The laureate’s odes could neither make people loyal, nor keep them so. On the other hand, the Jacobite Muse, with her petticoat busked up to her knee, was as brisk and winning as Maggie Lauder, especially in Scotland. She gave much concern to the people at St. James’s and the Cockpit, from the beginning to the end of the year. She was working mischief in the north. How matters were going on there, and how different was the treatment of the Scotch Muse, in December, from that of England before the throne of George, at St. James’s, in the preceding January, is told in the London papers. Captain Stafford, of Pulteney’s Foot, was stationed in Aberdeen, where the Jacobite Muse was rampant. The captain seized the singers of treasonable ballads in the streets, and brought them, with ballads and publishers, before the magistrates. These were Jacobites, and they could see no harm in the minstrels or the muse; and they discharged the peripatetic singing agents of the young Chevalier. They would not even confiscate the ballads. This the loyal captain took upon himself to do; he brought the whole mass of harmonious treason from the printer’s to the Market Place, and set fire to the ton of songs that was intended to raise one. While they were burning he made a speech, of which this is one of the flowers:――‘May all the enemies of His Most Sacred Majesty, King George, our rightful and lawful King, be consumed off the face of the earth, as the fire consumeth these vile and treasonable ballads.’ For which the captain was much commended in and about St. James’s. [Sidenote: _PRISONS AND PRISONERS._]