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In Edinburgh he was feasted and feted. "You cannot imagine," wrote Steele, "the civilities and honours I had done me there. I never lay better, ate or drank better, or conversed with men of better sense than there." Poets and authors greeted him in verse, he was "Kind Richy Spec, the friend to a' distressed," "Dear Spec," and many stories are told of his doings among these new-found friends.

"Why, Tom," quoth Aaron, "it is only three in the afternoon, as you say, although by the sky I could almost vouch for its being midnight, but I don't like that shouting Did you ever read of a water kelpie, Don Richy?" "Poo, poo, nonsense," said the Don; "Mr Cringle is, I fear, right enough."

We read with a shudder of comic horror a dialogue "On the Death of Mr. Addison," in which the interlocutors are "Richy and Sandy," to wit, Sir Richard Steele and Mr.

"I am a Scotchman, my dear sir; and the same person who, in his youth, was neither more nor less than wee Richy Cloche, in the long town of Kirkaldy, and in his old age Don Ricardo Campana of St Jago de Cuba. But more of this anon, at present we are in the house of mourning, and alas the day! that it should be so."

"Well fare thee, Allan, who in mother tongue So sweetly hath of breathless Addy sung: His endless fame thy nat'ral genius fired, And thou hast written as if he inspired. 'Richy and Sandy, who do him survive, Long as thy rural stanzas last, shall live." The grotesque in poetry could scarcely go farther. Mr.

Burchett, who addressed good Allan in these rhymes, was the refined gentleman who put the wigmaker's poems into English. "Richy and Sandy" was contained in a volume which Ramsay published by subscription, and which brought him in, to the immense admiration of his biographer, four hundred guineas sterling, which no doubt was a very admirable recompense indeed for so many foolish verses.