Ossian Collection > Scottish eccentrics

280 SCOTTISH ECCENTRICS
Adorned with a tobacco-pipe,
With dirk, and snap-work, and snuff-mill;
A bag which they with onions fill,
And, as their strict observers say,
A tasse horn filled with usquebay.
A slashed-out coat beneath the plaids,
A targe of timber, nails, and hides;
With a long two-handed sword,
As good's the country can afford —
Had they not need of bulk and bones
Who fight with all these arms at once?
It's marvellous how in such weather
O'er hill and moss they came together;
How in such storms they came so far.
The reason is, they're smeared with tar;
Which doth defend them, heel and heck,
Just as it doth their sheep protect.
Nought like religion they retain,
Of moral honesty they're clean,
In nothing they're accounted sharp
Except in bagpipe and in harp.
For a misobliging word
She'll durk her neighbour o'er the boord,
And then she'll flee like fire from flint.
She'll scarcely ward the second dint.
If any ask her of her thrift
Forsooth, her nainsell fives by theft!
If, finally, I were asked to fix upon what to my mind is
the best description of a typical Scot I would hesitate
between two. The first of these is the impecunious,
alcoholic James Tytler — author of some beautiful Scots
songs, dabbling in the manufacture of magnesia, experi-
menting with balloon-flying, compiling a Grammar, a
System of Surgery, and other entirely unrelated works,
retreating hastily to Ireland and thence to America when
cited to answer a charge of sedition. When living in a
slum garret in Edinburgh he was visited by a gentleman
who, having heard of the extraordinary stock of general
knowledge Mr Tytler possessed and with what ease he
could write on any subject almost extempore, was anxious
to procure as much matter as would form a junction
between a certain history and its continuance to a later
period. An old crone told him he could not see Tytler as