“See Phœbus or some friendly muse
Unto small poets songs infuse,
Which they at second hand rehearse,
Through reed or bagpipe, verse for verse.”
Needham, another Englishman, writing in 1648, after calling a typical Presbyterian such names as “a sainted Salamander that lives in the flames of zeal,” “an apocryphal piece of university mummery,” “a holy picklock,” “a gunpowder politician,” “a divine squib-crack,” “a pious pulpit-cuffer,” and “a deadly spit-fire,” winds up with—
“The Scotch bagpipes, the pulpit drums,
And priests sound high and big,
Once more a Cause and Covenant comes
To show ’s a Scottish jig.”
And yet another seems to think the Separatists, a Scottish religious sect of the 17th century, would have been better at the bagpipe than at singing. They had, he thought, “need of somewhat as a bagpipe, or something never used by Antichrist, to tune them; singing in their own conventicles like hogs against raine.”