When Thomas Sheridan came to Edinburgh in 1761 to give a course of lectures on elocution, ‘he was patronized by the professors in the College, by several of the clergy, by the most eminent among the gentlemen at the bar, by the judges of the Court of Session, and by all who at that time were the leaders of public taste’. Thenceforward, ‘correct pronunciation and elegant reading’ were reckoned ‘indispensable acquirements for people of fashion and for public speakers’. In other words, these people of fashion, like Francis Jeffrey on his return from Oxford, gave up the broad Scots in return for the narrow English. In the very year of the Kilmarnock _Poems_, Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster, one of the most public-spirited Scots of his generation, brought out a two-hundred-page volume of _Observations on the Scottish Dialect_. His purpose was not to preserve but to destroy his native speech. His book is a comprehensive index expurgatorius of all the words, phrases, and idioms a Scotsman must avoid--many of them today a part of the standard speech of the United States, and even of England. Thus, ‘best man’ is a Scotticism for ‘bride’s man’; ‘hairdresser’ is to be preferred to ‘barber’; ‘sore eyes’ is a vulgarism; ‘whisky’ should be called ‘usquebae’ or ‘aquavitae’. ‘Heather’ and ‘peat’ and ‘bracken’ are condemned along with ‘mittens’ and ‘kindling’; it betrays provincial origin to ask if a friend is in, or if he has gone out walking. ‘It is, indeed, astonishing,’ says Sir John, ‘how uncouth, and often how unintelligible, Scotch words and phrases are to an inhabitant of London, and how much it exposes such as make use of them, to the derision of those with whom they happen to have any communication or intercourse.’ However, he adds, a Scot should choose carefully even from the speech of London. ‘Cockney phrases a Scotchman is very apt to get into when he makes his first appearance in London. And when he can easily and fluently bring out, _this here thing_, and _that there thing_, for _this_ or _that thing_; _I knode_, for _I knew_; _on it_, for _of it_, as, _I heard on it_; _grass_, for _asparagus_; _your’n_ and _his’n_, for _yours_ and _his_, he fancies himself a complete Englishman.’ The anglicizing mania extended even to people’s names. David Malloch, when he crossed the Border, changed his name to Mallet; John Murray the publisher was originally M’Murray, as his predecessor, Millan, had been Macmillan; William Almack, the proprietor of the famous assembly-rooms in London, had started life as M’Caul. One of Burns’s own friends, James M’Candlish, dropped the prefix when he entered Glasgow University, and became simply Candlish. Even today, in spite of Burns, the anglicizing process continues: the visitor in Ayr, for instance, will find the street-signs pointing him to the ‘New Bridge’ and the ‘Old Bridge’.