A LAND where one may pray with cursed intent,

Oh, may they never suffer banishment!

Had Cain been Scot, God would have chang’d his doom—

Not forc’d him wander, but confin’d him home.

Like Jews they spread and as infection fly,

Hence ’tis they live as rovers, and defy

This or that place, rags of geography;

They’re citizens o’ th’ world, they’re all in all;

Scotland’s a nation epidemical.

And yet they ramble not to learn the mode

How to be drest, or how to lisp abroad....

No, the Scots errant fight, and fight to eat;

Their ostrich-stomachs make their swords their meat;

Nature with Scots as tooth-drawers hath dealt,

Who use to string their teeth upon their belt....

Lord! what a godly thing is want of shirts!

How a Scotch stomach and no meat converts!

They wanted food and raiment; so they took

Religion for their seamstress and their cook.

Unmask them well, their honours and estate,

As well as conscience, are sophisticate.

Shrive but their title and their moneys poize,

A laird and twenty pence pronounc’d with noise,

When constru’d but for a plain yeoman go,

And a good sober twopence, and well so.

Hence, then, you proud impostors! get you gone,

You Picts in gentry and devotion,

You scandal to the stock of verse—a race

Able to bring the gibbet in disgrace!

Hyperbolus by suffering did traduce

The ostracism, and sham’d it out of use.

The Indian that heaven did forswear,

Because he heard some Spaniards were there,

Had he but known what Scots in hell had been,

He would, Erasmus-like, have hung between.

I wrong the devil should I pick their bones;

That dish is his; for when the Scots decease,

Hell, like their nation, feeds on barnacles.

A Scot when from the gallow-tree got loose,

Drops into Styx, and turns a Soland goose.