154 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[No. 198. 



to a horse ; and, at any rate, he would have said 

 " C'est le cheval le plus opiniatre du monde." 



In the chapter headed " The Passport," and 

 also in another place, we have the phrase " Ces 

 Messieurs Anglais sont des gens tres extraordi- 

 nuires." This should be " Messieurs les Anglais," 

 &c. 



Again, under the head of " Characters," Count 

 de B. says, " But if you do support it, M. Anglais, 

 you must do it with all your powers." Tliis " M. 

 Anglais " is our " Mr. Englishman." The correct 

 expression is " M. I'Anglais " — Mr. the English- 

 man. 



I might add other instances ; but these, I 

 trust, are sufficient to warrant the opinion that 

 the Drummer's Letter, in its present shape, was 

 not written by Sterne. Henry H. Brben. 



St. Lucia. 



OLD FOGIES. 



(Vol. vii., p. 632.) 



At the place above referred to, Mr. Keightlet 

 puts to me several Queries ; but being resident in 

 the country, I had not an opportunity of seeing 

 them till the 15th instant, and it took some days 

 to get the information that would enable me to 

 answer them. 



I have now obtained the most ample evidence 

 of the existence, in the latter part of the last, and 

 the beginning of the present, centuries, of the 

 existence of a peculiar body of men called the 

 Fogies, in Edinburgh Castle. My informants 

 agree in describing them as old men, dressed in 

 red coats with apple-green facings, and cocked 

 hats. One says that they fired the Castle guns ; 

 another says that he understood them to be the 

 keepers, or, as we might say, the warders of the 

 Castle, and that they were sonaetimes brought into 

 the town to assist in quelling riots ; and this gen- 

 tleman's recollection of them goes back to 1784 at 

 least. But the oldest date I have been able to get 

 is from a much respected friend, the retired Town 

 Clerk of Edinburgh, who writes to me thus : " I 

 have a most vivid recollection of the Castle Foggies. 

 They were an Invalid company, and my recol- 

 lection of them goes as far back at least as 1780, 

 when I was at Stalker's English school in the 

 Lawnmarket." 



To the testimony of these still living witnesses, 

 I have to add that of Dr. Jamieson, who gives the 

 word in his Dictionary as one of common and well- 

 known use in Scotland in his time, 1759 — 1808 ; 

 though he may have been mistaken In supposing 

 it to be exclusively Scottish. It was for his tes- 

 timony to {\nafact that I referred to Dr. Jamieson's 

 Dictionary, and not for his etymology, for I am 

 not so much of a " true Scot " as to consider him 

 infallible in that department. I have not leisure 



at present to search any farther for the word in 

 books, but in the meantime I presume to think 

 the evidence I have pi-ocured of its use in Scot- 

 land, will carry us nearly as far back as Mr. 

 Keightley's for its use in Ireland. 



I cannot pretend to much acquaintance with 

 the Swedish language, but I was quite well aware 

 that that " Is what is meant by the mysterious Su.- 

 G." I was also aware that In the kindred Teu- 

 tonic tongues the word runs through the various 

 forms of vogt, fogat, phogat, voget, voogd, fogde, 

 fogecl, fogeti, with the meaning of bailiff, steward, 

 preses, watchman, guard or protector, tutor, over- 

 seei", judge, mayor, policeman; and I doubt not 

 that fogie belongs to the same family, though it 

 has lost its tail. Mr. Keightley does not need 

 to be told that words frequently degenerate in 

 meaning, falling from the noblest to the basest, 

 from the purest to the most obscene. Is there 

 then anything improbable in supposing that a word 

 once applied to the governor or chief keeper of a 

 castle, came at last to be applied to all, even the 

 meanest, of his subordinates ? Dr. Jamieson as- 

 serts that tiie wordybo-^e in the Su.-G. has actually 

 had that fate ; can Mr. Keightley controvert 

 him ? 



As a proof, quantum valeaf, that the Castle fogies 

 were so called for some other reason than merely 

 because of their being " old folks," I may men- 

 tion that there was in Edinburgh, for more than 

 a century, another body of veterans, called the 

 Town Guard, or City Guard, maintained by the 

 magistrates as a sort of military police, or gen- 

 darmerie, and finally disbanded in 1817. This 

 corps was generally recruited from old soldiers ; 

 and during the period of my acquaintance with 

 them (9i years) they were all aged, and some of 

 them very old men ; yet I never heard the word 

 fogies applied to them. On the contrary, they 

 were always distinguished from the fogies by the 

 elegant appellation of the " Toon Rottens," or 

 Town Rats, as well as by their facings, which 

 were dark blue. Some, Indeed, of my younger 

 friends, who remember the " Rats " very well, say 

 they never heard of the " Fogies " at all ; only 

 one of them, who lived when a boy at the Castle 

 Hill, perhaps about forty years ago, recollects of 

 the word " fogie " as being then applied to the 

 soldiers of the ordinary veteran or garrison bat- 

 talions, with blue facings, that had superseded the 

 fogies in the keeping of the Castle ; but of the 

 veritable apple-green fogies of the older establish- 

 ment, he has no remembrance. As ray own re- 

 collections of Edinburgh go back to 1808, the 

 fogies, I presume, must have been by that time 

 extinct, for I never saw any of them, though I 

 frequently heard them spoken of by those who 

 had seen them. 



I may mention also that while "fogie" was in 

 use, and of well understood application in Scot- 



