A sequence of birthdays:
1/25 Robbie Burns (the Scottish poet and lyricist), 1759
1/26 Edward Sapir (the American linguist, born in German Pomerania, in what is now northern Poland), 1884
1/27 BOTH Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (the Austrian composer), 1756; AND Lewis Carroll (the English writer, poet, and mathematician), 1832
Burns and Mozart both died young — Burns died in 1796, Mozart in 1791 — so their almost identical lifetimes were also the closing years of the 18th century. The whimsical Dodgson / Carroll was a figure of the late 19th century, Sapir of the early 20th century (he died just a year before I was born, and I knew a number of his students).
Bawdy Burns. I was aware of Burns’s Scots verse, but first experienced it with full force (over 50 years ago) in recordings of songs from his collection The Merry Muses of Caledonia. From Wikipedia:
The Merry Muses of Caledonia is a collection of bawdy songs said to have been collected or written by Robert Burns, the 18th-century Scottish poet.
The poems and songs were collected for the private use of Robert Burns and his friends, including the Crochallan Fencibles, an 18th-century Edinburgh club, which met at the Anchor Close, a public house off the High Street. Robert Burns was introduced to the club by William Smellie, while setting the Edinburgh edition of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Edinburgh Edition) in his shop in the same close. The songs in the collection were intended to be performed in a “convivial” atmosphere.
To paraphrase a bit: Meg had a muff, and the muff was rough, and Duncan Davidson stuck his highland pintle in it. (Just to keep warm, mind you.)