So, we'll go no more a roving the latter part of it, and sitting up late o' nights--had knocked me up a little. But it is over--and it is now Lent, with all its abstinence and sacred music... Though I did not dissipate much upon the whole, yet I find 'the sword wearing out the scabbard,' though I have but just turned the corner of twenty nine." The poem seems to have been suggested in part by the refrain of a Scottish song known as "The Jolly Beggar." The Jolly Beggar was published in Herd's "Scots Songs" in 1776, 41 years before Byron's letter, and goes partially
James Orr (poet) stare While out, in boats, we bustle: Creatures wha ne’er had seen a black, Fu’ scar’t took to their shankies; Sae, wi’ our best rags on our back, We mixt amang the Yankies, An’ skail’t, that day </poem> James Orr (poet) James Orr (1770 – 24 April 1816), known as the "Bard of Ballycarry", was a poet or "rhyming weaver" from Ballycarry, Co. Antrim in the province of Ulster in Ireland, who wrote in English and Ulster Scots. He was the foremost of the Ulster Weaver Poets, and was writing contemporaneously with Robert Burns. According to that other great Ulster