to Mr. Findlater was galling to Burns. In his
letter to Erskine of Mar he says: 'One of our supervisors-general, a Mr.
Corbet, was instructed to inquire on the spot and to document me--that
my business was to act, _not to think_; and that whatever might be men
or measures it was for me to be _silent_ and _obedient_.'

We can hardly conceive a harsher sentence on one of Burns's temperament,
and we doubt not that the degradation of being thus gagged, and the
blasting of his hopes of promotion, were the cause of much of the
bitterness that we find bursting from him now more frequently than ever,
both in speech and writing. That remorse for misconduct irritated him
against himself and against the world, is true; but it is none the less
true that he must have chafed against the servility of an office that
forbade him the freedom of personal opinion. In the same letter he
unburdens his heart in a burst of eloquent and noble indignation.

'Burns was a poor man from birth, and an exciseman by necessity; but--I
_will_ say it--the sterling of his honest worth no poverty could debase;
his independent British mind oppression might bend, but could not
subdue.... I have three sons who, I see already, have brought into the
world souls ill-qualified to inhabit the bodies of slaves.... Does any
man tell me that my full efforts can be of no service, and that it does
not belong to my humble station to meddle with the concerns of a nation?
I can tell him that it is on such individuals as I that a nation has to
rest, both for the hand of support and the eye of intelligence.'

What the precise charges against him were, we are not informed. It is
alleged that he once, when the health of Pitt was being drunk,
interposed with the toast of 'A greater than Pitt--George Washington.'
There can be little fault found with the sentiment. It is given to poets
to project themselves into futurity, and declare the verdict of
posterity. But the occasion was ill-chosen, and he spoke with all a
poet's imprudence. In another company he aroused the martial fury of an
unreasoning captain by proposing the toast, 'May our success in the
present war be equal to the justice of our cause.' A very humanitarian
toast, one would think, but regarded as seditious by the fire-eating
captain, who had not the sense to see that there was more of sedition in
his resentment than in Burns's proposal. Yet the affair looked black
enough for a time, and the poet was afraid that