Thistledown: A Book of Scotch Humour, Character, Folk-lore, Story and Anecdote

An eminently learned and genial ex-Professor of one of our Universities not long since pointed out how Scotland was remarkable for three things—Songs, Sermons, and Shillings. And whilst it may not be disputed that she has enormous and ever-increasing store of these three good things—and that, moreover, she loves them all—there is a fourth quality of her many-sided nature which is more distinctly characteristic of Auld Caledonia and her people, and that is the general possession of the faculty of original humour. Not one in ten thousand of the Scottish people may be able to produce a good song, or a good sermon; not one in twenty thousand of them may be able to “gather meikle gear and haud it weel thegither;” but every second Scotsman is a born humourist. Humour is part and parcel of his very being. He may not live without it—may not breathe. Consequently, it is found breaking out amongst us in the most unlikely as well as in the most likely places. It blossoms in the solemn assemblies of the people; at meetings of Kirk-Sessions; in the City and Town Council Chambers; in our Presbyteries; our Courts of Justice; and in the high Parliament of the Kirk itself. Famous specimens of it come down from the lonesome hillsides; from the cottage, bothy, and farm ingle-nooks. It issues from the village inn, the smiddy, the kirkyard; and functions of fasting and sorrow give it birth as well as occasions of feasting and mirth. It drops from the lips of the learned and the unlearned in the land; and is not more frequently revealed in the eloquence of the University savant than in the gibberish of the hobbling village and city natural.

Humorous Scottish anecdotes have been an abundant crop; and collectors of them there have been not a few. Dean Ramsay’s garrulous and entertaining Reminiscences, and Dr. Charles Rogers’ Familiar Illustrations of Scottish Life excepted, however, the published collections of our floating facetiæ have been “hotch-potch” affairs. Revelations each of some little industry, no doubt, but few of them affording any proof of the compiler’s familiarity with the subject. And as none of them have reached farther back than Dean Ramsay, and all have been content to take the more familiar of Ramsay’s and Rogers’ illustrations and anecdotes, and supplement these in hap-hazard fashion with random clippings from the variety columns of the daily and weekly newspapers, the individual result has been such as Voltaire’s famous criticism eloquently describes:—They have contained things both good and new; but what was good was not new, and what was new was not good.

To the present work the critical aphorism of the “brilliant Frenchman” may not in fairness be applied. In any attempt to afford an adequate representation of the humours of the Scottish people, illustrations must of necessity be drawn from widely different sources, and I have, consequently, to confess my indebtedness to various earlier gleaners in the same field, chiefly to Dean Ramsay, Dr. Rogers, and the genial trio, Carrick, Motherwell, and Henderson. But for representative illustrations of Scottish life and character I have gone further back and come down to a later period than any previous writer on the subject. And so, whilst the reader will discover here much that is old and good, he will find very much that is new, which, as illustrative of Scottish humour and character, will compare with the best of the old.