SOURCE: "Apotheosis," in Dirt & Deity: A Life of Robert Burns, HarperCollins Publishers, 1995, pp. 413–44.

[Here, Mclntyre presents a survey of critical and public reaction to Burns over the span of two hundred years.]

… The critics had continued to give as much attention to the defects of Burns's moral character as to the qualities of his poetry. The publication of Cromek's Reliques of Robert Burns in 1808 had occasioned two influential unsigned reviews—that by Francis Jeffrey in the Whig Edinburgh Review, and that by Walter Scott in the first issue of the Quarterly Review, recently established as a rival Tory voice. Jeffrey, who was later to begin his demolition of Wordsworth's The Excursion with the notorious 'This will never do!' was alive to the value of a provocative opening:

Burns is certainly by far the greatest of our poetical prodigies—from Stephen Duck down to Thomas Dermody. They are forgotten already; or only remembered for derision. But the name of Burns, if we are not mistaken, has not yet 'gathered all its fame'; and will endure long after those circumstances are forgotten which contributed to its first notoriety …

Burnsians who succumbed to apoplexy at this early point missed much that was judicious and discriminating, because it was Jeffrey's contention that to regard their hero as a prodigy was to derogate from his merits: 'We can see no propriety in regarding the poetry of Burns chiefly as the wonderful work of a peasant, and thus admiring it much in the same way as if it had been written with his toes.' Behind the acerbic and sometimes patronising manner, an informed critical intelligence was at work. Jeffrey, who stood in the urbane tradition of Addison and Johnson, was critical of what he termed the 'undisciplined harshness and acrimony' of Burns's invective, although that was not the most severe criticism he had to offer:

The leading vice in Burns's character, and the cardinal deformity, indeed, of all his productions, was his contempt, or affectation of contempt, for prudence, decency and regularity; and his admiration of thoughtlessness, oddity, and vehement sensibility;—his belief, in short, in the dispensing power of genius and social feeling, in all matters of morality and common sense … This pitiful cant of careless feeling and eccentric genius, accordingly, has never found much favour in the eyes of English sense and morality. The most signal effect which it ever produced, was on the muddy brains of some German youth, who are said to have left college in a body to rob on the highway! because Schiller had represented the captain of a gang as so very noble a creature …

These were robust strictures, but Jeffrey was not less incisive in what he had to say about the humour, the pathos and the animation which he found in Burns. He paid particularly close attention to the songs. They were, he said, 'written with more tenderness, nature, and feeling than any other lyric compositions that are extant' and were likely to outlive all his other work. His judgement that Burns was 'entitled to the rank of a great and original genius' was unqualified.¹

Scott, in his review for the Quarterly a month later,² did not think that Cromek had performed much of a service either to the poet or the public: 'The contents of the volume before us are more properly gleanings than reliques, the refuse and sweepings of the shop, rather than the commodities which might be deemed contraband.' Like Jeffrey, he thought highly of the songs—'No poet of our tongue ever displayed higher skill in marrying melody to immortal verse'—although he also took the view that Burns's devotion to compiling and composing for musical collections was so much time and talent frittered away and a diversion from 'his grand plan of dramatic composition'.

For Scott, Burns was 'the child of passion and feeling'. The tone of his review is kindlier than Jeffrey's, but he shakes his head no less reprovingly over his recklessness:

The extravagance of genius with which this wonderful man was gifted, being in his later and more evil days directed to no fixed or general purpose, was, in the morbid state of his health and feelings, apt to display itself in hasty sallies of virulent and unmerited severity: sallies often regretted by the bard himself; and of which, justice to the living and to the dead, alike demanded the suppression.

Scott's social and political conservatism did nothing to blunt his literary judgement, however—he dwelt at length, for instance, on the merits of that riotously subversive piece 'The Jolly Beggars'—'for humorous description and nice discrimination of character, [it] is inferior to no poem of the same length in the whole range of English poetry'. He also had a keen eye for the strengths and weaknesses of Burns's prose style, pointing impartially to the 'meretricious ornaments' to be found in his letters to Clarinda and the mastery of the vernacular he displayed in one of his letters to William Nicol—'an attempt to read a sentence of which, would break the teeth of most modern Scotchmen'.³

By the time Scott's son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart, tried his hand at a biography in 1828, he felt the need to placate the reader with a defensively worded preface: 'Some apology must be deemed necessary for any new attempt to write the Life of Burns.' By then Wordsworth, Coleridge and Hazlitt had all had their say and so, in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, had Byron; there is even a short passage referring to Burns in Sanditon, the novel which Jane Austen left unfinished at her death.

