SOURCE: "The Satires: Underground Poetry," in Critical Essays on Robert Burns, edited by Donald A. Law, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, pp. 90–105.

[In the following essay, Scott details what were considered the scandalous aspects of Burns's satires.]

The unanimity of praise for the satires among modern Scottish critics of Burns is remarkable in a literary scene where controversy is more usual than consent. To David Daiches [in his Robert Burns, 1950], 'The Holy Tulzie' is 'brilliant' and 'extraordinarily effective'; 'Holy Willie's Prayer' possesses 'cosmic irony' and 'perfect dramatic appropriateness'; 'The Holy Fair' is at once 'the finest of those [poems] in the Kilmarnock volume which show the full stature of Burns as a poet working in the Scots literary tradition' and a creation with 'revolutionary implications'; 'The Twa Dogs' is 'brisk, sharp-toned … with wit and point'; 'Address to the Deil' is 'effective' in that it 'blows up' the doctrine of original sin; 'The Ordination' is (again) 'effective', this time in 'the contrast between the form and the ostensible theme'; and 'Address of Beelzebub' is 'bitter and biting'. To Thomas Crawford [in his Burns, 1960], 'The Holy Tulzie' shows 'developing still further the technique used in … the "Epistle to John Rankine"—the apparent assumption of the standards, beliefs and language of the opposite party'; 'Holy Willie's Prayer' is 'one of the finest satires of all time'; 'The Holy Fair' shows 'complete mastery of traditional poetic skills'; 'The Twa Dogs' has 'a pleasing manner'; 'The Ordination' is 'one of the finest and freshest things Burns ever did'; and 'Address of Beelzebub' is 'the most savage of all Burns's satires'. To David Craig [in his Scottish Literature and the Scottish People 1680–1830, 1961], despite his distrust of 'reductive criticism' and 'the reductive idiom and the poor man's defensive pose' in much eighteenth-century Scots satirical writing, 'Burns was in a wonderfully original and rich vein in the poems that may be called his satires'.

All these works had been written before the publication in July 1786 of the Kilmarnock edition which created for Burns the national—and international—reputation he has enjoyed ever since. Yet references to the satires in the contemporary reviews are few and far between. The Edinburgh Magazine of October 1786, noting that 'some of his subjects are serious, but those of the humorous kind are the best', illustrates the point by quoting 'Address to the Deil' and excerpts from 'The Holy Fair', but none of the other satirical pieces is so much as mentioned by name; the Monthly Review (London) of December 1786 expresses the opinion that 'our author seems to be most in his element when in the sportive humorous strain', but neither discusses nor illustrates the work which would exemplify that remark—perhaps because of a view that 'the poems of this cast … so much abound with provincial phrases and allusions to local circumstances, that no extracts from them would be sufficiently intelligible to our English readers'; the Lounger (Edinburgh) of December 1786, where the reviewer was the novelist Henry Mackenzie, mentions the 'Dialogue of the Dogs' [sic] among other 'lighter and more humorous poems' which demonstrate 'with what uncommon penetration and sagacity this heaven-taught ploughman, from his humble unlettered station, has looked upon men and manners', but in defending Burns against the charge of 'irreligion' by remarking that 'we shall not look upon his lighter muse as the enemy of religion (of which in several places he expresses the justest sentiments) though she has been somewhat unguarded in her ridicule of hypocrisy', Mackenzie leaves the religious satires unrecorded by either title or quotation; and the English Review (London) of February 1787, while adducing 'Address to the Deil' and 'The Holy Fair' to exemplify its view that 'the finest poems … are of the humorous and satirical kind, and in these our author appears to be most at home', devotes most of its space to the discussion of poems from which humour and satire are entirely absent.

The temptation to berate those early critics of Burns for obtuseness, however strong it may be, and however apparently justified in the eyes of readers of his collected poems, does not survive reference to the Kilmarnock edition. For of all the satires mentioned in the first paragraph above, only three, 'The Holy Fair', 'The Twa Dogs' and 'Address to the Deil', find a place in its pages. The others have been suppressed, either by the poet himself, or by the poet following the views of his adviser, the lawyer Robert Aiken, 'Dear Patron of my Virgin Muse'. When Burns made his first bow to the public, he chose to do so with his strong right arm tied behind his back.

