Chapter VII: The Scot 278 (9)

Despite his constant citing of Young’s exhortation, ‘On Reason build Resolve’, Burns’s approach to life and ideas was always emotional and not intellectual. When he described himself in 1786 as having little of divinity ‘except a pretty large portion of honour and an enthusiastic, incoherent Benevolence,’ his self-analysis had his customary accuracy. To him, as to the New England Unitarians and to a man like Mark Twain, escape from the orthodoxy of his youth had come as a relief and not as a loss. Calvinism had erected a system of thought as rigidly deductive as the science of geometry. Starting from certain ‘self-evident’ axioms like the omnipotence and omniscience of God, the fall of man, and the literal authority of the Scriptures, it had created a religious philosophy from which all emotion except fear had been removed. Through the sin of Adam all men had earned damnation, but the inscrutable mercy or caprice of God would choose a remnant minority for salvation--for His merit, not theirs. Human faith and human righteousness were filthy rags.

This cold determinism outraged Burns’s sense of fairness and justice, as it outraged Channing’s and Emerson’s and Holmes’s. It seemed to him that the New Lights were ‘squaring Religion by the rules of Common Sense, and attempting to give a decent character to Almighty God and a rational account of his proceedings with the Sons of Men.’ But in investing their deity with human benevolence and loving-kindness, the New Lights were also, again like the New England Unitarians, more or less unwittingly surrendering the supernatural sanctions of religion and assimilating their ideas to those of the Deists. God was the ‘Great First Cause, least understood’; Christ tended to sink from Godhead to merely an inspired human teacher; personal immortality became a pious hope instead of a divine promise. If man were indeed immortal, the surest passport to salvation was righteous living rather than adherence to a particular creed. And the guide to righteous living was the still small voice of conscience, the Moral Sense which Francis Hutcheson had taught was an innate human faculty.

In his attitude towards these doctrines, Burns was a man of his century and a Scot of his century. The rigidity of the Kirk, so unlike the comfortable looseness of Anglican theology, left him no place within its pale, even though he never openly severed his connexion. As a youth he had, along with most of his countrymen, read popular works of divinity like Boston’s _Four-Fold State_, Fisher’s _Marrow of Modern Divinity_, and Cole _On God’s Sovereignty_. In 1791, when his rural neighbours of the Monkland Friendly Society insisted on adding these and other books to their co-operative library, Burns obediently ordered them from Peter Hill, and lumped them all together as ‘damned trash’. Though he told James Candlish in 1787 that after having ‘in the pride of despising old women’s stories, ventured in “the daring path Spinoza trod”; ... experience of the weakness, not the strength, of human powers, made me glad to grasp at revealed religion,’ it was not the revelation of the Kirk. Not even his infatuation for Clarinda, though it made him momentarily qualify his admiration for Milton’s Satan, could compel him to bow the knee to Calvin. ‘Mine’, he told her when she undertook to preach orthodoxy to him, ‘is the Religion of the bosom.--I hate the very idea of controversial divinity; as I firmly believe, that every honest, upright man, of whatever sect, will be accepted of the Deity.--If your verses, as you seem to hint, contain censure, except you want an occasion to break with me, don’t send them.... “Reverence thyself” is a sacred maxim, and I wish to cherish it.’

His fullest statement approximating to orthodoxy was written to Mrs. Dunlop in 1789:

‘I have just heard Mr Kirkpatrick preach a sermon. He is a man
famous for his benevolence, and I revere him; but from such ideas of
my Creator, good Lord, deliver me! Religion ... is surely a simple
business, as it equally concerns the ignorant and the learned, the
poor and the rich. That there is an incomprehensible Great Being, to
whom I owe my existence; and that He must be intimately acquainted
with the operations and progress of the internal machinery, and
consequent outward deportment, of this creature which He has made;
these are, I think self-evident propositions. That there is a real
and eternal distinction between virtue and vice, and, consequently,
that I am an accountable creature; that from the seeming nature of
the human mind, as well as from the evident imperfection, nay,
positive injustice, in the administration of affairs both in the
natural and moral worlds, there must be a retributive scene of
justice beyond the grave; must, I think, be allowed by every one who
will give himself a moment’s reflection. I will go farther, and
affirm, that from the sublimity, excellence, and purity of His
doctrine and precepts, unparalleled by all the aggregated wisdom and
learning of many preceding ages, though, _to appearance_, He Himself
was the obscurest and most illiterate of our species--therefore Jesus
Christ was from God....’

Another time he told the same lady, ‘We can no more live without Religion, than we can live without air; but give me the Religion of Sentiment & Reason.--You know John Hildebroad’s famous epitaph--

“Here lies poor old John Hildebroad,
Have mercy on his soul, Lord God,
As he would do, were he Lord God,
And thou wert poor John Hildebroad.”--

This speaks more to my heart, & has more of the genuine spirit of Religion in it, than is to be found in whole wagon-loads of Divinity.’ This was the same mood in which he had told Clarinda, ‘My creed is pretty nearly expressed in the last clause of Jamie Deans’s grace, an honest weaver in Ayrshire; “Lord, grant that we may lead a gude life! for a gude life maks a gude end; at least it helps weel!”’ Reason and Sentiment, but with the sentiment much more powerful than the reason, these were the dominant forces in Burns’s religious attitude.

Nevertheless Burns was more courageous than many of his contemporaries in accepting the logical consequences of belief in universal benevolence. No man knew more clearly the warfare between flesh and spirit, but he was convinced that both were the gifts of God. The lines which so shocked Wordsworth,

‘But yet the light that led astray
Was light from Heaven’,

are his frankest summary of his experience. Whatever sufferings his passions had brought upon him, the passions in themselves were noble. Asceticism had no appeal for him. He took life as God made it, and saw that it was good.

Taken by themselves, his utterances to Clarinda and Mrs. Dunlop might not be above suspicion. Burns had every motive for wishing favourably to impress both women, and might have feigned an interest which he did not feel, or at least have overstated his belief and understated his doubts. But here, as in his feelings towards his children, what he said when he may have been on dress-parade is confirmed by his letters to his intimates. In 1788 he wrote to Robert Muir, then dying of tuberculosis:

‘... An honest man has nothing to fear.--If we lie down in the grave,
the whole man a piece of broken machinery, to moulder with the clods
of the valley--be it so; at least there is an end of pain, care,
woes and wants: if that part of us called Mind, does survive the
apparent destruction of the man--away with old-wife prejudices and
tales!... A man, conscious of having acted an honest part among his
fellow-creatures; even granting that he may have been the sport, at
times, of passions and instincts; he goes to a great unknown Being
who could have no other end in giving him existence but to make him
happy; who gave him those passions and instincts, and well knows
their force.’

