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The Prayer of Holy Willie University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Faculty Publications English Language and Literatures, Department of 7-7-2015 The rP ayer of Holy Willie: A canting, hypocritical, Kirk Elder Patrick G. Scott University of South Carolina - Columbia, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/engl_facpub Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Publication Info Published in 2015. Introduction and editorial matter copyright (c) Patrick Scott nda Scottish Poetry Reprint Series, 2015. This Book is brought to you by the English Language and Literatures, Department of at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE PRAYER OF HOLY WILLIE by ROBERT BURNS Scottish Poetry Reprints Series An occasional series edited by G. Ross Roy, 1970-1996 1. The Life and Death of the Piper of Kilbarchan, by Robert Semphill, edited by G. Ross Roy (Edinburgh: Tragara Press, 1970). 2. Peblis, to the Play, edited by A. M. Kinghorn (London: Quarto Press, 1974). 3. Archibald Cameron’s Lament, edited by G. Ross Roy (London: Quarto Press, 1977). 4. Tam o’ Shanter, A Tale, by Robert Burns, ed. By G. Ross Roy from the Afton Manuscript (London: Quarto Press, 1979). 5. Auld Lang Syne, by Robert Burns, edited by G. Ross Roy, music transcriptions by Laurel E. Thompson and Jonathan D. Ensiminger (Greenock: Black Pennell Press, 1984). 6. The Origin of Species, by Lord Neaves, ed. Patrick Scott (London: Quarto Press, 1986). 7. Robert Burns, A Poem, by Iain Crichton Smith (Edinburgh: Morning Star, 1996). *** 8. The Prayer of Holy Willie, A canting, hypocritical, Kirk Elder, by Robert Burns; the Kilmarnock chapbook of 1789 edited by Patrick Scott (Columbia: Scottish Poetry Reprints, 2015). 9. Tollerators and Con-Tollerators, a comedy, attributed to Archibald Pitcairne, edited by John MacQueen (Columbia: Scottish Poetry Reprints, 2015). 10. A Bard Unkend: Selected Poems in the Scottish Dialect, by Gavin Turnbull, edited by Patrick Scott (Columbia: Scottish Poetry Reprints, 2015). The Prayer of Holy Willie, A canting, hypocritical, Kirk Elder With Quotations from the Presbyterian Eloquence by Robert Burns The Kilmarnock chapbook of 1789 edited by Patrick Scott Scottish Poetry Reprints University of South Carolina Libraries 2015 Initial costs for the print version of this Scottish Poetry Reprint have been made possible through private donations. Introduction copyright © Scottish Poetry Reprints, 2015. All rights reserved. Cover image courtesy of University of South Carolina Libraries. This reprint is published through CreateSpace, and is available from CreateSpace, Amazon, and AmazonUK. It is not available for direct purchase from the University Libraries. Editorial address: Patrick Scott, c/o Irvin Department of Rare Books & Special Collections, University of South Carolina Libraries, 1322 Greene Street, Columbia, SC 29208, U.S.A. ISBN-13: 978-1514814307 ISBN-10: 1514814307 INTRODUCTION Robert Burns’s “Holy Willie’s Prayer” has long been recognized as the greatest of his “Kirk satires.” It was written in 1785, but Burns did not include it in his first book, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), nor in any of the later editions published in his lifetime. Indeed, it was long thought that its first publication was not till 1799, in an unauthorized Glasgow chapbook printed for Thomas Stewart. In fact, it had been printed ten years earlier, in 1789, in Burns’s native Ayrshire, while Burns was still very much alive. This reprint makes the 1789 version readily accessible for the first time in over two hundred years. The existence of that first printed version, a modest chapbook or small pamphlet of just eight pages, was first recorded by the Burns collector W. Craibe Angus in 1899, and a description was included in J.W. Egerer’s Burns bibliography in 1964.1 However, Craibe Angus’s copy, now in the Burns Birthplace Museum, is still the only copy known. It has never been utilized by editors of Burns, and the circumstances in which the poem first reached print do not seem to have been explored by Burns’s interpreters and biographers. Burns himself provided the best-known short account of how he came to write “Holy Willie’s Prayer.” When he was copying out the poem for his patron Robert Riddell, he prefaced it with this “Argument”: 1 W. Craibe Angus, The Printed Works of Robert Burns: A Bibliography in Outline (n.p.: privately printed, 1899), 113; J. W. Egerer, A Bibliography of Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1964; Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1965), 32 (Egerer 16). Cf. also my fuller treatment of the bibliographical history in “The First Publication of ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer,’” Scottish Literary Review, 7:1 (Spring-Summer, 2015): 1-18. 