But if they’re gude and do repent,
They shall be sew’d again.”
But this was quite enough, the audience burst out into such a transport of laughter on hearing it that the ingenious author saw fit to suppress the rest, and abandon his poetical attempt.
Then Zachary Boyd, of facetious memory, minister of the Barony Church, Glasgow, in the time of Charles I., and who translated the Bible into verse, the MS. of which is preserved in the library of the University of Glasgow to this day, must have been a frank fellow. He sings:—
“There was a man called Job,
Dwelt in the land of Uz;
He had a good gift of the gob,
The same thing happens us.”
A fatal “gift o’ the gob,” alas!—for perfectly convincing proof of which see the following verses from his “History of Jonah”—a gem per se. Jonah—according to the poet—soliloquiseth—
“What house is this, where’s neither coal nor candle,