Green. He both gives details of the corruption against which Burns inveighed, and draws an unforgettable portrait of the stupid and stubborn King, Sovereign and Prime Minister in one, tacking on to it the charge that "the shame of the darkest hour of English history lies wholly at his door." The remedial measures proposed by Chatham, including the repeal of the insane Acts of the King, should next be examined. "It is not," said the great and fearless statesman, "cancelling a bit of parchment that will win back America; you must respect her fears and resentments.' His measure having been rejected by the Lords, Burke's by the Commons, and the King having spurned a petition from the City of London in favour of the Colonies, war began, and while it was in progress, at the time of Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga (1777) Chatham declared yet more fearlessly: 'You cannot conquer America. If I was an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms-never, never, never."

Can we wonder at the fierce scorn of the Washington Ode ? Both the brain and heart of the Mother Country were with her children who, it must never be lost sight of, were not aliens and foreigners to Burns, but kinsmen and, until the war broke the bond, fellow-subjects and fellowcountrymen. They are now called our cousins, but to this day there are Americans disposed to fraternise with Scotsmen for Burns's sake. He never wavered in his estimate of either the King or the American cause, and a few years after peace came, and the United States settled down in republican independence, he, by way of a birthday salutation, daringly reminded the King in "A Dream" (1787)

This, of course, was some years before the Washington Ode, and two years before the gaugership.

Reviewing what has been said, the reconciliation of Burns's attitude towards King and Government with a broader loyalty and a conception of patriotism which, at every point, touches a love of humanity at large, will be found complete. If, at first, his sympathies went out to the French, he came to sing "Does haughty Gaul invasion threat?" and stirred the whole country when the prospect of the threat being carried out rested like a nightmare on the United Kingdom. He also joined the local volunteers. He felt that the American cause was just, and if that involved his taxing the reigning King with tyranny, the fault did not lie with him. He maintained the right, and held the rebellion justified, which aimed at liberty and justice. That his sovereign was one of the combatants was to him a mere circumstance, that had no bearing upon the matter in dispute. He saw in it a plain question of right and wrong, and if all the monarchs of Christendom had been on the side of King George, it would not have altered the merits of the American claim. This consistent and inseeing verdict upon the Colonial problem shows, perhaps more convincingly than anything else in his history, Burns's power of concentrating his attention upon the essentials of public questions. He fixed his eye upon principles, and brushed aside as irrelevant every circumstance not entering into the essence of the matter before him.

Historical truth has found its way into fiction, and the reader who prefers his facts decked in the more entertaining garb, will find them so arrayed, yet in all verity, in the American Winston Churchill's romance of Richard Carvel." The particular scene is that in which, when in London, Carvel bluntly tells the company he is in, with Fox at the head of it, that to his countrymen the question was not one of tea or tuppence, but of principle: "You are pushing home

injustice and tyranny to the millions for the benefit of the thousands. For is it not true that the great masses of England are against the measures you impose upon us? Their fight is our fight. . . . . . You are helping the King to crush freedom abroad that he may the more easily break it at home. You are committing a crime," both against the British nation and against "a people who have in them the pride of your own ancestors." As Carvel ceased, the gentlemen of Old England, including Fox, drank to a speedy reconciliation with America! There could be no better key to Burns's position than Carvel's outline of that taken up by his countrymen.

There is only one point in what James Gray, Rector of Dumfries Academy, says of the Poet's politics, calling for emphasis. His evidence upon reform and the constitution is corroborative of Burns's own, and it is here passed over in order to reach the subject of revolution as distinct from constitutional reform, the necessity of which he often supported in conversation with all the energy of an irresistible eloquence." As to revolution, certain societies made a mad cry of it from one end of the kingdom to the other, but Burns kept aloof. He never joined in their debates; he never supported them or their views in writing; he had no correspondence with them. Gray had the best of opportunities of knowing Burns's politics-both acts and opinions-and that is his judgment. Neither a partisan nor a republican, nor a revolutionary, but a lover of liberty, an enemy of corruption, a constitutionalist, a monarchist, a patriot, a reformer, and a democrat of a most refined type-such was Burns.

"The wretch that would a Tyrant own,

And the wretch, his true-born brother,
Who would set the Mob aboon the Throne,
May they be damn'd together!

Who will not sing God save the King!'
Shall hang as high's the steeple:

The verse was written in 1795, when the Poet joined the volunteers. It holds a wholesome creed, and Burns made no essential addition to it, no known improvement upon it. In July, 1796, the end came.

EDWARD PINNINGTON.

BURNS AND BOSWELL.

IT

T is strange that two men who were contemporaries, and not only fellow-countrymen but belonging to the same shire, and both of whom rose to the front rank in literature, should so long have escaped comparison or even juxtaposition. Their names-as far as we know-have never before been linked together, and yet they have much in common, not only in outward circumstances and surroundings, but in the innate characteristic of their work. It is true that Boswell was born twenty years before Burns, but, on the other hand, he lived until the year before Burns died, and even then he was not an old man. Boswell belonged to an Ayrshire family-now unhappily extinct in direct succession, except through the female line-a family of Norman extraction, whose claim to have come over with the Conqueror is no myth, for the name of Sieur de Bosville is to be found in the Domesday Book. Lord Auchinleck, the father of Boswell, built a fine mansion-house, which was the third home of the Bosvilles or Boswells, in Ayrshire-the first a strong keep built high on a rock overhanging the Lugar; the second, also for defence, a castle with thick walls pierced by small windows and arrowslits; and the third a dwelling-house of ample space and classic design, and over the doorway the law-lord inscribed a Latin quotation, and the old Norman-French motto of the family-" Vraye foy" (true faith).

James Boswell was not born in Ayrshire, but in Edinburgh, but the accident of the place of his birth does not debar him from being a son of the shire. His boyhood was spent in his ancestral home, and there, under the care of a tutor, John Dun, he received his elementary education. He went to Edinburgh and to Glasgow to college, and while he was