attached. You, sir, have been much and generously my
friend.--Heaven knows how warmly I have felt the obligation, and how
gratefully I have thanked you. Fortune, sir, has made you powerful,
and me impotent--has given you patronage, and me dependence. I would
not, for my single self, call on your humanity; were such my insular,
unconnected situation, I would despise the tear that now swells in my
eye. I would brave misfortune--I could face ruin, for at the worst
Death's thousand doors stand open; but the tender concerns that I have
mentioned, the claims and ties that I see at this moment, and feel
around me, how they unnerve courage and wither resolution! To your
patronage, as a man of some genius, you have allowed me a claim; and
your esteem, as an honest man, I know is my due. To these, sir, permit
me to appeal; by these may I adjure you, to save me from that misery
which threatens to overwhelm me, and which--with my latest breath I
will say it--I have not deserved. R. B."

That this appeal was not without effect may be gathered from a letter
on this same affair, which Burns addressed on the 13th April, 1793, to
Mr. Erskine, of Mar, in which he says one of the supervisors-general,
a Mr. Corbet, "was instructed to inquire on the spot, and to (p. 149)
document me that my business was to act, _not to think_: and that,
whatever might be men or measures, it was for me to be _silent_ and
_obedient_."

Much obloquy has been heaped upon the Excise Board--but on what
grounds of justice I have never been able to discover--for the way in
which they on this occasion dealt with Burns. The members of the Board
were the servants of the Government, to which they were responsible
for the conduct of all their subordinates. To have allowed any of
their subordinates to set themselves up by word or deed in opposition
to the Ministry, and especially at such a crisis, was inconsistent
with the ideas of the time as to official duty. And when called on to
act, it is hard to see how they could have done so with more leniency
than by hinting to him the remonstrance which so alarmed and irritated
the recipient of it. Whatever may be said of his alarm,--his irritation,
if perhaps natural, was not reasonable. No man has a right to expect
that, because he is a genius, he shall be absolved from those rules of
conduct, either in private or in public life, which are held binding
on his more commonplace brethren. About the time when he received