If at first sight this seems to be extraordinary behaviour for a novice, who might be expected to wish to make the maximum impact upon his readers, the appearance is deceptive. Burns and his adviser had sufficient reasons for deciding against the inclusion in the Kilmarnock edition of those satires which are now among the most highly praised of all his works. Most of them were certainly libellous—and, in the eyes of some of those local readers in the west of Scotland for whom the Kilmarnock edition was printed by subscription, they might have appeared blasphemous at worst, and at best in extremely poor taste.

The clue to the situation lies in Burns's famous autobiographical letter to Dr Moore [in The Letters of Robert Burns, edited by J. De Lancey Ferguson, 1931] where, discussing the earliest of his satires, 'The Holy Tulzie', he writes:

The first of my poetic offspring that saw the light was a burlesque lamentation on a quarrel between two reverend Calvinists, both of them dramatis person in my Holy Fair.—I had an idea myself that the piece had some merit; but to prevent the worst, I gave a copy of it to a friend who was very fond of these things, and told him I could not guess who was the Author of it, but that I thought it pretty clever.—With a certain side of both clergy and laity it met with a roar of applause.

But there are always two sides (at least) to any Scottish reaction to works of art of a controversial kind, and how others among 'both clergy and laity' must have reacted to 'The Holy Fair' is indicated by their reception of its immediate successor, 'Holy Willie's Prayer'—'It alarmed the kirk-session so much that they held three successive meetings to look over their holy artillery, if any of it was pointed against profane Rhymers'.

Both 'The Holy Tulzie' and 'Holy Willie's Prayer' were attacks on local personalities in the church—hence the caution, 'to prevent the worst', which led Burns to pretend ignorance of the authorship of the former when passing it out in manuscript. Rural Ayrshire in the late eighteenth century was still under a clerical discipline—or Calvinist dictatorship—whose restrictive power was all the greater for its basis in a public opinion which Henry Mackenzie, reflecting 'moderate' Edinburgh views, described [in the Lounger, December 1786] as 'the ignorance and fanaticism of the lower class of the people in the country where these poems were written, a fanaticism of that pernicious sort which sets faith in opposition to good works'. Moreover, at the time 'The Holy Tulzie' and 'Holy Willie's Prayer' were composed, early in 1785, Burns had placed himself in a highly vulnerable position vis-à-vis the kirk: 'Unluckily for me, my idle wanderings led me, on another side, point-blank within the reach of their heaviest metal'. Less metaphorically, he was responsible for the pregnancy of Elizabeth Paton, the Burns family's domestic servant, who bore him a daughter on 22 May 1785, and consequently he would be required to appear on the church's stool of repentance, 'arrayed … in the black sackcloth gown of fornication', for three successive Sundays. After that penance he would be regarded as having made his peace with the kirk, provided there were no other scandals appertaining to his person. But if his authorship of 'The Holy Tulzie' and 'Holy Willie's Prayer' had been avowed, or even acknowledged, the clerical authorities would have had every reason (in their own view) to continue to hold him under the ban of their baleful displeasure.

A year later, in the spring of 1786, when Burns was selecting poems for the Kilmarnock edition, he would have been in even worse trouble had all the facts of his sexual irregularities come to light, for at that time he had made himself a bigamist by contracting two irregular marriages, firstly with Jean Armour—who bore him twins on 3 September—and secondly (and secretly) with Mary Campbell. From the consequences of those follies he was rescued, through no merit of his own, by the sudden death of 'Highland Mary' in the autumn of that year. By then, however, the Kilmarnock edition had already been published, with most of the anti-clerical satires omitted.

Yet, ironically enough, the same system of clerical dictatorship which compelled Burns to deny the dignity of print to some of his liveliest poems would appear to have been responsible for their original composition. While the poet's Commonplace Book makes it plain that he had reached a 'moderate' view in religion, opposed to the narrow fundamentalist ('Auld Licht') principles of his local kirk-session, at least as early as 1784, it was not until 'the thorns were in his own flesh' and he found himself in peril of the kirk's censure as a result of his affair with Elizabeth Paton that he was stimulated into writing about the Calvinists of his own district in terms of the kind of attack which has traditionally been regarded as the best means of defence.

