"
There is but one manifestation of the man in these last years
which need delay us: and that was the sudden interest in
politics which arose from his sympathy with the great French
Revolution. His only political feeling had been hitherto a
sentimental Jacobitism, not more or less respectable than
that of Scott, Aytoun, and the rest of what George Borrow has
nicknamed the "Charlie over the water" Scotchmen. It was a
sentiment almost entirely literary and picturesque in its
origin, built on ballads and the adventures of the Young
Chevalier; and in Burns it is the more excusable, because he
lay out of the way of active politics in his youth. With the
great French Revolution, something living, practical, and
feasible appeared to him for the first time in this realm of
human action. The young ploughman who had desired so
earnestly to rise, now reached out his sympathies to a whole
nation animated with the same desire. Already in 1788 we
find the old Jacobitism hand in hand with the new popular
doctrine, when, in a letter of indignation against the zeal
of a Whig clergyman, he writes: "I daresay the American
Congress in 1776 will be allowed to be as able and as
enlightened as the English Convention was in 1688; and that
their posterity will celebrate the centenary of their
deliverance from us, as duly and sincerely as we do ours from
the oppressive measures of the wrong-headed house of Stuart.
Pages:
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104