6 Patrick Scott Holy Willie was a rather oldish batchelor Elder in the parish of Mauchline, and much and justly famed for that polemical chattering which ends in tippling Orthodoxy, and for that Spiritualized Bawdry which refines to Liquorish Devotion.—In a Sessional process with a gentleman in Mauchline, a Mr. Gavin Hamilton, Holy Willie, and his priest, father Auld, after full hearing in the Presbytery of Ayr, came off second best; owing partly to the oratorical powers of Mr. Robt Aiken, Mr. Hamilton’s Counsel; but chiefly to Mr. Hamilton’s being one of the most irreproachable and truly respectable characters in the country.—2 Burns provided similar explanations on manuscript copies he made for several other correspondents (Kinsley I:74-75). Circulating both in manuscipt and by word of mouth, the poem was an immediate local success with Burns’s friends, and even with some of the more progressive Ayrshire presbyterian ministers. Allan Cunningham gives this anecdote from Burns’s friend John Richmond, then a clerk in Gavin Hamilton’s law office, about Gavin Hamilton’s reaction: Burns came in one morning and said, “I have just been making a poem, and if you will write it, John, I’ll repeat [i.e. dictate] it.” He accordingly, to Richmond’s surprise, repeated “Holy Willie’s Prayer:” Hamilton, came in, read it, and ran laughing with it to Robert Aiken—and Aiken was delighted.3 Others were less pleased, and the poem sharpened hostility to Burns among the local kirk elders and the Auld Licht clergy. It is, perhaps, difficult after more than two hundred years to understand how offensive the poem seemed in 1785 to the unco’ guid of Ayrshire.4 Burns wrote in his autobiographical letter to Dr. John Moore that it had “alarmed the kirk-Session so much that they held three several meetings to look over their holy artillery, if any of it was pointed against profane Rhymers,” and, as Burns acknowledged, he had left himself vulnerable to their 2 James Kinsley, ed., The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), I: 74. For background on the Gavin Hamilton case, see Kinsley, III: 1047-1048; Liam McIlvanney, Burns the Radical (West Linton: Tuckwell, 2002); J. Walter McGinty, Burns and Religion (Farnham: Ashgate, 2003); the entry by Carol McGuirk on Hamilton in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004); and David Purdie, et al., eds., Maurice Lindsay’s Burns Encyclopaedia, 4th ed. revised (London: Robert Hale, 2013), 158-159. 3 Allan Cunningham, ed., The Works of Robert Burns, with his Life, 8 vols. (London: James Cochrane, 1834 ), II: 98. 4 Extracts from 18th and 19th century comment are given as an appendix to this reprint (pp. 27-30). INTRODUCTION 7 censure for other faults, “point blank within the reach of their heaviest metal.”5 When a local moderate minister, the Rev. John M‘Math, requested a copy, Burns sent him one, but with a poem indicating just how much he had underestimated those he had antagonized: I own, ‘twas rash, an’ rather hardy, That I, a simple countra bardie, Shou’d meddle wi’ a pack sae sturdy, Wha, if they ken me, Can easy, wi’ a single wordie, Louse h-ll upon me (Kinsley, I: 124). The Hamilton case was soon over; while Burns made copies of “Holy Willie” for friends and patrons, he did not have the poem printed, and he did not include it in his 1786 volume. Two years later, some of the same Auld Licht clergy picked a new fight, this time against a softer target, a moderate minister, the shy, scholarly Rev. Dr. William M‘Gill (1732-1807), who held the second charge in Ayr at the parish kirk as junior colleague to Willliam Dalrymple. In the aftermath of his wife’s death, M‘Gill had published in Edinburgh a 500-page book about Christ’s sharing of human suffering, under the title A Practical Essay on the Death of Jesus Christ (1786). M‘Gill’s book was denounced as heterodox by two leading Auld Licht ministers in locally-published sermons, first by John Russel, minister in Kilmarnock, in his Reasons of Our Lord’s Agony in the Garden (Kilmarnock: Wilson, 1787), and then by William Peebles, minister of Newton upon Ayr and clerk to the Ayr Presbytery, in his The Great Things which the Lord Hath Done for This Nation (Kilmarnock: Wilson, 1788).6 When M‘Gill at last rose to the bait and answered Peebles, in yet another locally-published sermon, The Benefits of the Revolution (Kilmarnock: Wilson, 1789), the Auld Lichts bypassed the local presbytery and persuaded the next level up, the Synod of Glasgow and Ayr, to order the presbytery to investigate M‘Gill for heresy. Robert Aiken again took up the moderate cause, and in May 1789, the General Assembly meeting in Edinburgh quashed the M‘Gill investigation, though adjuring the Presbytery of Ayr to “maintain purity of doctrine.” 5 G.
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