In the same tone he said six years later to Alexander Cunningham that the two great pillars which bear us up, ‘amid the wreck of misfortune and misery’, are the ‘certain noble, stubborn something ... known by the names of courage, fortitude, magnanimity’ and ‘those feelings and sentiments which, however the sceptic may deny them or the enthusiast disfigure them, are yet, I am convinced, original and component parts of the human soul; those _senses of the mind_ ... which connect us with, and link us to, those awful obscure realities--an all-powerful and equally beneficient God, and a world to come, beyond death and the grave.’

The countryman of Francis Hutcheson could scarcely have indicated more clearly his obligations to the Glasgow philosopher. Burns’s ‘senses of the mind’ are merely Hutcheson’s Moral Sense a little expanded. Like Channing and Emerson, having rejected the authority of the church, and with it the supernatural sanctions of Christian doctrine, Burns fell back on the authority of intuition to support concepts which he was unwilling to abandon. The idea of the deity, and His relations with mankind, which is embodied in these passages, he never deviated from; what seemed to many of his readers shocking irreverence was aimed at intolerance and hypocrisy, and not at religion. But he was not able in all moods to convince himself of personal immortality.

At times he tried to argue himself into belief:

‘The most cordial believers in a Future State have ever been the
Unfortunate.--This of itself; if God is Good, which is, I think, the
most intuitive truth in Nature, ... is a very strong proof of the
reality of its existence....’

and he went on to reason that since the ideas of ‘OUGHT, and OUGHT NOT’ are ‘first principles or component parts of the Human Mind’ and are synonymous in our thinking with virtue and vice, the soul _must_ be immortal because, ‘except our Existence _here_, have a reference to an Existence _hereafter_, Virtue & Vice are words without meaning.’ Thus he argued to Mrs. Dunlop, who had just told him that her daughter, Mrs. Henri, was widowed after a few months of marriage. But not long before he had said to Cunningham,

‘All my fears & cares are of this world: if there is another, an
honest man has nothing to fear from it.--I hate a man that wishes to
be a Deist, but I fear, every fair, unprejudiced Enquirer must in
some degree be a Sceptic.--It is not that there are any very
staggering arguments against the Immortality of Man; but, that like
Electricity, Phlogiston, &c. the subject is so involved in darkness
that we want Data to go upon.--One thing frightens me much: that we
are to live forever, seems too good news to be true....’

An emotional man deprived of any authority except emotion on which he could rely, Burns’s religious views are of a piece with his politics and his patriotism. To get at the underlying emotions is to explain what appear to be glaring contradictions in thought. John Ramsay of Ochtertyre found Burns’s politics ‘abundantly motley’, for the poet managed to combine strong sympathy for the exiled House of Stuart with liberal if not republican views on contemporary affairs. To Ramsay this seemed like being simultaneously Catholic and Protestant, whereas it was only putting into words the unexpressed philosophy that had swayed the popular mind of Scotland for close on a century. Burns admired Lord Balmerino, noblest of the victims of the ’45; he also admired John Wilkes. Between a devoted Jacobite like Balmerino and a radical Whig like Wilkes, there was only one point in common: both were anti-Hanoverian. That one point reconciles Burns’s divergent opinions. The Stuarts embodied the ideal of Scotland as an independent nation; even though from the accession of James to the death of Anne they had governed Scotland from London they still commanded the loyalty of their old kingdom. But the Georges were, as Burns said, ‘an obscure, beef-witted, insolent race of foreigners whom a mere conjuncture of circumstances kickt up into prominence and power.’ His phrase summarizes in vigorous prose the spirit of the ribald satirical songs by which Scotland had avenged herself for the humiliations following the rebellions of 1715 and 1745. Burns was far from maintaining that the Stuarts were perfect, or that the Revolution of 1688 lacked justification; what he did maintain was that the Hanoverian system was not perfect either.

On the Fifth of November, 1788, Burns attended a special service of thanksgiving held at Dunscore Kirk to celebrate the centenary of the Revolution. The Rev. Mr. Kirkpatrick’s remarks about ‘the bloody and tyrannical House of Stuart’ sent the poet home to write an open letter to his friend David Ramsay, editor of the Edinburgh _Evening Courant_, in which he mingled unveiled satire with a sense of historical perspective hardly to be looked for in an ‘unlettered ploughman’. He went to church, he said, to give thanks for ‘the consequent blessings of the Glorious Revolution. To that auspicious event we owe no less than our liberties religious and civil--to it we are likewise indebted for the present Royal Family, the ruling features of whose administration have ever been, mildness to the subject, and tenderness of his rights.’ But, he continues, cannot we give thanks for our present blessings ‘without, at the same time, cursing a few ruined powerless exiles, who only harboured ideas, and made attempts, that most of us would have done, had we been in their situation?’ ‘Were the royal contemporaries of the Stuarts more mildly attentive to the rights of man? Might not the epithets of “bloody and tyrannical” be with at least equal justice, applied to the house of Tudor, of York, or any other of their predecessors?’ In short, the Stuarts were only fighting for prerogatives which former monarchs of England and contemporary monarchs of France enjoyed unchallenged, and the poet disclaims ability to determine whether their overthrow ‘was owing to the wisdom of leading individuals, or to the justling of party.’ And then comes the sting:

‘Man, Mr. Printer, is a strange, weak inconsistent being.--Who
would believe, Sir, that in this our Augustan age of liberality and
refinement, ... a certain people, under our national protection,
should complain, not against a Monarch and a few favourite advisers,
but against our whole legislative body, of the very same imposition
and oppression, the Romish religion not excepted, and almost in the
very same terms as our forefathers did against the family of Stuart!
I will not, I cannot, enter into the merits of the cause; but I dare
say, the American Congress, in 1776, will be allowed to have been as
able and enlightened, and, a whole empire will say, as honest, as the
English Convention in 1688; and that the fourth of July will be as
sacred to their posterity as the fifth of November is to us.’

