie) in 1746.

This brilliant anti-war song was sent to Thomson in September, 1794 (Letter 637), but was first printed by Johnson in December 1796. It is an original work. It was signed ‘B' in the S.M.M. The ‘roofless tower' is Lincluden Abbey.

The ‘lassie' lamenting the men who fall in ‘bluidy wars' is not a reference to a Jacobite war, but to the war of Britain against revolutionary France. It could also be resonant of Britain's role against the American colonies, where ‘our honor's gane an' a' ' is an appropriate description. As Crawford has commented, the song ‘reveals Liberty as emblematic, the “sacred posy” on the bonnet of the “stern and stalwart ghaist” of a minstrel of the olden time who bewails the political reaction which set in after the end of 1792' (p. 242). Within a similar eerie atmosphere to the appearance of Bruce in
The Ghost of Bruce
, the poet, conscious of printing the song in Johnson's collection, acts as self-censor, at the end of the song, declaring that what the minstrel said could not be printed: ‘I winna ventur't in my rhymes'. Crawford also agrees with the American editor Gebbie that this was probably a prelude to
Ode on General
Washington's Birthday
(pp. 242–3), or at the very least, written around the same time. What the penultimate stanza clearly suggests is another song of liberty possibly suppressed by Burns. It would, though, surely be difficult to consider the Washington ‘Ode' as a
song
.

The reference to ‘a Briton's ear' (l. 28) further emphasises Burns's dual or concentric Scottish/British identity.