[230] See a letter in Bishop Watson’s Life, i, 402; and cp. Buckle, ch. vii, note 218. [↑]
[231] See his Task, bk. iii, 150–90 (1783–1784), for the prevailing religious tone. [↑]
[232] Princ. of Moral Philos. bk. v, ch. ix. The chapter tells of widespread freethinking. [↑]
[233] Ernest Krause, Erasmus Darwin, Eng. tr. 1879, p. 211. Cp. pp. 193, 194. [↑]
[234] Letters vii, viii, ix, xix, xxii. [↑]
[235] E.g., The Ordination, the Address to the Deil, A Dedication to Gavin Hamilton, The Kirk’s Alarm, etc. [↑]
[236] See also the pieces printed between these in the Globe edition, pp. 66–68. [↑]
[237] The benevolent Supreme Being, he writes, “has put the immediate administration of all this into the hands of Jesus Christ—a great personage, whose relation to Him we cannot fathom, but whose relation to us is [that of] a guide and Saviour.” Letter 86 in Globe ed. Letters 189 and 197, to Mrs. Dunlop, similarly fail to meet the requirements of the orthodox correspondent. The poem Look up and See, latterly printed several times apart from Burns’s works, and extremely likely to be his, is a quite Voltairean criticism of David. If the poem be ungenuine, it is certainly by far the ablest of the unacknowledged pieces ascribed to him, alike in diction and in purport. [↑]
[238] Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, Jan. 1, 1789, in Robert Burns and Mrs. Dunlop, ed. by W. Wallace, 1898, p. 129. The passage is omitted from Letter 168 in the Globe ed., and presumably from other reprints. [↑]
[239] Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, July 9, 1790. Published for the first time in vol. cited, p. 266. [↑]