The concluding sentence of that peroration is paraphrased from a speech John Wilkes had delivered in the House of Commons ten years before. Manifestly Burns followed, closely and sympathetically, the utterances of the English radicals and reformers; it is well known that ‘A Man’s a Man’ is ‘two or three pretty good prose thoughts inverted into rhyme’ from the writings of a former Excise officer named Thomas Paine. Like most European liberals, Burns admired the leaders of the American Revolution--one of the toasts which gave offence in Dumfries is said to have been his proposal of the health of George Washington as ‘a better man’ than William Pitt--and his admiration would be intensified by obvious parallels between the grievances of the Americans and the Scots. His Jacobite sympathies were wholly emotional, and in part conditioned by the fact that the Jacobites had written all the good songs. One suspects that he would just as readily have taken the Catholic view of the Reformation if Scottish Catholics had embalmed their lost cause in poetry. When he looked at current affairs, his reason backed his feelings. Politically, Scotland had almost as much to complain of as the American colonies had had. In some respects, indeed, she had more. American towns had been free to manage their local affairs by a system of representative government; in Scotland the municipalities, like the country’s representation in Parliament, were self-perpetuating oligarchies. Burns, in common with thousands of men of higher rank, had no vote even in the government of his own burgh. Yet his dislike of the system and his contempt for most of its leaders would probably have expressed itself only in occasional satires had it not been for the outbreak of the French Revolution.

A movement for reform of both burgh and parliamentary government was under way in Scotland. George Dempster, one of the few men of independent mind among the Scottish representatives at Westminster, advocated such measures of reform as would allow ‘the industrious farmer and manufacturer [to] share at least in a privilege now engrossed by the great lord, the drunken laird, and the drunkener baillie.’ Country gentlemen of unimpeachable character took up the agitation, and Burns’s letters to men like William Robertson of Lude, John Francis Erskine of Mar, and Richard Oswald of Auchencruive, show that he looked to such leadership as the hope of the country. When his conduct was under inquiry Burns declared that he had, as a government employee, taken no active part, either personally or as an author, in the movement for reform, but that as a man he ‘would say that there existed a system of corruption between the Executive Power & the Representative part of the Legislature, which boded no good to our glorious Constitution; & which every patriotic Briton must wish to see amended.’

The early stages of the French Revolution roused the enthusiasm of the more liberal-minded men of all classes in Scotland. A dinner in Edinburgh to celebrate the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille was attended by a group of university students which included John Allen, stepson of the poet’s friend Robert Cleghorn, by numerous country gentlemen like his friend Robert Riddell and his acquaintance Alexander Fergusson of Craigdarroch, and by Lord Daer. It seemed to men like Craigdarroch and Daer that the popular interest in the principles of the Revolution might be harnessed for the benefit of Scotland in speeding measures for burgh and parliamentary reform. Actually the brief alliance with French sympathizers delayed reform for forty years. All the vested interests of Great Britain rallied to support Burke’s condemnation of the revolutionary principles, and the counter-attack swept away every attempt to alter in the slightest degree the existing scheme of things.

The full weight of the counter-attack was not felt at once. Indeed, it was a Scotsman, James Mackintosh, who published the fullest and best-reasoned of the numerous replies to Burke. Besides seeking to confute Burke, Mackintosh tried to rally his countrymen to the cause of reform by citing their medieval reputation as lovers of liberty who would die rather than surrender their freedom. Certain passages in Mackintosh were probably as directly responsible for the composition of ‘Scots wha hae’ as _The Rights of Man_ was for ‘A Man’s a Man’. But as the Revolution swept on with increasing bloodshed to the execution of Louis XVI and as mobs in various parts of Scotland, including Edinburgh itself, celebrated King George’s birthday by burning Henry Dundas in effigy, the authorities became panicky. Scotland felt the heaviest force of their fright. Long latent memories of the ’45 revived at Whitehall, and to the dread of Scotland as a focal point for rebellion was added the practical detail that repressive measures could be better organized there than in England. England had a few constituencies, like London and Westminster, in which enough people were enfranchised to give a really popular vote, and a few members of Parliament whom neither fear nor bribes could silence. Scotland had neither. Hence the counter-revolutionary reign of terror struck first and hardest at Scotland.

Early in 1793 several leaders of the Friends of the People, a society organized to agitate for parliamentary reform, were arrested on charges of treason. Lord Daer was a member of the society, too, but the authorities, doubtless afraid that not even a packed jury could be trusted to convict the son of a popular earl, made no move to seize him. They contented themselves with lesser, but still conspicuous, victims, and before the series of trials--conducted with such disregard of justice as in Henry Cockburn’s opinion had not been seen in Britain since Jeffreys’s Bloody Assizes--was over Thomas Muir, Thomas Palmer, and several other reform leaders had been condemned to long terms of penal transportation. All opposition was crushed in Scotland for a generation. Henry Erskine, the one man who dared to raise his voice in defence of justice and common sense, paid for his temerity by being voted out of his office as Dean of the Faculty of Advocates. One of the last of Burns’s satirical ballads commemorates the event, in which a young man just admitted to the bar, Walter Scott by name, voted with the majority to punish Erskine for having the courage of his convictions.

Such was the background against which Burns undertook to display himself as a Friend of the People. He never, so far as can be learned, actually joined any of the reforming organizations, but it was not in Burns’s nature to conceal his opinions. From the time when he appeared in Edinburgh drawing-rooms wearing a waistcoat of Foxite blue and buff, and inscribed on a window-pane at Stirling verses about the successors to the Stuarts being ‘an idiot race, to honor lost’, he was marked as a character who would bear watching. The wonder is not so much that he came near to losing his job in the Excise as that he ever succeeded in getting it. If William Corbet and Graham of Fintry had not been the generous and friendly souls they were, the poet’s service career would have ended in 1793, and he might even have shared the fate of Muir and Palmer.

To note some of Burns’s words and deeds during 1791 and 1792, and realize that for every reckless phrase that reached paper there were doubtless a score uttered over the punchbowl, is to marvel at the poet’s escape. His phrase about the House of Hanover, already quoted, was written in the privacy of Robert Riddell’s library, but it is hard to believe that he did not say equally sharp things in more public places. His most intimate friends in Dumfries were avowed sympathizers with the Revolution. Dr. James Maxwell had witnessed the execution of the king, cherished the handkerchief he had dipped in the royal blood, and was well enough known to the authorities to have his revolutionary connexions violently denounced by Burke on the floor of the House of Commons. John Lewars was tainted with ‘D-m-cratic heresy’; Syme, after enrolling, like Burns, in the Dumfries Volunteers, became heartily disgusted with the whole wretched business; Maria Riddell was a parlour revolutionist who on her visits to London associated ‘with a very pleasant set of Sans-culottes’. Throughout 1792 Burns had let slip few opportunities of proclaiming his own sympathies. In the spring he bought the _Rosamond’s_ carronades and dispatched them as a present to the French Convention; in the autumn, when Maria Riddell asked him to suggest a programme for a benefit night in Dumfries theatre, he chose from the repertory of the local company Mrs. Centlivre’s _The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret_ because it contained some platitudinous lines about British liberty which could be given political significance by well-timed applause. Either on this occasion or another the crowd carried the matter further than Burns had anticipated.

