THIS discourse, whatever result it may come to, is certainly not wrong in its choice of a subject. To think of the politics of Robert Burns is not like some of the idle and irrelevant enquiries about the lives of poets. In every current opinion about him, in every judgment passed on him since the year 1786, he is taken as a representative man, speaking for his nation, or for the rank he belongs to, or for some new reviving spirit of liberty, or for the old traditional Scottish loyalty, or for these two together, as Jacobin-Jacobite.

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