JOLLY BEGGARS, The. 'The Jolly Beggars) is one of many instances of Burns range of gifts and interests. He had always had a taste, he says in a letter, for the come pany of blackguards, though he had no ambition to become one. The poem is called a cantata; and is, indeed, an opera of beggary, with the scene laid in Poosie Nansie's hedge alehouse; and the characters, all noisy vagrants from roaming the world, rising one after another, with short introductions of them in recitativo, to sing their braveries; and loves, lusts, de baucheries, of the highways, the hedges, of and boys and youth. he whole piece is done in the manner of Jan Steen and Ostade among the painters; and in literature of the folk ballads, of Swift, Rabelais, Fielding, Shakespeare's Falstaff.
The frequent tendencies in the last four decades, especially on the Continent, to some thing of the broad realism of earlier periods, help clear the way for 'The Jolly Beggars) of the apologetic types of criticism from which it has often suffered, and make possible a more honest and direct approach. The chief excel
lence of the work lies in its power of minstrelsy, which here takes the direction , of coarse, ca rousing, bludgeoning humor, genuine balladry of the people: one of the best pieces in English of genre, kept perfectly to one key.
'The Jolly Beggars' was written 1785, after a visit to an alehouse where a party of vagrants were carousing; but out of con sideration for his public's sense of propriety, Burns excluded it from his published work.. So that the poem was first printed, though, only in part, in 1799, from a manuscript given to friends. In 1801 another manuscript was added to the first, making the poem complete as it now stands.
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