his political creed. He sets forth his tenets as they stood in his defence, and, in so far as they touch upon the ground covered by the Graham letter, they need not be repeated: "I said that whatever might be my sentiments of republics ancient or modern, as to Britain, I abjured the idea." He next takes up the Constitution, corruption and reform, the manly and independent sentiments avowed by him as Poet, "which I trust will be found in the man," the family considerations which had practically driven him into the Government service as gauger, and his haunting fear of being in time to come vilified as a man held up to public view as gifted with genius, but, unable to support the "borrowed dignity," by resources within himself, who "dwindled into a paltry Exciseman," &c. After referring to his honest worth and "independent British mind," he wrote two of his finest passages in prose. In the first he brings forward his children as representing the precious stake he had in his country's welfare. In the second, he waxes indignantly self-assertive :

“Does any man tell me that my full efforts can be of no service, and that it does not belong to my humble station to meddle with the concerns of a nation? I can tell him, that it is on such individuals as I that a nation has to rest, both for the hand of support and the eye of intelligence. The uninformed mob may swell a nation's bulk, and the titled, tinsel, courtly throng may be its feathered ornament, but the number of those who are elevated enough in life to reason and to reflect, yet low enough to keep clear of the venal contagion of a Court-these are a nation's strength."

Such, indirectly, is the Poet's reply to the caution of his friend Mr Corbet, as mouthpiece of the sapient Board of Excise, that he was to leave off thinking, and, in silent obedience, to confine himself to his beer barrels. The letter is a curious compound of political principle, gratitude, selfdefence, morbidity, self-appraisement, inflation of phrase, and right-thinking. In this letter and a later one, probably

to Captain Robertson of Lude, Burns heralds the coming of the great Middle Class, as the real depository of national power. A true democracy was to him a government by thinking people capable of reasoning, as distinct from mob rule.

For the sake of continuity of ideas and comparison, the Robertson letter, dated 5th December, 1793, enclosing Scots Wha Hae," written in the previous September, is here introduced :

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"In times like these, sir, when our commoners are barely able by the glimmering of their own twilight-understandings to scrawl a frank, and when lords are what gentlemen would be ashamed to be, to whom shall a sinking country call for help? To the independent country gentleman. To him who has too deep a stake in his country not to be in earnest for her welfare, and who, in the honest pride of man, can view with equal contempt the insolence of office and the allurements of corruption."

Here Burns assorts the independent country gentleman with the class standing for civic stability and intelligence, the professional man, the captain of industry, the commercial leader, the solid body of citizens coming between the ornamental but selfish aristocracy and the uneducated, unthinking populace and peasantry. The next year, 1794, is marked by the poem commonly called, in accordance with the intention Burns imparted to Mrs Dunlop, "Ode for Washington's Birthday." Anything more bitter against George III., or more nearly approaching rank disloyalty to King and Government, Burns never penned. That all his sympathies were with the Americans, and that he held the King guilty of attempting a heinous wrong, and of entering upon a course leading straight, had it been successful, to monstrous oppression, goes now without saying. It is nowise surprising that Perry, if the Ode reached him through Captain Miller, did not publish it in the Morning Chronicle.

It thrills with the fiery passion of an ardent lover of liberty; the King is denounced as a tyrant," the despot of Columbia's race," while the freed, victorious Americans are hailed as

sons of liberty," brave as free," who dared maintain "the Royalty of Man." The Poet launched his wrath against the King as an oppressor and an enemy of freedom, and in the quality of manhood he found the only test of royalty.

