LXXVI.

THE DEAN OF FACULTY.

A NEW BALLAD.

[The Hal and Bob of these satiric lines were Henry Erskine, and Robert Dundas: and their contention was, as the verses intimate, for the place of Dean of the Faculty of Advocates: Erskine was successful. It is supposed that in characterizing Dundas, the poet remembered "the incurable wound which his pride had got" in the affair of the elegiac verses on the death of the elder Dundas. The poem first appeared in the Reliques of Burns.]