When ‘God Save the King’ was called for, a group in the pit which included some of Burns’s friends shouted for ‘Ça Ira’ instead. The ensuing clamour came to the verge of a free-for-all fight. In his defence Burns avowed that he never opened his lips ‘to hiss, or huzza, that, or any other Political tune whatever’ because he looked on himself ‘as far too obscure a man to have any weight in quelling a Riot; at the same time as a character of higher respectability, than to yell in the howlings of a rabble.’ In other words, by sitting still and not applauding the national anthem he made himself just as conspicuous as if he had joined in the call for ‘Ça Ira’. He was anything but the obscure individual he claimed to be, and it was apparently his public conduct on this occasion that led to his being reported to his superiors as a disaffected person.

Seemingly the idea that his opinions might get him into trouble had never occurred to Burns. The threat of an official investigation threw him into a humiliating panic, and must also have alarmed his friends in the higher ranks of the Excise. It is difficult otherwise to account for Supervisor Corbet’s coming in person to Dumfries to look into the charges. An accusation brought against a minor officer in the service was scarcely in ordinary routine a serious enough affair to call in one of the highest officials; the inference is that Corbet was rightly fearful of the results if Burns were investigated by an unfriendly agent. Accordingly the Supervisor examined the poet across a dinner-table in company with Findlater and Syme, and in that mellow atmosphere found no ground for the charges ‘save some witty sayings’. But even so, Corbet, in the name of the Board, had to admonish Burns--so the poet reported to Erskine of Mar--‘that _my_ business was to _act_, not to think; & that whatever might be Men or Measures, it was for me to be silent and obedient.’

The hair-splitting particularity of Burns’s defence of his conduct is in itself proof of the real basis of the charges against him. He revered the King, he declared, in his public capacity as ‘the sacred Keystone of our Royal Arch Constitution’, but George’s ‘private worth, it is altogether impossible that such a man as I can appreciate.’ (On the report of the King’s first admitted insanity in 1788 he had said, ‘I am not sure whether he is not a gainer, by how much a Madman is a more respectable character than a Fool.’) He had joined no party for revolution or reform; his contributions to the radical _Edinburgh Gazetteer_ had been only a couple of non-political verses. But he did not mention that in subscribing to the _Gazetteer_ he had urged its editor, William Johnston, to ‘lay bare, with undaunted heart & steady hand, that horrid mass of corruption called Politics & State-Craft!’ and to ‘dare to draw in their native colours these “Calm, thinking Villains whom no faith can fix”--whatever be the Shibboleth of their pretended Party.’ Oddly enough, the _Rosamond’s_ carronades had not been brought up against him. Hence he naturally did not mention them, but he took occasion to avow that though he had been an enthusiastic votary of France at the beginning, he had changed his sentiments since the Revolution had embarked on a career of bloodshed and military aggression.

Here Burns was making a Galileo recantation. On the same day on which he thus denied to Robert Graham that he any longer supported the Revolution he was using French in a letter to Mrs. Dunlop and adding that he hoped it was correct, for ‘much would it go against my soul, to mar anything belonging to that gallant people: though my real sentiments of them shall be confined alone to my letters to you.’ Despite her repeated warnings to drop the subject, he continued to talk about his devotion to Liberty, his friendship with Dr. Maxwell, and his approval of ‘the delivering over a perjured Blockhead & an unprincipled Prostitute to the hands of the hangman’ until the offended lady broke off the correspondence. Seething, as he had said of his feeling in 1788, with the impotent ‘madness of an enraged Scorpion shut up in a thumb-phial’, Burns had to express himself to someone. He had lied about his sentiments, and though the lie was to save his family rather than himself, its taste was bitter in his mouth. Nor was he helped by the realization that all Scotland was equally cowed and that if he had not made his recantation he would have shared the fate of four other citizens of Dumfries who were imprisoned for drinking seditious toasts. Once before he had challenged authority in the shape of the temporal power of the Kirk, and had come off not unscathed but undefeated. Now he had challenged much less openly the State, and had learned the difference in strength between a vital institution and a moribund one. The realization of defeat shook his self-confidence as nothing else had ever done, and helped to drive him to such unmanly conduct as that which followed his quarrel with Maria Riddell. He who had refused to sell his songs for money had sold his independence for bread. That it was his children’s bread and not his own might salve his conscience, but it could not heal his pride.

The Man of Feeling had bruised himself against a harsher reality than anything Harley had found in London or Bedlam; the idealist in politics had learned the substance of which politicians are made. Brimming with New Light theories about the Moral Sense, convinced by primitivists like Rousseau that ‘mankind are by nature benevolent creatures’ whom mere stress of hunger and poverty makes selfish, Burns had come naked to battle against the forces of alarmed conservatism and privilege. Like thousands of others he had taken seriously the slogans of ‘Liberty’ and ‘the Rights of Man’, and had seen in the French Revolution the signs that the world’s great age was beginning anew. His disillusionment went deeper than mere realization of his own unsafe position as a government employee. He was watching the ancient forces of selfishness and aggression capture the movement from which he had hoped so much. His enlistment in the Dumfries Volunteers was not wholly from dread of further jeopardizing his livelihood by holding aloof. He still believed in the principles of the Revolution, but that belief did not commit him to endorsement of its practices, and so, like many another pacifist, he found himself, still hating war, nevertheless engaged in supporting it.

Though he dared no longer give direct utterance to revolutionary sympathies, he could, and did, express his detestation of war in a song like ‘Logan Braes’, and couple the ideas of his generation with the patriotic tradition of medieval Scotland. The low estate of contemporary Scottish liberty threw into more glorious relief the traditions of Bannockburn and the lost cause of the Stuarts. His patriotism accepted without question the legend that ‘Hey tutti taitie’ had been Bruce’s battle-march, as it accepted the romantic interpretation of Mary Queen of Scots. Burns might call himself an unprejudiced inquirer and a sceptic, but his nature had no kinship with the cool remorseless scepticism of a man like David Hume. Hume’s was the keenest Scottish mind of his century; Burns, at least in the height of his rebellion against the Kirk, might have been expected to find the philosopher congenial. But Burns could endure destructive criticism only of things he hated. Hume did not confine his scepticism to religion, and when he brought his devastating intellect to bear on the romantic traditions of his country Burns turned away in anger. He might endorse Hume’s demolition of the supernatural sanctions of the church, but he was disquieted by the application of the same scepticism to the belief in immortality, and infuriated when it was turned upon Queen Mary. Hume was mentally akin to Voltaire and Samuel Butler; Burns to Rousseau and Dickens.

