The following anecdote is told regarding the late Lord Dundrennan:—­A half silly basket-woman passing down his avenue at Compstone one day, he met her, and said, “My good woman, there’s no road this way.”  “Na, sir,” she said, “I think ye’re wrang there; I think it’s a most beautifu’ road.”

These poor creatures have invariably a great delight in attending funerals.  In many country places hardly a funeral ever took place without the attendance of the parochial idiot.  It seemed almost a necessary association; and such attendance seemed to constitute the great delight of those creatures.  I have myself witnessed again and again the sort of funeral scene portrayed by Sir Walter Scott, who no doubt took his description from what was common in his day:—­“The funeral pomp set forth—­saulies with their batons and gumphions of tarnished white crape.  Six starved horses, themselves the very emblems of mortality, well cloaked and plumed, lugging along the hearse with its dismal emblazonry, crept in slow pace towards the place of interment, preceded by Jamie Duff, an idiot, who, with weepers and cravat made of white paper, attended on every funeral, and followed by six mourning coaches filled with the company.”—­Guy Mannering.

The following anecdote, supplied by Mr. Blair, is an amusing illustration both of the funeral propensity, and of the working of a defective brain, in a half-witted carle, who used to range the province of Galloway armed with a huge pike-staff, and who one day met a funeral procession a few miles from Wigtown.  A long train of carriages, and farmers riding on horse-back, suggested the propriety of his bestriding his staff, and following after the funeral.  The procession marched at a brisk pace, and on reaching the kirk-yard style, as each rider dismounted, “Daft Jock” descended from his wooden steed, besmeared with mire and perspiration, exclaiming, “Hech, sirs, had it no been for the fashion o’ the thing, I micht as weel hae been on my ain feet.”

The withdrawal of these characters from public view, and the loss of importance which they once enjoyed in Scottish society, seem to me inexplicable.  Have they ceased to exist, or are they removed from our sight to different scenes?  The fool was, in early times, a very important personage in most Scottish households of any distinction.  Indeed this had been so common as to be a public nuisance.

It seemed that persons assumed the character, for we find a Scottish Act of Parliament, dated 19th January 1449, with this title:—­“Act for the way-putting of Fenyent Fules,” etc. (Thomson’s Acts of Parliament of Scotland, vol. i.); and it enacts very stringent measures against such persons.  They seem to have formed a link between the helpless idiot and the boisterous madman, sharing the eccentricity of the latter and the stupidity of the former, generally adding, however, a good deal of the sharp-wittedness of the knave.