race of literary
men had sprang up in Edinburgh who, as to national feeling, were entirely
colourless, Scotchmen in nothing except their dwelling-place. The (p. 197)
thing they most dreaded was to be convicted of a Scotticism. Among
these learned cosmopolitans in walked Burns, who with the instinct of
genius chose for his subject that Scottish life which they ignored,
and for his vehicle that vernacular which they despised, and who,
touching the springs of long-forgotten emotions, brought back on the
hearts of his countrymen a tide of patriotic feeling to which they had
long been strangers.

At first it was only his native Ayrshire he hoped to illustrate, to
shed upon the streams of Ayr and Doon, the power of Yarrow, and
Teviot, and Tweed. But his patriotism was not merely local; the
traditions of Wallace haunted him like a passion, the wanderings of
Bruce he hoped to dramatize. His well-known words about the Thistle
have been already quoted. They express what was one of his strongest
aspirations. And though he accomplished but a small part of what he
once hoped to do, yet we owe it to him first of all that "the old
kingdom" has not wholly sunk into a province. If Scotchmen to-day love
and cherish their country with a pride unknown to their ancestors of
the last century, if strangers of all countries look on Scotland as a
land of romance, this we owe in great measure to Burns, who first
turned the tide, which Scott afterwards carried to full flood. All
that Scotland had done and suffered, her romantic history, the manhood
of her people, the beauty of her scenery, would have disappeared in
modern commonplace and manufacturing ugliness, if she had been left
without her two "sacred poets."

Thirdly. Burns's sympathies and thoughts were not confined to class
nor country; they had something more catholic in them, they reached to
universal man. Few as were his opportunities of knowing the (p. 198)
characters of statesmen and politicians, yet with what "random shots
o' countra wit" did he hit off the public men of his time! In his
address to King George III. on his birthday, how gay yet caustic is
the satire, how trenchant his stroke! The elder, and the younger Pitt,
"yon ill-tongued tinkler Charlie Fox," as he irreverently calls
him--if Burns had sat for years in Parliament, he could scarcely have
known them better. Every one of the Scottish M.P.'s of the time,
from--

That slee auld-farran chiel Dund