In repudiating Hume’s treatment of Mary, Burns was unconsciously illustrating the force of Johnson’s ruthless dictum, which even the loyal Sir Walter Scott could not wholly deny, that ‘a Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist who does not love Scotland better than truth: He will always love it better than inquiry; and if falsehood flatters his vanity, will not be very diligent to detect it.’ Few men have lived more honest than Burns. He would not willingly lie, nor endorse a lie; but if offered choice between a romantic story which appealed to his patriotism and an unromantic one which did not, his choice was never in doubt. His own followers, in their hostility to anything like dispassionate investigation of the picturesque legends surrounding him, continue to illustrate the same attitude. Nor, indeed, have the Burnsians monopolized this aversion to inquiry. It remained for an Irishman and an American to set forth the true details of the life of Allan Ramsay, and for another American to write the only complete and scholarly study of Henry Mackenzie and his times.

Many Scotsmen besides Burns shared his passionate defence of Queen Mary; not so many shared his general patriotism. Here Burns, very Scot of very Scot, belonged to a generation which had passed, though he prepared the way for one to come. He had much in common with Claverhouse, Lochiel, or Fletcher of Saltoun; nothing in common with Bute, Wedderburn, or Henry Dundas. In so far as the patriotism of Sir John Sinclair sought the improvement of his country by collecting and tabulating her resources, Burns was with him, but when Sinclair tried to eradicate the national speech he struck at something Burns held precious. True, Burns was like his contemporaries in snatching at everything that seemed like proof that the Scots could equal or surpass the English at their own games. He applauded the _Mirror_ and the _Lounger_ because they looked like successful rivals of the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_; he admired Thomson and Beattie and Blair the more because even the English had to admit that these men wrote well in the southern tongue. But he deeply resented the willingness of his countrymen to sink their national identity in the Union.

‘Alas! have I often said to myself,’ he wrote to Mrs. Dunlop in 1790,
‘what are all the boasted advantages which my country reaps from the
union, that can counterbalance the annihilation of her Independance,
and even her very name! I often repeat that couplet of my favorite
poet, Goldsmith--

“----States of native liberty possest,
Tho’ very poor, may yet be very blest.”

Nothing can reconcile me to the common terms, “English ambassador,
English court,” &c. And I am out of all patience to see that
equivocal character, Hastings, impeached by “the Commons of England.”
Tell me, my friend, is this weak prejudice?’

Men like Boswell and Sinclair would have answered without hesitation that it was. The Union had admitted Scotland to as much share as she could grasp of the wealth of the British Empire; commerce and industry were increasing year by year; the poor relation was beginning to live like the prosperous branch of the family. For such profits, the change of name from ‘Scotland’ to ‘North Britain’ seemed a small price. To those who shared in the new prosperity, the suggestion of a nationalist movement would have seemed rank folly or even downright treason. So long as the prosperity continued, indeed, the ‘practical men’ had the overwhelming majority of their countrymen with them. The emergence of Scottish nationalism as a political force to be reckoned with had to await the collapse of Scottish industry which followed the World War. With the loss of material prosperity, the Scots have begun to question the value of the system which transfers to Westminster the control of their local affairs. Scottish poverty and Scottish pride are seemingly interdependent. Removal of the one will make the nation more willing to swallow the other.

Even if Burns had shared the material prosperity resulting from the Union, instead of helping, as tenant of rack-rented land, to pay for it, his feelings would have been the same. In every fibre of his being he shared the spirit of those Scots who, in contradiction of every proverbial association of pawky caution with their race, have been among the greatest soldiers, explorers, and idealists of modern history. Montrose and Livingstone, Admiral Duncan and Mungo Park, expressed in action the national traits which he expressed in song. His calling, consciously accepted, was that of national poet; his other activities merely the ‘sweat, that the base machine might have its oil’. He refused payment for his songs, because the task of supplying words to national melodies was a patriotic service, embalming and treasuring up these relics of his country’s spirit to a life beyond life.

Without Burns’s share in the work of gathering old Jacobite songs, for instance, and composing new ones, it may be questioned if such a halo of romance would have surrounded, in the next generation, the Rebellions of 1715 and 1745; without that halo, Sir Walter Scott would have been less readily attracted to them; without Sir Walter, the romantic vision of Scottish history would never have conquered the world. No Scottish writer of the eighteenth century, except Burns, passed on the torch of national pride. Without him, the fact that Hume and Boswell were Scotsmen, that Thomson was born on Tweed instead of Thames, would mean no more to the ordinary reader than does the fact that Swift was born in Ireland or Wordsworth in Cumberland. Without him, Ramsay and Fergusson would be forgotten minor poets who wrote in a difficult and obsolete dialect. He gathered together in his own work all that was vital in the work of his predecessors, infused it with the fire of his own personality, and sent it out again to keep Scotland alive.

Burns came at the last moment when a national poet could succeed in his task. A few decades later, and the vernacular would have sunk too low for preservation. Even as it was, he could only embalm it and not renew it as poetic speech. Except for Lady Nairne’s, scarcely any vernacular poetry written in Scotland since 1800 deserves higher ranking than the _Barrack-Room Ballads_. As a poetic influence, Burns’s work was weak. As a national influence, its force is not yet spent. He revealed the richness and colour of Scottish life, and in revealing it gave direction and vitality to the long and noble line of novelists which began with Sir Walter Scott and John Galt, and continued through Stevenson to John Buchan and the late Neil Munro. Through these men the Scotland which was no longer, politically, a nation became more enduring than anything which depends on rulers and boundaries--a nation of the mind and heart, a home of lost causes, of impossible loyalties, of high romance and simple faith. It is not Scott’s kings and ladies and nobles who keep his books alive; it is people like Edie Ochiltree, Jeanie Deans, Meg Dods, and Dandie Dinmont--in other words, the characters who are part and parcel of the world which Burns depicted and glorified. Steenie Steenson, like Thrawn Janet and Tod Lapraik, carries on the great tradition of Tam o’ Shanter. Without Burns the Scottish novel as we know it would never have been; without the Scottish novel, the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would be as much the poorer as seventeenth-century poetry would be without the Cavaliers.

