Thus prepared, Mr Machrie published in Edinburgh, in 1705, a brochure, styled _An Essay on the Innocent and Royal Recreation and Art of Cocking_, consisting of sixty-three small pages; from which we learn that he had been the means of introducing the sport into Edinburgh. The writer of a prefixed set of verses evidently considered him as one of the great reformers of the age: ‘Long have you taught the art of self-defence, Improved our safety then, but now our sense, Teaching us pleasure with a small expense.’ For his own part, considering the hazard and expense which attended horse-racing and hawking, he was eager to proclaim the superior attractions of cocking, as being a sport from which no such inconveniences arose. The very qualities of the bird recommended it—namely, ‘his Spanish gait, his Florentine policy, and his Scottish valour in overcoming and generosity in using his vanquished adversary.’ The ancients called him an astronomer, and he had been ‘an early preacher of repentance, even convincing Peter, the first pope, of his holiness’s fallibility.’ ‘Further,’ says he, ‘if variety and change of fortune be any way prevalent to engage the minds of men, as commonly it is, to prefer one recreation to another, it will beyond all controversy be found in cocking more than any other. Nay, the eloquence of Tully or art of Apelles could never with that life and exactness represent fortune metamorphosed in a battle, as doth cocking; for here you’ll see brave attacks and as brave defiances, bloody strugglings, and cunning and handsome retreats; here you’ll see generous fortitude ignorant of interest,’ &c. Mr Machrie, therefore, goes _con amore_ into his subject, fully trusting that his treatise on ‘this little but bold animal could not [Sidenote: 1702.] be unacceptable to a nation whose martial temper and glorious actions in the field have rendered them famed beyond the limits of the Christian world;’ a sentence from which we should have argued that our author was a native of a sister-island, even if the fact had not been indicated by his name.