His regard for these two things, Liberty and Manhood, was in the Poet's blood and fibre. When once, accordingly,

he had thrown off restraint and abandoned himself to the pent-up tide of devotion to the doubly sacred cause of humanity and freedom, he became reckless as to whether it dashed him against the throne or not. Liberty comes before loyalty. humanity before nationality, and it is this, the universal element in his song, as in his prose, that carried him above all petty distinctions of rank and discrimination between nations, that lifted him clear of his personal environment and attachments, and gives him to this day his enduring place beside the great poets of the world. Who now thinks of him as "the peasant Poet," "the Ayrshire ploughman"? Who feels that there is anything strained in assorting him, the once obscure gauger of Dumfries, with men of culture, great intellect, commanding eloquence and far-seeing statesmanship, like the elder Pitt and Burke? Who now sees any incongruity in placing him beside the great men of his day? If there be any incongruity, is it not rather in placing them beside him? He was inspired with more than song, and his politics will never be understood until, looking past the peasant, ploughman, wearer of "hoddin grey," and gaugerthe several disguises in which he was fated to plod through the world—he is seen in his true proportions as an intellectual giant, a leader, of clearer vision, and mentally more robust, than the vast majority of the sons of Time.

For the two or three years preceding his death, his

condition was one of extreme irritation, and his position beset with danger. Thinking out the possibilities of the case, it is not difficult to appreciate the courage underlying the Washington Ode, with the Address to Caledonia pointing like a finger-post to a Scots origin, and to Burns. Had it been published and traced, as might easily have happened, not only re-examination and dismissal from the Excise, but punishment were inevitable. He had presented De Lolme, bearing an ambiguous inscription, to Dumfries Library, and, according to tradition, he passed Tom Paine's Common Sense and The Rights of Man to a friendly blacksmith to keep for him as, if found in his possession, the books would work his ruin. There is material enough from which to realise how narrow was the path of silence and how strait the line of discretion the Government employee of those days was compelled to follow if he would escape detection, censure, and expulsion from the Service. The Poet had to choose between mute prudence and beggary. It is possible, as Chambers suggests, that all his democratic writings have not come down to us, but a still greater loss is ours. What code of political ethics and canons of conduct, what theory of the free government of a free people and of the function of kingship, what inspiring sketch of subject and civic rights and duties, what limning of Liberty set rouna with patriotism, official incorruptibility, and deference to humanity and progress, might have come from the pen of a Burns whose speech was free, we may imagine, but imagine only. He was beset on all sides-coerced into silence and that at the very time when his country had most need of guidance and his voice might have had the most salutary and telling effect upon the venal partisans and sightless pilots who steered the ship of State upon the rocks of war and revolution.

Let us turn to Chambers and Green's Short History. The former attributes Burns's high-strung nervous condition about this period (1793) to his pent-up anger at the course

taken by the Government. He thought it ruinous to the country; he and thousands more were being involved in distress, and his "bosom was ready to burst with indignation," but, a servant of the State, he could not free his soul, and bring the wrongdoers to the bar of righteous reason. Men were tried for sedition upon the flimsiest evidence, and subjected to heavy sentences; and the reaction at home from current events in France" threatened to crush every sentiment of liberty in which Great Britain had formerly gloried." In September he wrote "Scots Wha Hae," and says that it was inspired by Scotland's "glorious struggle for freedom, associated with the glowing ideas of some other struggles of the same nature, not quite so ancient." These could only have been the struggles of America and France, the latter of which was then victorious over the enemies of the Republic. "The English Ministers," Chambers continues, perhaps a little fancifully, "who had declared war on the French Republicans, and so ruined the still struggling Scottish commerce, became, in his imagination, the ancient enemies of the old-time allies, France and Scotland. Under cover of a fourteenth century battle-song, he was really liberating his soul against the Tory tyranny that was opposing liberty at home and abroad, and, morcover, striking at the comfort of his own fireside." That Scots Wha Hae "should protest so far-reaching,

have been made the vehicle of a and so incongruous with its more obvious and restricted sense, is doubtful; although, in view of the Poet's own reference to later struggles than the Scots War of Independence, it is admittedly venturesome to put limits to the association of ideas in his mind, especially when agitated by cross-currents of emotion reaching him from America, France, and the past of his own country. Tory tyranny" may therefore have added fuel to the fire, but Chambers strikes one as being too exclusive.

His view, nevertheless, takes colour from the historian