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Updated: May 28, 2025
You, he, and the noble Colonel of the Crochallan Fencibles are to me Dear as the ruddy drops which warm my heart. I have got a good mind to make verses on you all, to the tune of "Three guid fellows ayont the glen" MAUCHLINE, 21st May 1789.
I did not wish to see them, being strangers; but she is very pretty that is, the daughter and enthusiastic, and that is always flattering to an old gentleman. She wishes to have words to Celtic melodies, and I have promised her some, to the air of Crochallan, and incline to do her good, perhaps, to the extent of getting her words from Lord Francis Leveson Gower, Lockhart, and one or two others.
My facetious friend Dunbar, I would wish also to be a partaker: not to digest his spleen, for that he laughs off, but to digest his last night's wine at the last field-day of the Crochallan corps. Among our common friends I must not forget one of the dearest of them Cunningham.
'Shrewd Willie Smellie to Crochallan came, The old cocked hat, the grey surtout the same, His bristling beard just rising in its might; 'Twas four long nights and days to shaving night'; or in the characteristic picture of William Dunbar, a wit of the time, and the merriest of the Fencibles:
'As I cam by Crochallan I cannily keekit ben; Rattlin', roarin' Willie Was sitting at yon boord en'; Sitting at yon boord en', And amang guid companie! Rattlin', roarin' Willie, Ye're welcome hame to me! or in the verses on Creech, Burns's publisher, who left Edinburgh for a time in 1789. The 'Willies, by the way, seem to be especially inspiring to the Scottish balladists.
The etiquette of that howff of the Crochallan Fencibles in the Anchor Close or of Johnnie Dowie's tavern in Libberton's Wynd was not the etiquette of drawing-rooms; and the poet was free to enliven the hours with a rattling fire of witty remarks on men and things as he had been wont to do on the bog at Lochlea, with only a few noteless peasants for audience.
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