In tracing the continuing tradition of sentiment from Henry Mackenzie through Burns himself to ‘Ian Maclaren’ and Sir James Barrie, Professor Thompson made perforce a grave omission. The difference between the dynamic romanticism of England at the beginning of the last century--the romanticism of the young Wordsworth and of Shelley--and the insipid prettiness of the same movement in America at the same time, lies in the invigorating power of the French Revolution. By giving a fighting edge to romance, the Revolution raised it above mere fancifulness and sentimentality. His patriotism did the same thing for the influence of Burns. Without it he might today be only a minor Man of Feeling. Even as it is, he is neglected and misunderstood. The strength, the humour, the fighting edge are there, but few people care to find them.

He saved Scotland; himself he could not save. Five years after his death a group of admirers in Greenock organized a Burns Club, and Paisley and Kilmarnock quickly followed suit. The fashion spread through Scotland, and among Scotsmen in the rest of the English-speaking world, bringing in its train the erection of more, and worse, statues and monuments than have been reared to the memory of any other British individual with the possible exception of Albert, Prince Consort. Soon the movement acquired the characteristics of a minor religious cult, complete with ritual meals and a thriving traffic in relics, genuine or spurious, of its hero.

In itself this establishment as hero of a national cult might be harmless. After all, if any writer was to fill the role, Burns was the inevitable candidate, for he alone of the great Scottish writers was truly a man of the people. Not the existence of the cult, but the direction it took, is the tragedy of Burns. The sentimentality which lies, like the soft core of an over-ripe pear, at the heart of writers like ‘Ian Maclaren’, Sir James Barrie, and A. A. Milne, is widespread in Scotland. In the Burns cult this softness yearns to the answering softness of ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, ‘To a Mouse’, and ‘To a Mountain Daisy’, extols its hero as the Bard of Humanity and Democracy, and rejoices in the bathos of Clarinda and Highland Mary. Meanwhile the ribald magnificence of ‘Holy Willie’ and ‘The Jolly Beggars’ is neglected, the homely realism of satires, epistles, and dramatic monologues goes unread. Worst of all, the splendid treasury of more than three hundred songs, Burns’s most truly patriotic work, lies almost untouched on the shelves. Radio and concert stage alike ignore them. And choice of the few that are known to the public at large runs true to the same form as with the longer poems. Probably a hundred people know ‘Sweet Afton’ for one who knows ‘M’Pherson’s Farewell’ or ‘Rantin’ Rovin’ Robin’.

The flattery of being a national hero would delight Burns. If his followers were only mealy-mouthed where he was outspoken, they would merely amuse him. He would not mind if they slobbered over his sins, for the unco guid were old acquaintance of his. But at the thought of his worshippers exalting his weakest work and ignoring his best, his very soul would scunner. The real Burns was not the dropper of tears over ploughed-under weeds but the man who brought in the neighbours for a kirn-night and kissed the lasses after every dance; the man who sat by farmers’ ingles and on ale-house benches listening to the racy earthy talk of his people and storing his mind with folk sayings and old songs. He was not ashamed of being a Scottish peasant, the heir of all the picturesque and frequently bawdy tradition of Scots folk literature. Neither was the man who wrote, ‘But yet the light that led astray Was light from Heaven’, ashamed of his human nature. But his worshippers are ashamed of the best part of his nature and his work. And nobody else reads him at all.

INDEX

Abbotsford, 227

_Aberdeen Almanac_, 45

Aberfoyle, 47

Adam, Alexander, 119

Addison, Joseph, 40, 234

_Adventures of John Cheap the Chapman, The_, 46

_Adventures of Telemachus_ (Fénelon), 51

‘Ae fond kiss,’ 149, 172, 264

Agriculture in Scotland, 10-16, 188

Agriculture, Professorship of, Edinburgh, 155

Aiken, Robert, 93-96, 98, 142, 144, 147, 193, 194

Ainslie, Robert, 65, 107, 110, 112-115, 144, 150, 151, 167, 168, 170,
173, 186, 214