A notorious dispute about parish boundaries between two 'Auld Licht' ministers, 'hitherto sworn friends and associates', who 'lost all command of temper' when the matter was discussed at the Presbytery of Ayr, and 'abused each other … with a fiery violence of invective', presented the poet with a golden opportunity for satire. The whole of 'The Holy Tulzie' is an extended metaphor, the nature of which is succinctly indicated by the poem's alternative title 'The Twa Herds', but the very orthodoxy of the time-hallowed images of the minister as shepherd and the congregation as his flock gives a keener edge to the mockery of the treatment, and the poet's adoption of the persona of an Auld Licht sympathizer, professing horror and dismay at the 'bitter, black outcast' between the two guardians of sanctity, sharpens the irony to a more penetrating point. Again, the presentation of the two pastors as actual—as well as metaphorical—Scottish shepherds, their business to protect the sheep 'frae the fox / Or worrying tykes', their practice to trap 'the Fulmart, Wil-cat, Brock and Tod' and 'sell their skin', deprives them of dignity and makes their blowing of 'gospel horns' and swinging of 'the Gospel-club' all the more ludicrous by the brilliantly daring association of the scriptural with the mundane—while the presentation of their flocks as real sheep ('the Brutes') puts beyond argument the propriety of patronage in the presentation of parish ministers, since it would appear that the only alternative is to 'get the Brutes the pouer themsels / To chuse their Herds'. Technically, too, the poet's command of the Habbie Simson stanza is already consummate, although this is only the third occasion he has employed it.

Despite those various virtues, however, the poem falls short of being a masterpiece. As Hilton Brown remarks [in his There Was a Lad, 1949], '[Burns] was always lazy … even in his best days many of his most promising openings peter out for lack of just that finish and pulling together which an extra ounce of effort would have supplied', and he gives 'The Holy Tulzie' as an example of this fault. The poem ends too abruptly, as if the writer had suddenly run out of steam. But even before that point is reached, readers from other airts than eighteenth-century Ayrshire find themselves in difficulty and compelled to start grubbing in editorial notes. During the first fifty-four lines, no such grubbing is necessary, for even although we know nothing about the two protagonists, 'Moodie man and wordy Russell' as Burns punningly names them, their natures and their functions emerge so clearly from the verse that they quickly establish themselves in our minds as recognizable clerical types, as true to life now as then. But in the next thirty lines the poet lets loose an avalanche of ministers' names, all of them familiar enough to his original local audience, but now unknown to fame except for their appearance here and elsewhere in Burns's work, and none of them sufficiently delineated to achieve a living reality in the verse. From being a local poem which yet contains implications of wider significance, 'The Holy Tulzie' here becomes parochial, concerned with personalities of interest only to a limited circle of readers. Those very elements which gave the poem much of its notoriety among Burns's Ayrshire contemporaries decrease its appeal to the present day.

Some stanzas of 'Holy Willie's Prayer' suffer from the same disability. To say as much is not to deny a jot of the brilliance of Burns's parody of the style of 'the Scottish Presbyterian eloquence' with its incongruous combination of the Biblical and the broad, or the satirical skill of the presentation of his protagonist, the arch-hypocrite of Calvinist fanaticism, disguising yet revealing his lust and greed under 'a veil that is rent', a tattered screen of sanctified self-interest, and betraying himself out of his own all too awfully eloquent mouth. For the first sixty-six of the poem's one hundred and two lines, Holy Willie is a prototype as well as a local personality, and given the slightest acquaintanceship on the reader's part with the doctrines of original sin and predestination, the theme of Christianity unchristianized is of universal—and ageless—relevance. Even the introduction, by name, of Willie's most hated 'enemy', Gavin Hamilton, requires no external explanation, for he too is not only individual but representative, a personality who enjoys the pleasures frowned upon by the kirk ('He drinks, and swears, and plays at cartes') while possessing such charm that he commits the even greater 'crime' of winning more regard than the community's religious leader ('Frae G—d's ain priest the people's hearts / He steals awa').