Lockhart had, in fact, correctly identified the need for something less monumental than the successive editions of Currie, and his book was well received. 'All people applaud it,' Scott told him in a letter, 'a new edition will immediately be wanted'. Scott was right. The style is mellifluous and Lockhart's Life ran into many editions; it was only in the 1930s that it came under the beady scrutiny of modern academic scholarship: 'Inexcusably inaccurate from beginning to end, at times demonstrably mendacious,' wrote Snyder. He allowed one thing in its favour—it was the occasion of a famous review by Thomas Carlyle.⁴

Carlyle, thirty-two years old and still struggling to establish himself, had just abandoned Edinburgh for the bleak solitude of Craigenputtoch. He saw Burns's life as a tragedy of potential unfulfilled and opportunity squandered, but argued that he must for all that be ranked 'not only as a true British poet, but as one of the most considerable British men of the eighteenth century':

An educated man stands, as it were, in the midst of a boundless arsenal and magazine, filled with all the weapons and engines which man's skill has been able to devise from the earliest time; and he works, accordingly, with a strength borrowed from all past ages. How different is his state who stands on the outside of that storehouse, and feels that its gates must be stormed, or remain forever shut against him! His means are the commonest or rudest; the mere work done is no measure of his strength. A dwarf behind his steam-engine may remove mountains; but no dwarf will hew them down with the pickaxe; and he must be a Titan that hurls them abroad with his arms.

Carlyle's own origins and associations were not so very different from those of Burns and nobody before or since has written about him with such passionate insight. He paid scant attention to Lockhart's text—what he produced was not really a review at all but an extended essay in biography. For him, Burns's writing was 'no more than a poor mutilated fraction of what was in him, broken glimpses of a genius that could never show itself complete'. He notes, however, the tonic effect of his work on Scottish literature as a whole: 'For a long period after Scotland became British, we had no literature … Theologie ink, and Jacobite blood, with gall enough in both cases, seemed to have blotted out the intellect of the country.'

The merits of the poetry interest Carlyle less than the psychological complexities of the man who wrote it:

There is but one era in the life of Burns, and that is the earliest. We have not youth and manhood, but only youth … With all that resoluteness of judgement, that penetrating insight, and singular maturity of intellectual power, he never attains to any clearness regarding himself.

He acknowledges that Burns was unfortunate in some of the 'fashionable danglers after literature' he fell in with along the way, but contemplates the various difficulties he encountered in his life with a complete lack of sentimentality; in Carlyle's view, the world treated him no worse than it did Tasso or Galileo or Camoens. 'It is his inward, not his outward misfortunes that bring him to the dust.' Burns, he declares, like Byron, never came to 'moral manhood'.

His conclusion is that the Burnses, the Swifts and the Rousseaus of this world are sometimes tried 'at a tribunal far more rigid than that where the Plebiscita of common civic reputations are pronounced,' and that the result is often a condemnation that is both blind and cruel:

Granted, the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and tackle damaged; the pilot is blameworthy; he has not been all-wise and all-powerful; but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the Globe, or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs.⁵

Jeffrey, still editing the Review after twenty-six years, considered the article too long and diffuse and did not admire its author's Germanic English. When Carlyle received the proofs, he found that he had been drastically pruned—'the body of a quadruped with the head of a bird,' he grumbled to his wife; 'a man shortened by cutting out his thighs, and fixing the Knee-pans on the hips!' He restored the cuts and returned the proofs to Jeffrey, telling him he was free to drop the article but not to mutilate it; rather surprisingly, his editor acquiesced.⁶ As things turned out, Carlyle's views on Burns carried a good deal further than either the Isle of Dogs or Ramsgate; Goethe thought so highly of the article that he translated long passages from it and published them in his collected works.

