Burns’s acquaintance with popular and traditional literature was not, however, limited to what he heard at home. The eighteenth century was the heyday of the chapbook and the broadside--forms of popular literature resulting from the spread of literacy among the middle and lower classes, which were finally swept away by the newspaper. In Burns’s childhood every peddler’s pack contained an assortment ranging from topical songs and reports of the death and dying words of the latest criminal to abridgements of old histories and romances. Even the poorest labourer could afford the penny or two these publications cost, and they passed from hand to hand until they were worn out. William Hamilton of Gilbertfield’s modernization of Blind Harry’s _History of Sir William Wallace_, which so roused Burns’s boyish patriotism, may have reached the lad in chapbook form; the Life of Hannibal which he also mentions was almost certainly a chapbook; he was familiar from his earliest years with such ephemera as ‘The Aberdeen Almanac’ and ‘Six Excellent New Songs’. But he nowhere mentions another group of writings which he assuredly read. Only a few years before Burns was born, Dugal Graham, the hunchbacked bellman of Glasgow, began publishing a series of Scottish chapbooks. Their popularity was enormous; total sales are alleged to have run into the hundreds of thousands. The most pretentious of Graham’s works was a metrical history of the ’45; the most characteristic were the humorous prose tales such as ‘Jocky and Maggie’s Courtship’, ‘The Adventures of John Cheap the Chapman’, and ‘The Comical Sayings of Paddy from Cork’. These chaps were made up of traditional anecdotes of a broadly comic sort, loosely strung together but supplied by Graham with the local colour of Scottish peasant life. Much of Graham’s material had a long history; coarse jests which go back at least as far as Chaucer; folk-tales of unquenchable vitality, such as the one on which Synge long afterwards based _The Shadow of the Glen_; quaint figures of speech and wild exaggerations, some of which crossed the Atlantic to become the progenitors of the American ‘tall story’. The peasant world as Graham depicted it was tough and crude and unlovely, but full of a coarse vitality which enlivened even the baldest passages of Graham’s prose and which at its best expressed itself in pungent phrases remembered and used by Burns, probably long after he had forgotten their source. The most indecorous stanza in ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ is based on a phrase from ‘Jocky and Maggie’s Courtship’, as is a similar stanza in ‘Death and Doctor Hornbook’.