But then occur two stanzas in which Willie demands that the Lord should 'hear my earnest cry and prayer / Against that Presbytery of Ayr!' and describes 'that glib-tongu'd Aiken' who created such terror among the godly that even 'Auld wi' hingin lip gaed sneaking'. These lines are a good deal less than self-explanatory to readers unaware of what occurred when Gavin Hamilton appealed to the 'moderate' Presbytery of Ayr, against the adverse judgment on his alleged absence from public worship passed by the 'Auld Licht' kirk in the parish of Mauchline, and won his case thanks to the successful pleading of his lawyer and friend Robert Aiken. To 'the rustic inmates of the hamlet who constituted Burns's first audience, the affair was so recent, and the gossip concerning it so rife, that detailed description would have been otiose, but what was daylight to them is darkness to us unless we are given editorial assistance, for the parochial nature of the subject-matter defeats unaided comprehension.

Both 'The Holy Tulzie' and 'Holy Willie's Prayer' are concerned with specific local religious scandals, so notorious in the west country that, had the poems been printed, the characters who feature in them could not have failed to be recognized, even if their names had been omitted and replaced by asterisks. The risk of a libel action, or of clerical condemnation, or of both, was too great for that unconfessed bigamist among 'rakish rooks', Robert Burns, to include them in the Kilmarnock edition—even although there can be little doubt, human nature being what it is, that those subjects of scandal and concern had created much of that local interest in the author which led to his first publication being so heavily subscribed by his neighbours. 'The Holy Tulzie' remained unpublished during the poet's lifetime, the first to appear in print being 'Holy Willie's Prayer', in an anonymous pamphlet of 1789, when it was accompanied—appropriately—by 'quotations from the Presbyterian eloquence'.

This linking of Burns's late-eighteenth-century poem with a work published in 1694 as a result of the religious strife in seventeenth-century Scotland is significant, for although Professor James Kinsley [in his The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, 1968, Vol. III] indicates a more recent model for 'Holy Willie's Prayer' ('Burns may have taken a hint from Ramsay's "Last Speech of a Wretched Miser to his hoard'"), it has much in common with Drummond of Hawthornden's late near-vernacular poem, 'A Character of the Anti-Covenanter, or Malignant', first published among the posthumous poems in the 1711 edition of Drummond's works. Here Drummond, himself an 'anti-Covenanter, or Malignant' (or Cavalier), adopts the persona of a Covenanter in order to 'attack' the Cavalier view, in exact anticipation of the way in which Burns, himself a moderate (with the same dislike of Presbyterian extremism as the Cavaliers had possessed before him), adopts the persona of an Auld Licht in order to 'attack' the moderate standpoint, and in each poem the Calvinist fanatic who is the protagonist brings down the reader's condemnation upon himself while seeking to destroy the opposition.

'A Character of the Anti-Covenanter', 106 lines long—only four lines longer than 'Holy Willie's Prayer'—is written in octosyllabic couplets instead of the 'standard Habbie' of Burns, but its jaunty, irregular rhythms, its at least equally irregular rhymes, its brutal jocularity, its plain blunt energy—at the opposite pole of style from the stately and mellifluous decorum of Drummond's earlier verse, published during his lifetime—give it a force no less devastating, and no less remarkable for its counterpointing of the profound and the profane, than the later work. There is, however, one major difference between the two poems, for the speaker in Drummond is not identified by any nickname; he represents all extreme Calvinists rather than, like Holy Willie, a particular spokesman speaking for all. In the same way, the targets at which the earlier extremist fires his musket are not specific opponents like Gavin Hamilton and Robert Aiken, but each and every member of the 'malignant' party. It may be argued that Burns's particularity of characterization gives 'Holy Willie's Prayer' more point (although in fact Hamilton is as much a type as an individual, and Aiken is scarcely particularized at all, except as 'glib-tongu'd'), or it may be held that this very particularization narrows the range of Burns's attack, compared with Drummond's; but it is beyond dispute that the present-day reader of Drummond does not require to acquaint himself with seventeenth-century Scottish biography in order to gain full appreciation of his poem, as must be done with regard to the following century in respect of 'Holy Willie's Prayer'.