Language was initially something of a barrier to the spread of Burns's fame beyond the English-speaking world. There were several translations into French between 1825 and 1840 and articles about him began to appear in the Russian periodical press in the 1820s. (Appropriately enough there is an early translation of 'Ae Fond Kiss' by Mikhail Lermontov, himself the descendant of a Scottish adventurer called Learmont who had entered the Russian service in the seventeenth century.) Burns's work was also greatly admired in Scandinavia, and one of the first to translate him was Henrik Wergeland, the outstanding Norwegian lyric poet of the nineteenth century.

In Canada and the United States, Burns's egalitarianism and his identification with the colonial cause had gone down well from the start. There were also many expatriate Scots who needed no prompting either to promote the work or foster the legend. Emigrant sons of Caledonia might quickly shed their Scottish accents after a few years in the land of the free, but they remained in the grip of a powerful nostalgia for the real or imagined Scotland they had left behind. From Pittsburgh, in 1852, the young Andrew Carnegie wrote home to an uncle:

Although I cannot say sow crae just as broad as I once could I can read about Wallace, Bruce and Burns with as much enthusiasm as ever and feel proud of having been a son of old Calodonia, [sic] and I like to tell people when they ask, 'Are you native born?' 'No sir, I am a Scotchman,' and I feel as proud as I am sure as ever Romans did when it was their boast to say, 'I am a Roman citizen.'⁷

In 1859, the hundredth anniversary of Burns's birth was widely celebrated in North America. In New York City, a centenary oration was given by the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, then at the height of his fame as a congregational minister and moral crusader. Until his death, he told his audience, Burns's life had been a failure: 'Ever since it has been a marvelous success.' In Boston, there was a lavishly eloquent tribute from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Not Latimer, nor Luther struck more telling blows against false theology than did this brave singer. The Confession of Augsburg, the Declaration of Independence, the French Rights of Man, and the 'Marseillaise', are not more weighty documents in the history of freedom than the songs of Burns.

Emerson drew heady comparisons with Rabelais, Shakespeare and Cervantes. 'If I should add another name,' he continued, 'I find it only in a living country-man of Burns.' (He was a great friend and admirer of Carlyle's.) The genius of Burns was exceptional, and for a curious reason:

The people who care nothing for literature and poetry care for Burns … Yet how true a poet he is! And the poet, too, of poor men, of gray hodden and the guernsey coat and the blouse … And as he was thus the poet of the poor, anxious, cheerful, working humanity, so had he the language of low life … It seemed odious to Luther that the devil should have all the best tunes; he would bring them into the churches; and Burns knew how to take from friars and gypsies, blacksmiths and drovers, the speech of the market and the street, and clothe it with melody …⁸

Celebrations took place in fifty-nine other locations in the United States. We know this because they were chronicled in meticulous detail by an Edinburgh artist and man of letters called James Ballantine. England did slightly better with seventy-six meetings, the Colonies notched up forty-eight and Ireland ten; the occasion was also marked by Burnsians in Copenhagen. Ballantine recorded proudly that in Scotland itself the day was celebrated by six hundred and seventy-six events:

The utmost enthusiasm pervaded all ranks and classes. Villages and hamlets, unnoticed in statistical reports, unrecorded in Gazetteers, had their dinners, suppers, and balls. City vied with clachan, peer with peasant, philanthropist with patriot, philosopher with statesman, orator with poet, in honouring the memory of the Ploughman Bard.⁹ …

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the apotheosis of Burns was well-nigh accomplished. In March 1885, a marble bust was placed in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. It was unveiled by Gladstone's successor as Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, and the name of the Prince of Wales stood at the head of the subscription list. The sculptor was the Aberdonian Sir John Steell, who had executed the marble figure for the Scott Monument in Edinburgh and who had been awarded a commission some years previously for a statue of Burns in New York's Central Park—the first outside Scotland. Bronze casts of this were made, one for Dundee, one for Dunedin, one for the Thames Embankment. This too had been unveiled by Rosebery, who delivered a speech arrestingly free of the sentimentality that was so often the hallmark of such occasions:

