ay have been right in a time of quiet, it
was not unnatural that the Pitt administration should postpone all
thoughts of reform, till the vessel of the State had weathered the
storm which was then upon her.

Besides his conviction as to public wrongs to be redressed, Burns had,
he thought, personal grievances to complain of, which, as is so often
seen, added fuel to his reforming zeal. His great powers, which he
believed entitled him to a very different position, were
unacknowledged and disregarded by the then dispensers of patronage.
Once he had been an admirer of Pitt, latterly he could not bear the
mention of his name. Of the ministry, Addington, we have seen, was
fully alive to his merits, and pressed his claims on Pitt, who himself
was quite awake to the charm of Burns's poetry. The Premier, it is
said, "pushed the bottle on to Dundas, and did nothing,"--to Dundas,
too practical and too prosaic to waste a thought on poets and poetry.
Latterly this neglect of him by public men preyed on the spirit of
Burns, and was seldom absent from his thoughts. It added force, no
doubt, to the rapture with which he, like all the younger poets of the
time, hailed the French Revolution, and the fancied dawn of that day,
which would place plebeian genius and worth in those high places,
whence titled emptiness and landed incapacity would be at length
thrust ignominiously down.

Burns had not been more than three months in Dumfries, before he (p. 145)
found an opportunity of testifying by deed his sympathy with the
French Revolutionists. At that time the whole coast of the Solway
swarmed with smuggling vessels, carrying on a contraband traffic, and
manned by men of reckless character, like the Dirk Hatteraick of _Guy
Mannering_. In 1792, a suspicious-looking brig appeared in the Solway,
and Burns, with other excisemen, was set to watch her motions. She got
into shallow water, when the gaugers, enforced by some dragoons, waded
out to her, and Burns, sword in hand, was the first to board her. The
captured brig "Rosamond," with all her arms and stores, was sold next
day at Dumfries, and Burns became the purchaser of four of her guns.
These he sent, with a letter, to the French Legislative Assembly,
requesting them to accept the present as a mark of his admiration and
sympathy. The guns with the letter never reached their destination.
They were, however, intercepted by the Custom-House officers at Dover,
and Burns at once became a sus