"The Twa Magicians," as posted by Jim Dixon, is the work of John Wilson (1785-1854) Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. It appeared as part of a comic sketch in the very prestigious, very widely read, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine for Dec., 1828, Number 40 in the long-running series of "Noctes Ambrosianae," by several authors. Wilson's text appears to bowdlerize that published by Peter Buchan in the very same year and reprinted by Child as his sole example. "Maidenhead" becomes "silken snood" and "virgin love."

A few other lines are revised. The Scots "dreel" ("a swift violent motion") given by the drake is also gone.

Wilson and his editors missed the "nail/tail" business because they lived in a pre-Freudian age when, in polite literature, a cigar was *always* a cigar.

FWIW, the character "Timothy Tickler," who sings the song, was based on Wilson's uncle, Robert Sym (1750-1844). Sym was 78 in 1828, probably too old to have learned a new ballad from Buchan. But Wilson most likely thought it was the sort of song that Sym might have taken to in his youth.

Wilson is responsible for James Hogg's cognomen of "The Ettrick Shepherd." The character of that description in "Noctes" is based on Hogg.