It was not much for him to die so young; he died in noble company, for he died at the age which took away Raphael and Byron, the age which Lord Beaconsfield has called the fatal age of 37. After all, in life there is but a very limited stock of life's breath; some draw it in deep sighs and make an end; some draw it in quick draughts and have done with it; and some draw it placidly through four-score quiet years; but genius as a rule makes quick work with it. It crowds a lifetime into a few brief years, and then passes away, as if glad to be delivered of its message to the world, and glad to be delivered from an uncongenial sphere.¹⁰

In the heyday of Victorian prosperity a small army of likenesses in stone and bronze sprang up in Great Britain, North America and the southern hemisphere—not only statues, but plaques and roundels, panels in high and low relief, busts in bronze and plaster and wood and Sicilian marble. James Mackay, indefatigable auditor of the world's store of Burnsiana, believes that only Christopher Columbus and (in his day) Lenin have been more widely commemorated.

A bust had been installed in the Mercantile Library in St Louis, Missouri, in 1866; on Labour Day, 1877, a statue was unveiled by the Scottish community in the Australian gold-rush town of Ballarat. Burns attracted the attention of a number of nineteenth-century Italian sculptors. Fidardo Landi, a professor in the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara, produced several busts—one of them found its way to the public library of Fall River in Massachussets. In the Scottish capital, the statue in marble commissioned from John Flaxman in 1824 took some time to find a permanent home. Originally sited in the Burns monument on Calton Hill, it was subsequently transferred to the University Library. The Principal, however, Dr John Lee, took exception to this on the ground that Burns was not a graduate. After some wrangling it was moved to the National Gallery of Scotland; finally, in 1889, it came to rest in the entrance hall of the newly-opened National Portrait Gallery, and that is where it stands today.

Burns seated, Burns standing to attention, Burns leaning on a stick, Burns sprawled on the fork of a tree. Life-size in Adelaide, eleven feet tall in San Francisco. Burns in plaid and breeches, Burns in the Fox livery of buff and blue; bare-headed and shirt-sleeved in Barre, Vermont, in Auckland he is got up in a tail coat and a Kilmarnock bonnet. In Aberdeen his expression is stern and dignified, in Central Park it is pained; he looks earnest in Ayr, vacant in Dumfries. Burns in the act of composition, Burns gazing at the evening star, Burns holding a bunch of daisies … The range is truly eclectic, although inevitably some are more successful than others. 'Undoubtedly the most pretentious of all Burns monuments,' writes James Mackay of the structure unveiled in Kilmarnock in 1879—'a fusion of Scots Baronial, neo-Gothic and Italianate, with a dash of Baroque and a hint of Romanesque'.¹¹

The centenary of Burns's death in 1896 was also widely marked. At the Mausoleum in Dumfries, wreaths arrived from around the world. The one sent by Burnsians in New South Wales was somewhat delayed. It had been placed inside a block of ice and conveyed to Scotland in the refrigerated hold of a ship normally used for transporting frozen meat. It finally reached Dumfries by goods train early in August, and was met by the town band and a large crowd, but although it had by this time begun to melt, the block of ice in which the wreath was entombed was still too big to be got through the gateway of the Mausoleum.

There was an ambitious exhibition in Glasgow. It was held under the patronage of Queen Victoria and of a galaxy of the great and the good—dukes and marquesses, generals and archbishops, Lord Provosts and Members of Parliament, university principals and newspaper editors. Sir John Millais, then President of the Royal Academy, was an Honorary Vice-President, as was the historian W. E. H. Lecky; literature was represented by the oddly-assorted duo of Bret Harte and Algernon Swinburne. Lord Rosebery, whose premiership had ended so miserably the year before, accepted the honorary presidency; another patron was Andrew Carnegie—for many years it was de rigueur in the libraries he endowed in the United States (there were more than three thousand of them) to have a bust of Burns on display.

An unwieldy general committee was established. It included, as ex-officio members, not only the entire executive council of the Burns Federation, founded eleven years previously, but the presidents, vice-presidents and secretaries of all the clubs affiliated to it. These already numbered seventy—the Burns Haggis Club of Alloa and the Winnipeg St Andrew's Society, the St Rollox Jolly Beggars and the Scottish Thistle Club of San Francisco … Happily there was also a much smaller executive committee with a strong leavening of Glasgow lawyers and businessmen, and they saw to it that the exhibition was ready by the appointed day in July.