Unlike that dramatic lyric, Burns's next religious satire, 'The Holy Fair', which followed in the autumn of the same year, was considered 'safe' enough for inclusion in the Kilmarnock edition—although that safety was ensured only by a liberal substitution of asterisks for proper names whose owners would have regarded their appearance in print in such a context as being highly improper. A further measure of safety arises from the fact that 'The Holy Fair' is less personal than public, less concerned with the follies committed by particular individuals than with the festivities enjoyed by a whole community, for the poem belongs to a Scots tradition of 'come-to-the-fair' verse-comedy traceable to the medieval celebration of village life in 'Christ's Kirk on the Green' (which had been brought up to date earlier in the eighteenth century by Allan Ramsay, with the addition of extra cantos of his own).

Again, 'The Holy Fair' is not concerned with one specific, easily recognizable occurrence—an undignified row between two Calvinist ministers, or a legal battle between fundamentalist priest and liberal parishioner—but might derive from observation of any and every public communion held in the open air in the west of Scotland. The scene is in fact set in Burns's local parish of Mauchline, as we now know (from the manuscript), but the asterisks in the Kilmarnock edition give no clue to this, and there are no merely parochial descriptive details (except perhaps the mention of 'Racer Jess', the half-witted daughter of 'Poosie Nansie' Gibson, who kept a local tavern) which might give the game—and the name—away to readers not already in the know. Moreover, the references to the various preachers who waste the sweetness (or sourness) of their eloquence on the desert air—while 'the godly … gie the jars an' barrels / A lift that day' and 'the lads an' lasses … are cozie i' the neuk'—are of such a generalized kind that their actual identities, indicated in the printed text only by asterisks, matter little or nothing.

Who cares, or needs to care, that scholarly research has revealed the minister there as 'Sawnie', otherwise Alexander Moodie (of 'The Holy Tulzie'), 'educated at Glasgow, ordained to Culross in 1759, and minister of Riccarton from 1762'? What difference does it make to the reader's enjoyment to know that the asterisks in '***** opens out his cauld harangues' represent that grand old Caledonian cognomen, Smith? Yet Burns himself, publishing his volume while he poised precariously on the razor's edge dividing acknowledged fornication from unadmitted bigamy, was compelled to care, and the difference between asterisks and actuality was vital. He might risk revealing the truth in 'The Holy Fair', but not the whole truth. The real identities of his preaching protagonists remained 'underground'.

Of all the many poems in the 'Christ's Kirk' tradition, 'The Holy Fair' is the most masterly, in its command of verse technique, the idiomatic cut and thrust of its style, the combination of comedy and criticism in its action and characterization, and the cunning of its transitions between panoramic views of general activities and close-ups of individuals and particularities. Yet Hilton Brown, while finding the poem 'excellent as a descriptive piece', dismisses it as 'surely too crude for successful satire', a view which seems eccentric—unless the critic is using 'crude' in the sexual sense, expressing disapproval of such scenes as the lover taking advantage of everyone else's eyes being fixed on the preacher, and engaging meantime in intimate caresses of his 'ain dear lass'. But this is surely to have overlooked the central theme of the poem, the triumphant survival of life-creating sexuality even under the dreary domination of the most repressive puritanism.

The satire on Calvinism in 'Address to the Deil' (written in the winter of 1785–6) is so indirect, and so devoid of specific local references, that it was included in the Kilmarnock edition almost as written. Almost, but not quite. In lines 61–6 the demands of decorum have led to the toning down of the tragic tale of how devilish witchcraft deprives the new bridegroom of his virility at the most vital of all moments; and in lines 85–90 'my bonie Jean, / My dearest part' is removed from the poem. The first of these departures from the manuscript is significant in showing how Burns, despite his contempt for convention, was the kind of rebel poet who is not above deciding, on occasion, that discretion is the better part of valour where the interests of publication are concerned—and even then he was not discreet enough for some, since the Rev. Hugh Blair advised that even the revised stanza 'had better be left out, as indecent' from the Edinburgh edition of 1787.

