Lag's Elegy ajjd Othek Ghap Books. 213 



Lou&e (after having slept in the barn) ; the goodman ordered me 

 the pottage pot to lick, ' for,' says he, ' it is an old property of 

 chapmen.' AVell, I had no sooner begun to it than out came a 

 great mastiff dog and grips me by the breast, then turns me over 

 iipou my back, and takes the pot himself. ' Ay, ay,' said the 

 goodman, ' I think your brother pot licker and you cannot agree 

 about your breakfast.' 



" Dougal Graham's works, which number more than a dozen, 

 all throw much light on the national manners. But it should 

 be kept steadily in view that he was a humourist delighting 

 in exaggeration, and that he had no opportunities of studying 

 the home life of any of those grave and rigorously virtuous 

 men in humble life who abounded in every Scottish parish, 

 his tales having no attractions for them. Valuable in many 

 ways though Dougal's productions unquestionably are, it is 

 not to be regretted that only antiquarians devote attention 

 to them now. Coarser than even the novels of his great 

 contemporary, Henry Fielding, they are quite unfit for popular 

 reading. Like Chaucer's Miller, the .Skellat Bellman of Glas- 

 gow — 



' Nolde his wordes for no man forbere 

 But tolde his cherlisch tale in his manere.' (15) 



" As examples of Scottish chap-books treating of the super- 

 natural, I would mention specially ' The Devil of Glenluce ' 

 and ' The Laird o' Coul's Ghost,' and as a specimen of the records 

 of crime ' Sawney Bean and his Family ' — all three being tales 

 connected with Galloway. ' The Devil of Glenluce,' a work 

 in which the ludicrous and the horrible are curiously blended, 

 appeared originally in George Sinclair's ' Hydrostaticks,' 1672, 

 and was repeated in his ' Satan's Invisible "World,' 1685. Mr 

 Macmath says the relation had a yet wider circulation in the 

 separate form of a chap-book. The Glenluce fiend confined his 

 attentions to a respectable weaver named Gilbert Campbell and 

 his family, and his appearance was connected with a curse which 

 had been uttered by Alexander Agnew, a sturdy beggar, after- 

 wards hanged at Dumfries for blasphemj'. Sinclair, who was 

 Profes.'^or of Philosophy and afterwards of Mathematics in 

 Glasgow University, died in 1696. I have seen a chap edition of 



15. Morris's Chaucer, Vol. XL, p. 98. 