In the six galleries of the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts in Sauchiehall Street the committee assembled a remarkable collection. There were books and manuscripts, portraits and pictures. The Trustees of the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh declined for some reason to lend the original portrait for which Burns gave sittings to Nasmyth, but the Skirving drawing in red chalk was there, and McKenzie's portrait 'Bonnie Jean and Grandchild' attracted much attention.

The book section of the exhibition was a bibliographical feast. The organisers had managed to lay their hands on 696 different editions, issued by 243 publishers in thirty-two cities and towns of the United Kingdom (which at that time included the whole of Ireland)—303 editions in Scotland, 359 in England, thirty-four in Ireland. The editors of the catalogue expressed some disappointment at having been able to round up only some seventy editions from the United States:

Only four of the greater cities are represented, while wealthy, populous, and progressive centres like Washington, Chicago, Cincinnati, San Francisco, St. Louis, and New Orleans do not appear at all. The presence in the list of relatively small places like Salem and Wilmington may be taken as evidence that Burns has been much more widely and frequently reprinted in the United States than would appear from this collection …¹²

There was also a section of translations and continental editions—Burns in Bohemian, Burns in Flemish, Burns in Hungarian, Burns in medieval Latin. Germany was strongly represented, and even the Old Enemy was catered for: Burns in English, translated from the Scottish Dialect by Alexander Corbett, Boston, 1892. The most popular feature of the exhibition was the display of relics. A writer in the Twentieth Century in 1892 had poured scorn on the credulity of Church dignitaries in Rome who venerated such objects as a bottle of the Virgin's milk or a vial of the sweat of St Michael when he contended with Satan. Such excesses were clearly not to be expected in the land of Calvin and cakes, but the editors of the catalogue deemed it prudent to issue a mild disclaimer: 'Though no hall-mark of genuineness can be claimed on the ground of admission to the Exhibition, it is not to be supposed that any large proportion of the articles shown were of the nature of counterfeits."¹³

The crowds who thronged the large gallery found much to excite their interest. Here was the poet's excise ink bottle and the Bible he had read when he was at Brow Well; here was a draught-board he and Gilbert had used at Lochlea, and here was his masonic apron and the jewel he had worn as Depute Master of the St James' Lodge at Tarbolton. There were two of his razors, his blunderbuss and several locks of his hair; there was Jean's rolling pin, and a pair of her black silk embroidered stockings. John B. Morgan had lent the bolt and two hasps from the outer door of Clarinda's house; the Kilmarnock Burns Club had lent a small egg-cup made from the old rafters of the steading at Mossgiel; J. R. S. Hunter Selkirk, LL.D., had made several items available from his collection, including 'a piece of wood which formed part of a joist on which the bed rested on which Burns died.' 'All are redolent of his humanity—scarce one of his spirituality,' wrote Duncan McNaught, the then editor of the Burns Chronicle:

Burns is no abstraction to his countrymen. His poetry is embalmed in their hearts, and his overshadowing personality pervades and is ever associated with it. Hence it is that everything connected, in the remotest degree, with his earthly pilgrimage is guarded by all sorts and conditions of men with a solicitude that is apt to evoke a smile from those outwith the pale of the national feeling.¹⁴

The 1890s saw important advances in Burns scholarship—much of it from outside that pale. In 1893 the Frenchman Auguste Angellier of the University of Lille brought out his magisterial two-part Life and Works. The first volume was a searching biographical study, the second considered Burns's poetry not only in its British context, but against a broader European background. To Angellier, Burns stands out in the literature of his native land as a somewhat isolated figure. In his view, he could find congenial literary asylum in the French tradition, and he draws interesting comparisons with poets of an earlier age like François Villon and Mathurin Régnier.¹⁵

In Britain the centenary was marked by two substantial works. William Wallace published his extensive revision of Dr Robert Chambers' four-volume study, first published in 1851–2, and Henley and Henderson produced a new text of the poems far superior to any that had previously appeared. The flamboyant Henley (Robert Louis Stevenson, a close friend, called him 'boisterous and piratic'—he was the model for Long John Silver), enlivened this Centenary edition with a brilliantly acerbic biographical essay, as readable today as it was in the closing years of Victoria's reign.

