also;
For she by tribulations
Is now brought very low.

Consume that high-place, Patronage,
From off thy holy hill;
And in thy fury burn the book--
Even of that man M'Gill.^1

Now hear our prayer, accept our song,
And fight thy chosen's battle:
We seek but little, Lord, from thee,
Thou kens we get as little.

[Footnote 1: Dr. William M'Gill of Ayr, whose "Practical
Essay on the Death of Jesus Christ" led to a charge of
heresy against him. Burns took up his cause in "The Kirk of
Scotland's Alarm" (p. 351).--Lang.]

Sketch In Verse

Inscribed to the Right Hon. C. J. Fox.

How wisdom and Folly meet, mix, and unite,
How Virtue and Vice blend their black and their white,
How Genius, th' illustrious father of fiction,
Confounds rule and law, reconciles contradiction,
I sing: If these mortals, the critics, should bustle,
I care not, not I--let the Critics go whistle!

But now for a Patron whose name and whose glory,
At once may illustrate and honour my story.

Thou first of our orators, first of our wits;
Yet whose parts and acquirements seem just lucky hits;
With knowledge so vast, and with judgment so strong,
No man with the half of 'em e'er could go wrong;
With passions so potent, and fancies so bright,
No man with the half of 'em e'er could go right;
A sorry, poor, misbegot son of the Muses,
For using thy name, offers fifty excuses.
Good Lord, what is Man! for as simple he looks,
Do but try to develop his hooks and his crooks;
With his depths and his shallows, his good and his evil,
All in all he's a problem must puzzle the devil.

On his one ruling passion Sir Pope hugely labours,
That, like th' old Hebrew walking-switch, eats up its neighbours:
Mankind are his show-box--a friend, would you know him?
Pull the string, Ruling Passion the picture will show him,
What pity, in rearing so beauteous a system,
One trifling particular, Truth, should have miss'd him;
For, spite of his fine theoretic positions,
Mankind is a science defies definitions.

Some sort all our qualities each to its tribe,
And think human nature they truly describe;
Have you found this, or t'other? There's more in the wind;
As by one drunken fellow his comrades you'll find.
But such is the fla