ould be on
this subject could he for an instant be permitted to witness the
progress of Scotland during the past hundred and thirty years, and the
benefits that have accrued to her from the Union.

Amongst his metrical tales, one of the finest, without question, is _The
Lure_, a satirical fable or allegory, whereof the moral, as may best be
stated in the poet's own words--

----'shews plainly,
That carnal minds attempt but vainly
Aboon this laigher warld to mount,
While slaves to Satan.'

The narrative, however, though possessing many merits, is too indelicate
for latter-day taste even to be sketched in outline.

In 1723 appeared his poem _The Fair Assembly_, directed against the
Puritanic severity of that section of the community which took exception
to dancing and such pleasant amusements, alike for young and old.
Nothing reveals to us more vividly the strange contrasts in the
religious life of the time, than the fact that the clergy winked at the
drunkenness which was so prominent a feature in the social customs of
the eighteenth century, and fulminated unceasingly against dancing.
Those who indulged in it were in many instances barred from sacramental
privileges, and had such pleasant epithets as 'Herodias' and 'Jezebel'
hurled at them. As Chambers states in his _Traditions of Edinburgh_:
'Everything that could be called public or promiscuous amusement was
held in abhorrence by the Presbyterians, and only struggled through a
desultory and degraded existence by the favour of the Jacobites, who
have always been a less strait-laced part of the community. Thus there
was nothing like a conventional system of dancing in Edinburgh till the
year 1710,' when at length--induced, probably, by the ridicule cast on
the ascetic strictness of Scottish social functions by the English
visitors who from time to time sojourned in 'the grey metropolis of the
north'--a private association commenced weekly _reunions_, under the
name of 'The Assembly.' Its first rooms, according to Arnot's _History
of Edinburgh_, were in a humble tenement in the West Bow (standing on
the site now occupied by St. John's Free Church), where they continued
to be located until 1720, when they were removed to Old Assembly Close.
In the West Bow days it was, as Jackson tells us in his _History of the
Stage_, that the Presbyterian abhorrence of 'promiscuous dancing' once
rose to such a height that a crowd of people attacked the roo