The German academic Hans Hecht, a godson of Brahms, published his excellent short biography in 1919.¹⁶ After that, the centre of gravity of Burns scholarship shifted to North America, and the contributions made during the 1930s by such scholars as Franklin Bliss Snyder and J. De Lancey Ferguson have not been surpassed. Ferguson's edition of the Letters came out in 1931 and Snyder's Life the following year. Ferguson's original and penetrating study, Pride and Passion, which appeared on the eve of the Second World War, ended on a glum note: Burns's worshippers, he concluded, were ashamed of the best part of his nature and his work, and nobody else read him at all.

Ferguson was perhaps unduly despondent; academics sometimes are. His energetic fellow-countrymen did not see reading books and erecting statues as the only ways of paying homage to the bard. In St Louis, Missouri, there was a long-established Burns Cottage Association; in 1902 it had published a report of a project to build an exact replica of Burns's cottage at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. During the First World War a young Scot called John Reith, later to become celebrated as the first director-general of the British Broadcasting Corporation, was despatched to the United States on a weapons procurement mission. Wounded in France, and with a vivid scar on his cheek to prove it, he found himself much fêted by the local business community in Philadelphia. On one occasion he stayed overnight with a wealthy family of Scottish descent. 'Next morning I was awakened by telephone at 5.30,' he noted in his diary. 'They showed me with great pride that the grounds immediately in front of the dining room were laid out in boxwood hedges and little paths the same pattern as behind Burns' cottage at Ayr.'¹⁷

From 1924 onwards Burns became widely known in the Soviet Union through the translations of Samuil Marshak. A friend of Gorki's and celebrated in Russia as a children's poet, Marshak also translated Shakespeare, Blake, Edward Lear and A. A. Milne; by the time he died in 1964, his translations of Burns had sold more than a million copies.

The poems became available in Icelandic in 1924, Rumanian in 1925 and Esperanto in 1926. (The Faroese had to wait till 1945, and the Albanians until the 1960s.) Their appeal was not confined to the English-speaking world and to Europe. 'In order to understand China,' the philosopher Lin Yutang wrote in 1935, 'one needs a little detachment and a little simplicity of mind too; that simplicity of mind so well typified by Robert Burns, one of the most Scottish and yet most universal of all poets.'¹⁸

Interest in the life and work of Burns continued at a high level in the inter-war years, even if changed economic conditions meant that he was now less frequently immortalised in stone.¹⁹ There was no check, however, to the commercial exploitation of the Bard. Memorabilia in porcelain and pottery had begun to appear early in the nineteenth century. Burns's friends in Dumfries commissioned a splendid three-gallon punch-bowl and four whisky jugs from Spode as early as 1819, and ceramics remained attractive to those whose enthusiasm for Burns was tempered with some aesthetic sensibility—the Globe Inn in Dumfries still possesses a delightful Staffordshire flatback figure of Tarn o'Shanter and Souter Johnny, for instance, and in the middle of the nineteenth century items of saltglazed stoneware were also produced at Portobello and other Scottish potteries. Later, the flood of souvenirs and mementoes was swollen by all manner of printed ephemera—labels for whisky bottles, calendars, match boxes and cigarette cards, beer mats, Tshirts and the lids of shortbread tins.

In the twentieth century, as in the nineteenth, Burns has been hi-jacked for a range of political purposes. The authors of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia wrote about him as predictably as they did about Dickens. ('Burns, who had assimilated the progressive ideas of the Enlightenment, created an original form of poetry that was modern in spirit and content … ') A pamphlet published in Vancouver in 1926 was entitled Robert Burns, Patriot and Internationalist. In Scotland, whenever there has been a revival of the fortunes of the Scottish National Party, some of its less sophisticated candidates have tended to evince a loud proprietary interest. In 1989, at the first Dumfries Burns Festival, an exhibition was mounted with the title 'For a' That'. It was advertised as having two aims—to shed new light on Burns, and to get more people thinking about contemporary art. One of the paintings on display depicted a newspaper billboard which proclaimed 'Robert Burns calls for Tougher Sanctions Against South Africa'.

