was Lauchlan M'Baiii ' an officer of excise,’ and so we are told : —
First when M'B the preventives saw,
He cried, ' My brave lads, come awa ;
We '11 survey their glens and ruin a'
The Glen Noughty lads in the mornin'.
The task to do will be but small,
We '11 fleg the lads with powder and ball,
We '11 break their stands, and ruin all
The Glen Noughty lads in the mornin'.'
But the breaking of stands and burning of bothies was not to be carried out so easily.
When Glenlivet men they came to know
Of such a fatal overthrow',
They said, ' My lads, we '11 join and go
For to help our friends in the mornin'.'
So off they marched to Noughty-side,
And at every shot they laid their pride
And stood on the defensive side
Among Noughty glens in the mornin'.
And so on the ballad goes, the general result, as we are asked to believe, being that despite various ruses attempted to capture or identify them, the Glenlivet men beat the ' preventives ' with their boastful leader, in whose coat they had ' bored some holes ' with their shot, off the ground. And, their valorous example proving contagious, the excise were for the time baffled and obliged to retire from all the neighbouring glens. It was the bard's utter perplexity, caused by ' the great demand for copies,' that first led him to conceive the idea of printing the ballad. He had yet another lesson to learn, however. When printed, it was sent about to the shops on sale, and went rapidly off at threepence per copy. But in addition to the mishap of one untrustworthy agent, who sold seven hundred copies and then drank the money received in payment, the general herd of strolling ballad-singers and chap- men, whose stock-in-trade consisted largely of the literary productions of Dougal Graham, the Skellat bellman of Glasgow — characters who had no rhyming-gifts of their own — got hold of the piece, which they reprinted piratically, and sold for their own behoof ' in every town in Scotland.'
With the title of ' The Poet of Glenlivet ' freely accorded to him — a title which he was wont to vary by the more euphonious ' Livet's Glen,' as the exigencies of rhyme might happen to demand — it was but natural that when health again failed him, and smuggling whisky had got to be so hazardous as to be well-nigh impossible, John Milne should bethink him of vending his own ' songs and poems,' as well as composing them. And we by and by find him in full swing as a wandering minstrel after his own fashion ; first cogitating over the themes that happened to engross his thoughts, and then, when the latest ' Touch on the Times ' had been completed to his satisfaction, mounting the good grey ass which was his faithful servant and the companion of his wanderings for twenty years, to sally forth from the quiet glen where his home lay for a long ride of over fifty miles to the printing-press at Aberdeen. It was his boast that he knew what printing ought to cost, as he had tried various presses, and his issues were by the thousand. The next stage was the start inland for active business. Remounting his trusty ass, with capacious canvas wallet, amply stored with 'new,' and newly printed, ballads, slung by his side, his course was a zigzag perambulation of the parts of Aberdeen, Banff, Moray, and Kincardine shires which constituted his regular beat, the leading aim being to put in appearance at as many of the half-yearly feeing-markets and other leading fairs as could be overtaken. And, whether as seated on his primitive saddle astride of the patient ass, trudging leisurely along the highway, or as he stood at business in the feeing-market, the centre of a noisy but warmly appreciative group of rustics, the figure of the Glenlivet bard was distinctive and sufficiently picturesque. His own words in relation to the photograph from which the sketch of his head accompanying this paper has been taken were — ' I was never a comely person, for my face was so disfigured with the small-pox that no one that knew me before would have known me again.' His customary garb was the old-fashioned knee-breeches, with grey ribbed stockings under, cut-away coat, ample Highland, or ' braid,' blue bonnet, and tartan plaid. And as he went on, all undisturbed by the Babel of sounds of men and cattle around, delivering 'The last new Song' in his own peculiar chant — something between 'singing and say- ing' — with abundance of facial contortion, breaking a line now and again while he caught the coppers first from one purchaser and then from another, and handed the coppers' worth over in return from the pile of ballad sheets under his left arm, he and his surround- ings presented a study quite equal to anything that . Wilkie has worked into his 'Pitlessie Fair.'
It was among the class of ploughmen and farm labourers generally that the poet of Glenlivet found his chief and most valued patrons. And while the interests of ' the labouring classes' as a whole constituted a frequent theme for his muse, ' The Ploughman ' was Sling as the most indispensable member of the social community, and indeed extolled as a sort of embodiment of all the manly virtues ; the merits of himself and his class being made to contrast strongly, in a favourable sense, with the tyrannies and meannesses of the farmers as their employers —
The very Queen that wears the crown.
And brethren of the sacred gown,
And Dukes and Lords of high renown.
Live by our gallant ploughmen.
And the same idea crops up again and again in various measures : —
Ploughmen, the stay o' a' the nation.
The very Queen maun thank your station.
An' a' the nobles in rotation
To you maun bow,
Toom wames, nae rent, black desolation
But for the plough.
