ROBERT BURNS, 1788.
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,—