The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 21
Epistle to Davie
Epistle to Davie.
O Shade of Burns! whose songs endear
Thy name to every Scottish ear,
Wer't thou on earth in this sad age,
Thy heart would glow with bitter rage,
To see thy heaven-inspired vocation
Enduring such base profanation.
In this far North each prosing sinner
Sits down to rhyme as to a dinner;
Cuts up and mangles English metre,
Thinking than his none can be sweeter;
Avoids the vowels, choosing words
With consonants as stiff as swords;
Goes three months to the parish school,
Completes his training for a fool;
Then settles down to mending watches,
While wild-goose dreams he fondly hatches;
Tries to improve the Kirkwall time,
By making clocks to strike to rhyme;
Finds motes into his neighbour's een,
Thinks beams in his will ne'er be seen;
Has aye twa irons i' the fire,
And makes himself a fool and liar.
Puppies like him are always yelping,
And needing whiles a friendly skelping;
Think Orkney fame is but a bone
Thrown out to every scribbling drone.
Brought up on 'tatoes and sau't herring,
Looks like ane never had his sairing:
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He talks of mutton too, alas!
Such braying only marks the ass;
His barren brains have long been lost,
And now he finds it to his cost.
'Tis vain to seek poetic zeal
In what at first was meant for veal;
But beastly natures love to bite,
So doggrel Davie rhymes for spite.
I would advise him to tak tent—
Else when ower late he may repent—
Gae hame and sip his herring broo,
And steek henceforth his bletherin' moo;
For though he whine and even bark,
Sic dogs as he leave nae tooth-mark.
His native isle, 'tis said, has plenty
Of those whose wits are rather scanty.
Let him wha's stor'd in auld Scotch saws,
Keep his ain guts to his ain maws;
Spend ither three months at the school,
And play nae mair the rhyming fool.