Holy Willie

—Holy Willie was a rather oldish bachelor elder, in the parish of Mauchline, and much and justly famed for that polemical chattering, which ends in tippling orthodoxy, and for that spiritualized bawdry which refines to liquorish devotion.

Holy Willie’s Prayer 1909

[1387] Burns's Holy Willie, like Boswell, was an Ayrshire man.

Life Of Johnson Boswell, James, 1740-1795 1887

There were politicians and there were ecclesiastics, and good people neither one nor the other, who shook their troubled heads over the ploughman who would not confine himself to the daisy of the field or the Saturday night's observances of the Cottar, but was capable of Holy Willie and the Holy Fair.

Royal Edinburgh Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets George Reid 1862

Grass_ by a Harlan or other Holy Willie, affirms that "one more irreproachable in his relations to the other sex lives not upon this earth" -- an assertion which one must take as one finds it, having neither confirmatory nor traversing evidence at hand.

Poems By Walt Whitman Walt Whitman 1855

[1387] Burns's Holy Willie, like Boswell, was an Ayrshire man.

Life of Johnson, Volume 2 1765-1776 James Boswell 1767

"But maybe," he said, "I oughtn't to be reading the like of that to you that's the son of the Manse, though nobody would think of Holy Willie and your father together.

The Northern Iron George A. Birmingham 1907