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."
As time wore on, his sentiments grew more pronounced and even
violent; but there was a basis of sense and generous feeling
to his hottest excess. What he asked was a fair chance for
the individual in life; an open road to success and
distinction for all classes of men. It was in the same
spirit that he had helped to found a public library in the
parish where his farm was situated, and that he sang his
fervent snatches against tyranny and tyrants. Witness, were
it alone, this verse:-