Epitaph

On an Innkeeper Nicknamed ‘The Marquis’

First printed in Duncan, Glasgow, 1801.

Here lies a mock Marquis whose titles were shamm’d,

If ever he rise, it will be to be damn’d.

This is written on a Dumfries innkeeper whose public house was demolished in the early nineteenth century, although, according to Cunningham, the place where it stood was known as the Marquess’s Close till the 1830s (Cunningham, Vol. III, p. 310).