Of the revision of lines 85–90 Kinsley takes the view that it was 'probably made just before going to press, to remove the allusion to Jean Armour, from whom he was estranged', but this does much less than justice to the difficulty and danger of Burns's situation in June 1786, when he was secretly married not only to a pregnant Jean Armour but also to Mary Campbell (whose reputation was far from being impregnable). 'Estranged' from Jean Armour, Burns undoubtedly was, when her parents compelled her to acquiesce in the defacement of the 'marriage certificate' which the poet had given her and then packed her off to Paisley in the hope that she might contrive a more suitable match; but he did not languish after her for long. On the contrary, the speed with which he was off with the old love and on with the new, and his recklessness in giving the second girl the same kind of documentary evidence of his 'honourable intentions' as he had already presented to the first, put him in a position of vulnerability to the law—if his secrets were discovered—that would have weakened even the steeliest nerves. For Burns to have published a declaration of his regard for Jean (‧A dancin, sweet, young, handsome queen / Wi' guileless heart') at a time when he was risking a charge of bigamy—against which he could have defended himself only by swearing that she had no claim upon him whatsoever—would have been an act of self-destruction too apparent for even the most impractical poet to ignore. As far as his published work was concerned, it was imperative that Jean be kept 'underground', consigned to oblivion, become a non-person. And so it happened, Burns replacing her person with 'the Soul of Love', an unconscious irony which was lost upon those of his original readers who had not already encountered the poem in manuscript. Even in its altered state, the 'Address' remains one of his most attractive works, a humorous mock-attack on the Great Enemy which reduces more orthodox assaults upon him to the status of superstitious nonsense, but the excised stanzas have a bite and a particularity lacking from their published counterparts.

The last of the religious satires composed before the Kilmarnock edition made Burns famous, 'The Ordination' (written early in 1786) was as parochial in origin as 'The Holy Tulzie' and 'Holy Willie's Prayer', it suffered the same fate, exclusion. For all the asterisks with which the text is bespattered fail to conceal from even the most cursory reader that the scene is Kilmarnock and the occasion the presentation to the ministry of the Laigh Kirk there of a fundamentalist minister, the Rev. James Mackinlay, who owned his preferment to the favour of the patron, the Earl of Glencairn. Written to console the moderate party in their defeat, the poem uses the pastoral imagery of 'The Holy Tulzie' to present a ludicrously grotesque picture of Kilmarnock's Auld Licht congregation in the shape of a ram which has had only 'scanty' feeding while the Moderates held the field but which can now revel in rich repasts of 'gospel kail ' and 'runts ' grace' provided by the fundamentalist Mackinlay. The work's daring juxtapositions of the sacred and the profane must have seemed blasphemous to contemporary readers of the evangelical persuasion, and the concluding episode, when Orthodoxy flogs Learning, Common Sense and Morality through the town as if they were rogues and vagabonds, possesses a brutal jocularity, equating 'righteousness' with sadistic revenge, which lays it open to the same change. This is the only one of Burns's pre-Kilmarnock satires occasioned by a Moderate defeat rather than by an Evangelical upset, and the sharper bitterness of its tone may well reflect the rage felt by the poet's party, and by the author himself, at their discomfiture on a battle-ground where they had begun to believe that they were on the winning side.

But Burns did not leave 'The Ordination' unacknowledged and underground for very long. Although he omitted it from the Kilmarnock, he found it a place in the Edinburgh edition of 1787, and one can only speculate on the reasons which led him on that occasion to accept a risk which he had refused to take a year earlier, and which he still refused on behalf of 'The Holy Tulzie' and 'Holy Willie's Prayer'. Perhaps he had realized that irony remains unnoticed by persons without a sense of humour, and that a poem written in the style of a victory-song for the fundamentalists might well be interpreted as such by them and hence escape their strictures? Whatever the explanation, there is no doubt that Burns experienced some difficulty in finding sufficient previously unpublished poems for the Edinburgh edition to justify it in the eyes of readers who had already bought the earlier book—this accounts for his inclusion in the Edinburgh collection of 'Death and Dr Hornbook', a jeu d'esprit which has been greatly admired for its witty command of dialogue but which the poet himself had considered 'too trifling and prolix' to publish in the Kilmarnock volume. He may have felt that, having 'got away' with 'The Holy Fair' in the Kilmarnock, where it had even been praised and quoted in the reviews, he might now take a chance on the publication of another religious satire, and chose 'The Ordination' as being less of a pointed personal attack on individuals than 'The Holy Tulzie' and 'Holy Willie's Prayer'. The question must remain in doubt, but—given the necessity of finding some 'new poems' for the Edinburgh volume—the hypothesis seems not unreasonable.

