From Count Aranda to Robert Burns,--from the rich and titled minister,
faring sumptuously in the best house of Paris, to the poor ploughboy
poet, struggling in a cottage,--what a contrast! And there is contrast
also between him and the philosopher nestling in the English Church. Of
the poet I say nothing, except that he was born 25th January, 1759, and
died 21st July, 1796, in the thirty-eighth year of his age.
There is only a slender thread of Burns to be woven into this web, and
yet, coming from him, it must not be neglected. In a letter dated 8th
November, 1788, after a friendly word for the unfortunate House of
Stuart, he prophetically alludes to American Independence:--
“I will not, I cannot, enter into the merits of the case, but
I dare say 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_.”[607]
The year 1788, when these words were written, was a year of
commemoration, being the hundredth from the famous Revolution by
which the Stuarts were excluded from the throne of England. The
“centenary” of our Independence is not yet completed; but long ago the
commemoration began. On the coming of that hundredth anniversary, the
prophecy of Burns will be more than fulfilled.
This aspiration is in harmony with the address to George the Third in
the “Dream,” after the loss of the Colonies:--
“Your royal nest, beneath your wing,
Is e’en right reft and clouted,”[608]--
meaning broken and patched; also with the obnoxious toast he gave at
a supper, “May our success in the present war be equal to the justice
of our cause”;[609] and also with an “Ode on the American War,”
beginning,--
“No Spartan tube, no Attic shell,
No lyre Eolian I awake;
’Tis Liberty’s bold note I swell;
Thy harp, Columbia, let me take.”[610]
How natural for the great poet who had pictured the sublime brotherhood
of man!--
“Then let us pray that come it may,
As come it will for a’ that,
…
That man to man, the warld o’er,
Shall brothers be for a’ that.”[611]