r might be glad to get there
himself without any such nice burden as a punch-bowl to carry.

In a more recent edition of the poet's life and writings--where at
length an effort is made to illustrate both, by documentary and other
exact evidence[1]--the affair is set in such a light as to throw a
ludicrous commentary on such testimony as the 'tradition of the land.'
It appears, from a letter of Burns in which two verses of the song are
transcribed, that it was written before 16th October 1789; while it
equally appears that Mr Nicol did not purchase Laggan till March 1790:
_ergo_, the maut was not brewed at Laggan; Masterton did not cross the
Nith; and the punch-bowl is a myth, which most likely originated in
editorial fancy.

Laggan is, nevertheless, a remarkable place, for Burns and Nicol must
have been there together in some fashion, if not a Bacchanalian one,
since it was upon the recommendation of the former that the latter
became its proprietor. There are, however, two Laggans--one in
Dunscore parish, about two miles from Ellisland; the other in
Glencairn parish, a comparatively remote situation; and the latter was
the Laggan of Nicol. Mr M----, of A----, who now lives near Ellisland,
remembers, while living in his father's house, Laggan of Dunscore--the
place erroneously assumed by Cunningham--that Burns and Nicol came
there rather late one evening, and induced his father to accompany
them to the town of Minniehive, whence he did not return home till
next day at three o'clock. Laggan of Glencairn being on the way to
Minniehive, and near it, and there being no other imaginable reason
for Nicol going to such an out-of-the-way place, it seems a very
reasonable supposition, that the pair of friends were on their way to
see the property which Nicol thought of purchasing; and that Burns,
knowing Mr M---- to be well skilled in land, had thought of asking his
advice on its value. The junior Mr M---- adds a reminiscence, too
characteristic, we fear, to be much doubted, that Burns and Nicol on
that occasion were for a whole week engaged in merry-making.

We had, therefore, a half-melancholy interest in seeing Laggan--a
name, we felt, associated with reckless gaieties, but then they were
the gaieties of genius, and well had they been moralised in the
punishments which they drew down--for, as Currie remarks in 1799,
these 'three merry boys' were already all of them under the turf. Our
kind host, the successor of Masterton's