In his religious satires, Burns is the artist-intellectual in rebellion against the obscurantism of local public opinion, and his allies are the men of education who favoured patronage (exercised by land-owning heritors) in the establishment of parish ministers, rather than election by the elders of individual kirks, as the uneducated majority preferred. In his social satires, however, Burns becomes the lower-class radical hostile to the gentry, and his allies are the same peasant masses—the crofters and small farmers—for whose fundamentalist religious opinions he had the highest contempt. 'The Twa Dogs' (early 1786), an eclogue consisting of canine comparisons between the virtues and vices of the rich and the poor, much to the latter's advantage, eschews all discussion of religion, and its implicit Biblical moral, that 'Satan still finds work for idle hands to do', in contrasting the idle aristocracy with the hard-working peasantry, avoids any scriptural association. This is perhaps 'natural' enough, in the sense that the dialogue is conducted between a pair of brute beasts to whom the spiritual aspects of existence might be expected to remain unknown, but in view of Burns's own religious alignment, the omission is also highly significant.

Radical as 'The Twa Dogs' is in its attack on the privileged, its inclusion in the Kilmarnock volume placed its unprivileged author in no danger of any kind of prosecution or persecution by authority. When social criticism emerges from the mouths—or muzzles—of dogs, it is bound to create the effect that their bark is worse than their bite. Moreover, Burns takes care to make exceptions to his general strictures on the gentry—'there's some exceptions, man an' woman'—and thereby provides the opportunity for any reader belonging to the upper classes to include himself among the exceptional few to whom the satire does not apply. Again, the introductory descriptions of the two canine characters have such charm as to make it well-nigh impossible to take offence at anything they say. Their dialogue is both racy and pointed, and Burns's success in giving his octosyllabic couplets the cadence of Scots vernacular speech is so remarkable as to be quite unremarked in the reading. Yet, at the same time, one can appreciate the doubt in Hilton Brown's mind when he commented that 'to talk of … "The Twa Dogs" … as "poetry" seems to strain a little the accepted meaning of words' and preferred to consider the work's medium as being verse; for in capturing the tone of conversation Burns frequently strays so far from the poetical that passage after passage is no more than rhythmical rhyming prose, entirely devoid of imagery.

Different in every way, except its octosyllabic couplets, is 'Address of Beelzebub', also written in 1786, but never published in Burns's lifetime. Dated from 'Hell 1st June Anno Mundi 5790', and signed by Beelzebub, the poem is only too particular in the point of its attack, being directed to

the Rt Honble JOHN, EARL OF BREADALBANE, President of the Rt Honble the HIGHLAND SOCIETY, which met, on the 23d of May last, at the Shakespeare, Covent garden, to concert ways and means to frustrate the designs of FIVE HUNDRED HIGHLANDERS who, as the Society were informed by Mr McKenzie of Applecross, were so audacious as to attempt to escape from theire lawful lords and masters whose property they are by emigrating from the lands of Mr McDonald of Glengary to the wilds of CANADA, in search of that fantastic thing—LIBERTY.

The savage sarcasm of the poem's sixty-two lines makes it one of the most fiercely effective of Burns's works, a furious condemnation of aristocratic arrogance, which lashes authority with as stinging a whip as his lordship is pictured as using on 'the tatter'd gipseys' who are wives to those 'Poor, dunghill sons of dirt an' mire', his Highland tenants. For attempting to interfere with their freedom of choice, Breadalbane is not only doomed but also pre-eminently damned, fated to a special place in hell, 'The benmost newk, aside the ingle / At my right hand', and the brutality of the punishment to be inflicted by him upon the lower orders ('smash them! crush them a' to spails!') is evoked by Burns in a passage of such ferocious energy as to make eternal hell-fire seem no outrageous sentence when compared with the crime.

