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, åt 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.

66

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 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

yet in the early twenties, he made the grand tour considered so indispensable in those days for a man of the world and a gentleman. He visited Corsica, which at that time was as

a sealed book to the world at large, and when he returned, his Corsican book of travels brought him, not only into notice, but into prominence in the literary world. Thenceforward, through all the vicissitudes of his life, and whatever else might be his nominal profession, his heart was given over to the pursuit of literature.

Burns was born into a very different world from that of the young Boswell. On a January night of dreadful storm he first saw the light in a clay biggin' in Alloway, not twenty miles from the lordly mansion of Auchinleck. All through the years when Boswell was dancing attendance upon his divinity (Samuel Johnson) Burns was growing up from infancy to the hard, driving work of his boyhood, and to the intense, passionate life of his early manhood. There is every possibility that Burns and Boswell heard of each other. In due course of time the old Laird of Auchinleck had died, and James Boswell, his son, reigned in his stead. Burns spent much of his life in the neighbouring parish of Mauchline, and a laird in one parish would be well known— by repute at least to the farmers in the next. Then Burns, with his literary gifts, could not escape the notice of a man whose life was also devoted to literature, and the sudden fame which fell upon the young Poet with the publication of his first book could not fail to reach the house of Auchinleck, even if Edinburgh society, into the best of which Boswell had the the entrée, had not likewise opened its doors to the farmer-poet for a while. It would have been interesting to have had an opinion each of the other, but it seems a case of "how near and yet how far." The two men were near in time and place, and they were brothers in genius. In literature they stand foremost, each in his own place; in character they have much in common,