Albert, Prince Consort, 306

Allen, John, 110, 291

Alloway, 11, 36-41, 48, 279

Alloway Kirk, 36, 266

Almack, William, 30

‘A Man’s a Man,’ 289, 292

American Colonies. _See_ United States

American Revolution, 70, 82, 225, 290

Anderson, Robert, 196, 247

Anne, Queen, 60, 287

‘An’ O for ane-and-twenty, Tam,’ 264

Antigua, 176

Arbroath, 266

Archers, Royal Company of, 108

Argyll, John, Duke of, 5

Armour, James, 77, 94, 139, 142-143, 150, 165, 192

Armour, Mrs. James, 168

Armour, Jean. _See_ Burns, Jean Armour

Army, Burns’s opinions of, 155, 179

Arnot, John, 191

Arran, 47

Athole, Jane Cathcart, Duchess of, 116-117

Athole, John, Duke of, 116-117

Auchencruive, 144

Auld Brig, Ayr, 31

_Auld Farmer’s New Year’s Morning Salutation, The_, 58, 249, 250

_Auld Lang Syne_, 260

Auld, Walter, 120, 228

Auld, William, 173, 279

Austen, Jane, 278

Aylmer, Rose, 250

Ayr, 195, 279

Ayr, Brigs of, 31

Ayr, Presbytery of, 92-93

Baker, --, 127

Ballads, 25-27, 38, 43-44, 246, 252, 259, 269

Ballantine, John, 61, 93-96, 202

Ballenden, Braes of, 256

Balmerino, Arthur Elphinstone, Baron, 229, 287

_Banks of Cree_, 271

Bannockburn, 48, 272, 300

Barncailzie, 125

_Barrack-Room Ballads_, 305

Barrie, Sir James Matthew, 305, 307

Bayard, 28

Beattie, James, 25, 29, 75, 104, 270, 302

Bede, 23

Beethoven, Ludwig von, 275

Begbie, Alison, 69-70, 189

Begg, Isabella Burns, 147

_Bell_, West-Indiaman, 192-193

Benson, Anna Dorothea, 132

Beugo, John, 175

Bible, 23

Black Bull Inn, Glasgow, 166

Blacklock, Thomas, 99, 195

Blair, Athole, 116-117, 207

Blair, Hugh, 29, 97, 104, 118, 155, 195, 244, 302

Blair, Sir James Hunter, 240

Blair, Robert, 259

Blake, William, 243, 278

Bloody Assizes, 293

Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount, 60

_Bonnie Dundee_, 261-262

Border tour, Burns’s, 113, 200, 208, 240, 247, 255

Boston, Thomas, 19, 37, 281

Boswell, Sir Alexander, 274

Boswell, Euphemia, 165

Boswell, James, 11, 29, 60, 91, 103, 107, 111, 129, 278, 302, 304

Boyd, Thomas, 120, 213

Brawne, Fanny, 250

Braxfield, Robert M’Queen, Lord, 102, 108, 129

Bremner, Robert, 242

_Brigs of Ayr, The_, 248

Broadsides, Scottish, 45

Brontë, Emily, 162

Brown, Richard, 80-83, 84, 89, 92, 137-138, 163, 166, 169, 237

Brown, Samuel, 56

Browning, Robert, 250, 251

Brow Well, 133, 184-187

Bruce, King Robert the, 272, 300

Brussels, 32

Buchan, David Stuart Erskine, Earl of, 100-101, 255

Buchan, John, 305

Burke, Edmund, 278, 292, 295

Burn, Robert, 221

Burnes, Agnes Broun (mother of the poet), 37-38, 44, 90, 135-136,
138-139, 203

Burnes, Robert (grandfather of the poet), 36

Burnes, Robert (uncle of the poet), 36, 60

Burnes, William (father of the poet), 8, 34, 35, 36-39, 41, 42-43, 48,
49-50, 55, 59, 62, 70, 71-73, 84, 85-88, 90, 279

Burness, James, 117, 232

Burnet, Elizabeth, of Manboddo, 240

Burns, Agnes (sister of the poet), 49

Burns, Elizabeth Paton (daughter of the poet), 74, 138-139, 143, 150,
203

Burns, Elizabeth Riddell (daughter of the poet), 183-184

Burns, Gilbert (brother of the poet), 11, 34, 37, 41, 48, 50, 55, 59,
63, 68, 73, 87, 88, 90, 95, 122, 138, 143, 186, 202-203, 208, 214,
220, 245

Burns, Isabella (sister of the poet). _See_ Begg, Isabella Burns

Burns, Jean Armour, 13, 83, 90, 91-92, 109, 110, 113, 114-115, 118,
126, 133, 136, 138, 139-144, 146-148, 150, 153, 156, 164, 165,
167-170, 172-176, 185, 187, 189, 192-193, 201, 212, 214, 217, 220,
221, 232, 233

Burns, John (brother of the poet), 88

Burns, Robert, _Poems_. See _Poems_, Burns’s

Burns, Robert, the poet, _passim_. Specific references are to be found
in association with other persons, topics, or places.

Burns, Robert (son of the poet), 167, 174, 185

Burns, William (brother of the poet), 166, 203-204, 215

Burns, William Nicol (son of the poet), 119

Burns Clubs, 301, 306-308

Burton, Robert, 42

_Bush aboon Traquair, The_, 48, 255

Bute, John Stuart, Earl of, 5, 301

Butler, Samuel, 300

Byron, George Noel Gordon, Lord, 109, 278

Cadell and Davies, 199

Caedmon, 23

_Ça Ira_, 295-296

Caledonian Hunt, 99, 127, 197

_Caller Oysters_, 248

Calton Hill, 118

Calvin, John, 19

Calvinism, 5, 16-23, 66, 162, 163, 279-287

Cameron, Meg, 113, 118, 148, 151, 152, 165, 208

Campbell, Mary, 138, 144-149, 250, 307

Canada, 190

Candlish, James, 30, 62, 281

Cape Club, Edinburgh, 105

Caroline lyrics, 42

Carronades, Burns’s purchase of, 227, 295, 297

Carswell, Catherine, 84, 180

Catalan, 23

Catrine House, 96-97, 195

Cawdor Castle, 48

Centlivre, Susannah, 295

Chalmers, Margaret, 148, 160-161, 164, 256

Channing, William Eilery, 280, 285

Chapbooks, Scottish, 45-46

Chapman, George, 49, 75

Chatterton, Thomas, 62, 79

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 23, 42, 46

Chesterton, G. K., 66

Children, Burns’s feelings toward, 150-153

Chloris. _See_ Lorimer, Jean.

_Christabel_, 243

_Chronicle_, London, 134, 206

Clarinda. _See_ M’Lehose, Agnes.

Clarke, Samuel, 128

Clarke, Stephen, 257-258

Class-consciousness, Burns’s, 52-53

Claverhouse, John Graham of, Viscount Dundee, 301

Cleghorn, Robert, 109-111, 253, 291

Clint, Henry, 120

Clochnahill, 36

Clow, Jenny, 113, 118, 144, 146, 148, 152, 165, 170-171, 221

Clydesdale, 50

Cockburn, Alison, 43

Cockburn, Henry, 103, 108, 293

Cockney dialect, 30, 247

Coila, 157

Cole, Elisha, 281

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 243

_Comical Sayings of Paddy from Cork, The_, 46

‘Coming thro’ the rye,’ 26

Commonplace Book, Burns’s, 236-239, 242-244, 259

Composition, Burns’s methods of, 241-246

Connaught, 81

Constable, Archibald, 106

Copyrights, Burns’s, 199-201, 274

Corbet, William, 129, 294, 296

Corri, Domenico, 28

_Cotter’s Saturday Night, The_, 58, 154, 246, 269, 307

_Court of Equity, The_, 111, 146

Court of Session, 86

Cowper, William, 278

Craig, Lord, 162, 165

Craigdarroch, 121

Crane, Ichabod, 39

Creech, William, 100, 105, 106, 161, 165, 169, 197-201, 204-205, 220

Criffel, 187

Crochallan Fencibles, 104-109, 253, 254, 255

Cromek, Robert Hartley, 161

Cullen, William, 155

Cunningham, Alexander, 107-109, 110, 112, 118, 125, 126, 133-134, 167,
205, 240, 253, 268, 285, 286

