His love of country is
recorded in too many undying lines to admit of a doubt now: nor is it
that chivalrous love alone which men call romantic; it is a love which
may be laid up in every man's heart and practised in every man's life;
the words are homely, but the words of Burns are always expressive:--
"The kettle of the kirk and state
Perhaps a clout may fail in't,
But deil a foreign tinkler loon
Shall ever ca' a nail in't.
Be Britons still to Britons true,
Amang ourselves united;
For never but by British hands
Shall British wrongs be righted."
But while verses, deserving as these do to become the national motto,
and sentiments loyal and generous, were overlooked and forgotten, all
his rash words about freedom, and his sarcastic sallies about thrones
and kings, were treasured up to his injury, by the mean and the
malicious. His steps were watched and his words weighed; when he
talked with a friend in the street, he was supposed to utter sedition;
and when ladies retired from the table, and the wine circulated with
closed doors, he was suspected of treason rather than of toasting,
which he often did with much humour, the charms of woman; even when he
gave as a sentiment, "May our success be equal to the justice of our
cause," he was liable to be challenged by some gunpowder captain, who
thought that we deserved success in war, whether right or wrong.
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