SANQUHAR. Black Joan, frae Crichton Peel, SUCH is the description which Sanquhar obtains as one of the "Five Carlines." She was decidedly for the Whigs and Captain Miller: This burgh is situated in the upper part of Nithsdale, on the road between Dumfries and Ayr, and thus was frequently visited by our poet. It is a town of about fifteen hundred inhabitants. The burgal privileges were conferred by James VI. in 1596. The massive building in the foreground of the accompanying plate is the ruined castle of Sanquhar, at. one time the abode of the family of Crichton, Lords of Sanquhar; whence the appellation, "Black Joan frae Crichton Peel," peel being a term often used in Scotland for fortalice or castle. The personage usually known as the Admirable Crichton sprung from a branch of this family, residing in the adjacent castle of Elliock, where the room in which he first saw the light is still preserved in its original state. CAPTAIN GROSE. FRANCIS GROSE, the subject of more than one set of facetious verses by Burns, was the son of a jeweller at Richmond, near London, and appears to have been born about the year 1743. A good education, respectable talents, and an independency left to him by his father, enabled him to enter life with the happiest prospects; but these were soon overcast by the consequences of a too easy and self-indulgent disposition. Having become captain and paymaster of the Surrey militia, he is said to have kept no other accounts than his two pockets, receiving into the one, and paying from the other; at the same time, he had all the habits of a bon-vivant, as that style of life was practised at the period-the consequen |