Currie, James, 125, 182, 246, 273

‘Cutty stool,’ 17

Daer, Basil William, Lord, 96, 131, 291, 293

_Daft Days, The_, 25, 248

Dalrymple, 51

Dalrymple, William, 279

Dalswinton, 114, 207-212

Dalyell, Sir John Graham, 124

Dalziel, Alexander, 98, 99, 195

Darien Expedition, 7

Davidson, Betty, 44, 136

Davies, Deborah Duff, 149

Deans, Jamie, 283

Deans, Jeanie, 305

_Death and Dr. Hornbook_, 39, 46, 83

Death, Burns’s, 133

Deists, 20, 22, 281, 286

Democracy, Scottish, 32-33

Dempster, George, 32, 290

Dickens, Charles, 65, 266, 300

Dinmont, Dandie, 305

Dods, --, 127-128

Dods, Meg, 305

Don, Lady Harriet, 61, 132

Doonholm, 36

Douglas and Heron Bank, 16, 70, 85, 230

Douglas, Charles, 192

Douglas, Gawain, 23, 247

Douglas, Lady Mary, 132

_Douglas, Tragedy of_, 21, 40

Douglas, William, 250

Dover, 227

Drama, Burns and the, 251-252

Drama, in Edinburgh, 21

Dramatic lyric, Burns’s use of, 250-251

Dramatic monologue, Burns’s use of, 250-251

Drummond, William, of Hawthornden, 23

Dryden, John, 42

Dumfries, 68, 110, 113, 118, 124-134, 152, 160, 171, 177, 208, 219,
221-233, 267, 294-297, 298

Dumfries Academy, 224

Dumfries Burgh Council, 224

Dumfries Public Library, 106

Dumfries Theatre, 179, 295-296

Dumfries Volunteers, 228, 231, 232, 295, 299

Dunbar, William (the poet), 23, 247

Dunbar, William (Edinburgh), 106, 157, 254

Duncan, Adam, 303

Dundas, Henry, 5, 101, 108, 116, 207, 292, 301

Dundas, Robert, 107, 108

Dunlop, Andrew, 82

Dunlop, Frances Anna Wallace, 61, 96, 101, 148, 150, 151, 152,
153-160, 167, 194, 199, 206, 209, 240, 260, 267, 282-283, 284, 286,
297-298, 302

Dunlop House, 156, 167

Dunlop, Keith, 157, 167

Dunlop, Rachel, 156, 167

Dunlop, Thomas, 154

Dunnottar, 36

Dunscore, 288

Dunse, 112, 113

Durham, 127

East India Company, 6, 190

East Lothian, 208

Easy Club, Edinburgh, 105

Eclogues, Virgil’s, 252

Edinburgh, 7-10, 75, 78, 94, 99-119, 124, 153, 162-172, 195-202,
209-210, 216, 221, 245, 252, 291-293, 294

Edinburgh High School, 116, 119

Edinburgh University, 8, 96

Eglinton, Archibald Montgomerie, Earl of, 197, 202

Eglinton, Countess of, 197

Eglinton Wood, 82

_Elegies_ (Shenstone), 57

_Elegy on the Death of Sir James Hunter Blair_, 240

_Elibanks and Elibraes_, 48, 255

Elizabethan lyrics, 42

Elliot, Jean, 43

Ellisland, 101, 110, 113-115, 119-122, 158, 174, 202, 203, 207-222,
262

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 261, 280, 285

_Encyclopædia Britannica_, 105

_Epistle to John Rankine_, 77

Erskine, Andrew, 91, 99

Erskine, Henry, 108, 293

Erskine, John Francis, of Mar, 291, 297

_Esopus to Maria_, 181

_Evening Courant_, Edinburgh, 288

_Eve of St. Agnes, The_, 250

Excise, 55, 98, 101, 109, 115, 116, 129-130, 133, 165, 169, 170, 190,
206-207, 209-210, 212, 214-233, 262, 269, 277, 289, 294, 296

Faculty of Advocates, 293

Falstaff, 167

Farington, Joseph, 121, 165

Farming, Burns’s, 204, 210-222

Fénelon, François, 51

_Ferdinand Count Fathom_, 58

Fergusson, Alexander, of Craigdarroch, 121-122, 291

Fergusson, Robert, 25, 61, 75, 91, 104, 105, 134, 221, 237, 241-242,
247-248, 252, 304

Fergusson, William, 36, 50, 53

Ferrara, Duke of, 250

Fifeshire, 247

’Fifteen, Rebellion of, 36, 287, 304

Findlater, Alexander, 96, 129-130, 217, 219, 229, 296

Fisher, Edward, 281

Flax-dressing, Burns and, 71, 79-84

Fletcher, Andrew, of Saltoun, 301

_Flowers of Edinburgh, The_, 272

_Flowers of the Forest, The_, 43

Folk-songs, Scottish, 26-28, 38, 43-44, 75, 132, 252-263, 269

Fornicators’ Court, 112

’Forty-five, Rebellion of, 4, 7, 26, 46, 287, 292, 304

_Four-Fold State_ (Thomas Boston), 19, 37, 279, 281

Fox, Charles James, 294

Franklin, Benjamin, 22, 61, 100, 103, 266

Freemasonry, 67-68, 87, 99, 104, 144, 145, 297

French, Burns’s knowledge of, 51-52

French Convention, 227, 295

French Revolution, 51, 119, 128, 159-160, 182, 226-228, 270, 272,
290-299, 306

Friars Carse, 120, 176, 177, 181, 182, 212, 265

_Friars Carse Hermitage, Written in_, 262

Friends of the People, 293-294

_Gala Water_, 255

Galileo, 297

Galloway, Burns’s tour in, 229

Galloway, John Stewart, Earl of, 131

Galt, John, 305

_Gazetteer_, Edinburgh, 297

_Gentlemen’s Magazine_, 31

George III, 292, 296-297

_Geographical Grammar_ (Guthrie), 48

_Gillicrankie_, 237

Glasgow, 7, 83, 166

Glasgow University, 20, 30

Glenbervie, 36

Glencairn, Elizabeth M’Quire, Countess of, 132

Glencairn, James, Earl of, 95, 98-101, 107, 120, 195-197, 209, 210,
216, 240

Glenconner, 211

Globe Inn, Dumfries, 120, 174

_God Save the King_, 295-296

Godwin, William, 278

Goldielea, 122, 178

Goldsmith, Oliver, 31, 302

Gordon Castle, 117

Gordon, Jane, Duchess of, 117, 132, 159

Gow, Neil, 27

Graham, Dugal, 11, 45-46

Graham, Robert, of Fintry, 68, 111, 116, 207, 216, 223, 224, 294, 297

_Grave, The_ (Blair), 259

Gray, James, 124, 152

Gray, Thomas, 103, 157

Greenfield, William, 252

Greenock, 192-193, 306

Grieve, James, 85