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(　128　) upon Scott Douglas's version, and indicate the differences and variation of the text as established by comparison.

An incomplete version of the "Court of Equity" seems to have been first published circa 1810 in octavo sheet form. It also appears surreptitiously appended to certain editions of the works of the poet about the same date. We have seen a copy of it in an appendix to an Alnwick edition, circa 1810. In 1827 it was printed in that filthy receptacle, "The Merry Muses"—the volume with which the name of Burns has been so erroneously and unjustly associated, and it is still retained in the ever-recurring issues of the obscenities therein contained. In 1893, an expurgated version was published in the Aldine edition, under the editorship of Mr. G. A. Aitken. Scott Douglas quotes the opening lines in his Kilmarnock edition, and again refers to the production in his Edinburgh edition (Vol. I., pp. 163, 166). Robert Chambers thus refers to it—"He composed, on the 4th of June, a poem on the reigning scandals of his village, cases on which the Session Record throws ample light, if light were of any use in the matter; but, unfortunately, though the mock-serious was never carried to a greater pitch of excellence than in this poem, its license of phrase renders it utterly unfit for publication." To this Dr. Wallace, in his new edition of Chambers, appends—"The composition is full of tenderness and humanity, but it is too 'broad' for publication."

Concerning the dramatis personæ Richmond was law clerk with Gavin Hamilton before he removed to Edinburgh, and it was in his lodgings that Burns found accommodation during his first visit to that city. He spent the last years of his life in Mauchline, and died there in 1846. Smith, to whom he addresses one of his epistles, was a draper in his native town who started an unsuccessful calico printing business in Lesmahagow, and ultimately died in Jamaica. Hunter was the village shoemaker, of whom no mention is made save in this effusion. The worthy trio, it appears, had each had experience of the pains and penalties which attached to personal appearance before the Kirk Session of Mauchline, hence their selection by the poet as the accredited officials of the mock tribunal. Sandy Dow (son of John Dow or Dove, mine host of the "Whitefoord Arms") drove the coach between Mauchline and Kilmarnock, hence his soubriquet of "Coachman." John Brown ("Clockie Brown") was watch and clockmaker in the village, and the hero of "Lament him, Mauchline husbands a'," which is dedicated to "Johannis Fuscus," in the original MS. The harder terms meted out to him seem to have been because of the aggravations condescended upon, and because he was not, like Dow, a brother "of the mystic tie" of Freemasonry. Of the heroines, nothing of