Lag's Elkgy and Otheu Chap Buoks. 209 



year 1648,' edited and printed bv William AVilsou from a MS in 

 1735. (8). 



In the editor's introduction Charles II. is referred to as ' that vile 

 abominable profane monster '—a description of the hated King- as 

 unflattering as the one in ' Lag's Elegy.' I am not aware that 

 any rhymes bearing- the name of Wm. Wilson were published as 

 early as 1735, but about the middle of the century he offered to 

 the public two little collections of bad verse. He had some con- 

 nection with Tiuwald, and it has been conjectured that he wrote 

 the inscription on the Covenanter's tombstone in the churchyard 

 of that parish. (9). 



" But the weig-ht of evidence seems to favour the claim 

 of a third schoolmaster, William Irving-, of Hoddom, who died 

 in 1782. That Irving was the author is stated as a well- 

 known fact in the following sentence from an article on 

 Stewart Lewis, a native of Ecclefechan, published in an early 

 number of ' Chambers's Edinburgh Journal ' : 'He (Lewis) was 

 put for a short time under the ferula of the parish school- 

 master, a character famed in Annandale by the name of Dominie 

 Irving, and still more generally known as the writer of a wicked 

 satire called Lagg's Elegy, of which a copy might once have 

 been found in almost every cottar's window in the south of Scot- 

 land.' (10). As the contributor of the article quoted was well 

 acquainted with Stewart Lewis personally, it is highly probable 

 that the Ecclefechan bard was one of his authorities for the 

 ascription of the pasquil to Dominie Irving. Testimony in favour 

 of Irving's claim is borne also by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, 

 who, in a note to some memoranda on Lag and his connections, 

 condescends to name the writer of a poem which he despised as 

 popular among the vulgar only. ' The Elegy on Lag,' he says, 

 ' was written as I have heard by one Irving, a schoolmaster, 

 ancestor of the author of Fair Helen of Kirkconnel and other 

 poems, who some years ago, in a fit of insanity, cut his own 



8. A Sermon concerning the Believer's siting under Christ's Shadow, 

 1 reached from Canticles ii., 3, by that faithfull minister of Jesus Christ, 

 .\Jr Adam Kae &c. Printed for and sold by William Wilson, schoolmaster 

 at Broad-wood, in the parish of Carluke, 1735. 



c: \ "?^'*/oX^,^^7^^'^^°^ **»« South of Scotland," chap. 24. (Dumfries 

 5<a«f/a»rf of 23id May, 1894.) 



10. No. 116, 19th April, 18.34. 



