Staig, Jessie (1775-1801)

"To equal young Jessie, seek Scotland all over;
To equal young Jessie you seek it in vain:
Grace, beauty, and elegance, fetter her lover,
And maidenly modesty fixes the chain,"

The song appeared in Thomson's Scottish Airs, 1798, after an unsuccessful effort on the part of the editor to get what he felt to be a stiff line altered. Burns while agreeing about the stiffness, declined to make any alteration, saying 'it would spoil the likeness, so the picture must stand'.

Writing to Mrs Dunlop in September 1794, Burns said: 'I sympathised much, the other day, with a father, a man whom I highly respect. He is a Mr Staig, the leading man in our Borough. A girl of his, a lovely creature of sixteen, was given over by the Physician, who openly said that she had but few hours to live. A gentleman who also lives in town, and who had studied medicine in the first schools — the Dr Maxwell whom Burke mentioned in the House of Commons about the affair of the daggers — he was at last called in; and his prescriptions in a few hours altered her situation, and have now cured her.... I addressed the following epigram to him on the occasion:

"Maxwell, if merit here you crave,
That merit I deny:
You save fair Jessie from the grave!
An Angel could not die."

But the 'angel' did die a few years later at the age of twenty-six! And Dr Maxwell's 'prescription' for Burns's own heart ailment hastened the poet's end.