During this visit of 1809, the bookmaker fell an easy victim to the hoax devised by a stalwart young stone-mason, afterwards known to fame as poet, novelist, biographer, and art critic. This was Allan Cunningham, then in his twenty-fifth year, earning eighteen shillings a week as a working mason. Cromek, we learn from Mr. Peter Cunningham's interesting introduction to his father's collected Poems and Songs (1847), looked coldly on the mason's acknowledged verses, but caught eagerly at the idea of discoveries of old Songs, to be made among the Nithsdale peasantry. He greedily swallowed Allan's happy imitations, and ever 'called out for more!' On quitting Dumfries for Newman Street, he put a MS. book into Allan's hands with the modest written injunction, 'To be filled with old unpublished songs and ballads, with remarks on them, historical and critical.' Another milch-cow has turned up!
Under pretence of collecting a world of previously unknown local song from the well-gleaned land of Burns and Scott, the young man, finding in Cromek (who had more natural taste than reading or acumen) a good subject for the cheat, and a willing one, palmed off, as undoubted originals, a whole deskful of his own verse, in slightly antique mould. Verse, it proved, bold, energetic, and stirring, or tender, sentimental, and graceful; the best of modern Scottish songs and ballads since those of the Ayrshire peasant, though wide the interval! Cromek, who reminds one of Burns's Johnson, of Musical Museum memory, a man of the same type, was, as usual, only too happy to avail himself of another's genius and labours; too ready a recipient to be over-curious as to authenticity. But his letters to Cunningham reveal often pertinent doubts as to any high antiquity, even while he and the eager domestic circle in Newman Street, whom a northern raven was feeding, were receiving the poems with delighted wonder. 'I have read these verses,' he writes of one song (She's gone to dwell in Heaven), 'to my old mother, my wife, sister, and family, till all our hearts ache.' Cromek
