Coilus or Coila

"There where a sceptr'd Pictish shade
Stalk'd round his ashes lowly laid."

Burns took the name Coila for his muse (see The Vision: Coila my name; and this district as mine I claim.')

When Mrs Dunlop informed the poet that a woman painter was engaged in painting Coila, Burns replied, writing from Mossgiel on 7^th Mary 1788: 'I am highly flattered by the news you tell me of Coila. I may say to the fair painter who does me so much honor, as Dr Beattie says to Ross, the poet of his muse Scota, from which, by the by, I took the idea of Coila ('tis a poem of Beatties in the Scottish dialect, which perhaps you have never seen) —

"Ye shake your head, but o' my fets,
Ye've set auld Scota on her legs;
Land had she been in beffs and flegs,
Bunbaz'd and dizzie,
Her fiddle wanted strings and pegs,
Wae's me, poor hizzie."

The poem, Dr James Beatties only excursion into Scots, is titled 'To Mr Alexander Ross at Lochlee, author of The Fortunate Shepherdess and other poems in the broad Scottish dialect.'