, the worst o't," he would
have proved a much more formidable satirist than poor Willie Craw, the
last of the "blind crowders." Burns wrote, of course, in a spirit of
reckless humour; but he could not, even in sport, have alluded to the
life as "suited to his habits and powers," had gaberlunzies been mere
mendicants. In Herd's collection of Ballads is one on the ancient
Scottish beggar:--

In Scotland there lived a humble beggar,
He had nor house, nor hald, nor hame;
But he was well liked by ilk a body,
And they gave him sunkets to rax his wame.

A sieve fu' o' meal, a handfu' o' groats,
A dad o' a bannock, or pudding bree,
Cauld porridge, or the lickings o' plates,
Wad make him as blythe as a body could be.

The dress and trade of the beggar are said to have been adopted by
James V. in his adventures, and tradition attributes to him a song, "The
Gaberlunzie Man."

One of Edie's most charming traits is his readiness to "fight for his
dish, like the laird for his land," when a French invasion was expected.
Scott places the date of "The False Alarm," when he himself rode a
hundred miles to join his regiment, on Feb. 2, 1804.

Lockhart gives it as an event of 1805 (vol. ii. p. 275). The occasion
gave great pleasure to Scott, on account of the patriotism and courage
displayed by all classes. "Me no muckle to fight for?" says Edie. "Isna
there the country to fight for, and the burns I gang dandering beside,
and the hearths o' the gudewives that gie me my bit bread, and the bits
o' weans that come toddling to play wi' me when I come about a landward
town?" Edie had fought at Fontenoy, and was of the old school. Scott
would have been less pleased with a recruit from St. Boswells, on the
Tweed. This man was a shoemaker, John Younger, a very intelligent and
worthy person, famous as an angler and writer on angling, who has left
an account of the "False Alarm" in his memoirs. His view was that the
people, unlike Edie, had nothing to fight for, that only the rich had
any reason to be patriotic, that the French had no quarrel with the
poor. In fact, Mr. Younger was a cosmopolitan democrat, and sneered at
the old Border glories of the warlike days. Probably, however, he would
have done his duty, had the enemy landed, and, like Edie, might have
remembered the "burns he dandered beside," always w