Doggerel.
Thomson, John Anstruther,1818-1904.
[Scotland? : s.n.,
1890?]
Anonymous, privately printed verse on hunting and other subjects. The poems are untitled, but applied titles might be "Jack Thomson," "The Stable Boy,"  two individual quatrains comprising  "Fast ran the hounds of Buccleugh," and a final quatrain, titled in manuscript, "The Empress of -."  There are clues in two of the poems that suggest the volume is likely connected with Col. John Anstruther Thomson (1818-1904,) Scottish aristocrat, officer with the 9th Lancers and 13th Light Dragoons, Hon. Colonel, Fife and Forfar Imperial Yeomanry, deputy lieutenant of Fife, and a lifelong hunting enthusiast who was a Master of the Pytchley Hounds, Northamptonshire. Anstruther Thomson's two-volume "Reminiscences of Eighty Years" was published in 1904.
The volume is prefaced with a poem/drinking toast "Jack Thomson" which incorporates the single manuscript correction in the present volume, and includes additional lines and variant lines. Jack  Thomson, or more commonly "Jock Tamson" of the phrase "Jock Tamson's bairns," was frequently evoked for drinking toasts. The poem, a play on the often parodied "My Mother," is a tribute to Anstruther Thomson, and concludes: 'John Tamson's Bairns' - means: brothers we,/ An auld Fife phrase, and all agree/ That Fife still sees, lang may she see-/ John Tamson."  A line in the second poem in the volume "Fast ran the hounds" is "But I yearned For Tailby's haloo," referring to W. Tailby, mentioned several times in Anstruther Thomson's Reminiscences.