Yet the power in the land which permitted Breadalbane and his associates among the Scottish gentry to curtail the liberties of their tenants was also too great for a mere tenant-farmer such as Burns to risk defying it by publication, however violently he might denounce that power in manuscript. In a Scotland where political—and judicial—authority was concentrated in the 'happy few' who constituted the landed interest, and where that authority was well-nigh absolute (as Burns and other radicals were to discover to their cost when they dared to favour the French Revolution a few years later), the public defiance of a belted earl by an untitled nobody from the hilts of a plough might well have exposed the latter to a legal system for which the social hierarchy was still sacrosanct, and would certainly have placed him beyond the pale so far as any prospect of public employment was concerned. It is even a matter of doubt whether he could have continued as a tenant-farmer, for as a 'marked man', a radical who had published an attack on one of the greatest landlords in the country, he would have found most other landlords refusing to rent him a farm. Such were the perils daunting enough to force the freest spirit in eighteenth-century Scotland to confine 'Address of Beelzebub' to an underground existence.

Ironically, it seems to have been safer to satirize the monarch in far-off London than a mere magnate with a Scottish estate. When King George III's birthday was celebrated on 4 June 1786 with a Pindaric ode by the poet-laureate, Burns immediately retorted with 'A Dream', and inserted it into the copy for the Kilmarnock edition just before it went to press. Although his aristocratic acquaintance Mrs Dunlop informed him that the work was disliked by 'numbers at London' and suggested that he amend it for the Edinburgh edition, Burns rejected her advice on the grounds that 'I set as little by kings, lords, clergy, critics etc. as all these respectable Gentry do by my bardship'. This appears to be very bold, but in fact it is little more than bravado. For while some readers of 'A Dream' might take offence at its tone of impudent familiarity, addressing the king and his family as if they were near neighbours, the poem is innocent of any attack on the institution of monarchy. On the contrary, it protests the author's 'loyal, true affection' alongside its waggish depreciation of the flattery of courtiers and the pecadilloes of the royal princes. Its publication might be regarded as being in doubtful taste, but it could scarcely be denounced for advocating revolutionary principles of equality, since its democratic attitude remains implicit, as a matter of manner, and is never explicitly stated, and even stressed, as in the overt onslaught upon aristocracy in 'Address of Beelzebub'.

After the publication of the Kilmarnock edition in July 1786 and Burns's consequent departure from his native heath to become consecutively a literary lion in Edinburgh, a farmer in Dumfries-shire, and an exciseman in Dumfries, there was a marked decline in his satirical production, both in quantity and in quality. For this there would appear to have been two reasons—rootlessness and respectability. Burns the famous poet, elevated out of the ranks of the tenantry and commissioned as an officer in the Excise, and domiciled in a district different from that in which he had shared the trials and tribulations of the labouring life, was inevitably distanced from the people and the places, the pulpits and the politics, which had provided his radical attacks on religious orthodoxy and aristocratic privilege. Occasionally he attempted to hark back to his parochial past in Ayrshire, but 'A New Psalm for the Chapel of Kilmarnock' (25 April 1789), written in the mock-scriptural style of 'Holy Willie's Prayer', was innocuous enough—in its avoidance of personalities—for immediate publication in the London Morning Star, while 'The Kirk of Scotland's Garland' (autumn 1789), published as an anonymous broadsheet, is a repetitive catalogue of individual insults rather than a rounded poem. Well might the author ask himself, 'Poet Burns, Poet Burns, wi' your priest-skelping turns, / Why desert ye your auld native shire?' The short answer, financial necessity (' 'tis luxury in comparison of all my preceding life'), had been expressed more poignantly by the poet a twelvemonth earlier, in his 'Extemporaneous Effusion on being appointed to the Excise'—

With the solitary exception of 'Tam o' Shanter'—his only excursion into narrative—the rest of the best of Burns is not satire but song.