Earlier, in the 1950s and 60s, he was the occasion of a controversy in which, improbably, philately became caught up in politics. A month after the 160th anniversary of Burns's death in 1956, the Soviet Union, rather mysteriously, issued a special 40-kopeck postage stamp. The British Post Office was notoriously conservative in the matter of commemorative issues, and when the Burns Federation and its many allies made a case for a stamp to mark the bicentenary of the birth, they came up against a brick wall.

Four years later, when it was announced that five stamps would be issued to mark the Shakespeare quatercentenary, Scottish tempers rose; in Ayrshire, the Stevenston Branch of the Scottish National Party produced a crudely-printed label decorated with the Lion rampant which read 'BOYCOTT THE SHAKESPEARE STAMPS! "NO PRECEDENT" FOR BURNS, WHY ONE FOR HIM?' The Labour government that came to power in 1964 adopted a more liberal policy, and two Burns stamps were eventually issued in 1966—in time, somewhat raggedly, to mark the 207th anniversary.

In more recent times Burnsians have had to brace themselves against the impact of feminism. A charity event at the Kelvingrove Galleries in Glasgow in January 1992 was billed as Scotland's first womenonly Burns Supper, although some of those present thought this a misnomer and argued that it should be called a Jean Armour Supper. 'We are going to make it more sophisticated,' announced one of the organisers. Champagne was served in place of whisky. A few men in kilts were allowed to be present to serve the haggis.

Notes

¹Edinburgh Review, xiii (January 1809), pp. 249–76.

²Quarterly Review, i, (February 1809), pp. 19–36.

³ Letters, 112. This is the letter written from Carlisle in June 1787. See pp. 145–6 supra.

⁴ Snyder, p. 488.

⁵Edinburgh Review, xlviii, no. xcvi, December 1828.

⁶ The two men were very good friends. 'A beautiful little man,' Carlyle wrote of Jeffrey in his Reminiscences, 'and a bright island to me and mine in the sea of things.'

⁷ Letter to George Lauder dated 30th May 1852, now in the Carnegie papers in the Library of Congress. Quoted in Joseph Frazier Wall, Andrew Carnegie, Oxford University Press, New York, 1970, p. 101.

⁸ E. W. Emerson, (ed.) Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Centenary Edition, Boston and New York, 1911, vol. xi, pp. 440–3. Margaret Fuller, Emerson's associate on the transcendentalist magazine the Dial, waxed even more rhapsodical: 'Since Adam,' she wrote, 'there has been none that approached nearer fitness to stand up before God and angels in the naked majesty of manhood than Robert Burns.' (Quoted in Franklyn Bliss Snyder, Robert Burns, His Personality, His Reputation and His Art, University of Toronto Press, 1936, p. 77.)

⁹ James Ballantine (comp. and ed.) Chronicle of the Hundredth Birthday of Robert Burns, A. Fullarton & Co., Edinburgh, 1859, p. 430. Ballantine (1808–77) began life as a house-painter. He later became interested in the revival of glass-painting, and was commissioned to execute the stained-glass windows in the House of Lords. He was also one of the so-called Whistle-binkie poets, who published collections of sentimental songs and poems.

¹⁰ Robert Rhodes James, Rosebery, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1963, p. 213.

¹¹ James A. Mackay, Burnsiana, Alloway Publishing Ltd., Ayr, 1988, p. 36.

¹²Memorial Catalogue of the Burns Exhibition, William Hodge & Company and T. R. Annan & Sons, Glasgow, 1898, p. 196.

¹³Ibid., p. 92. A substantial number of the Burns letters which passed through the auction rooms in the 1880s and 1890s turned out to be forgeries, many of them the work of an Edinburgh man called Alexander H. Smith. This enterprising citizen (he became known as 'Antique' Smith) managed to keep one step ahead of the law for quite some time.

¹⁴Ibid., pp. 91–2.

¹⁵ Villon, (c. 1431–1463), thief and murderer as well as poet, would easily find a place in The Jolly Beggars. He is remembered especially for his Grand Testament and for his Ballade des dames du temps jadis, with its celebrated refrain, 'Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?' The life of Régnier (1573–1613) was less violent but equally dissipated. A disciple of Ronsard and a forerunner of Molière, he was a stylish and penetrating satirist. Burns would have approved of the licence he permitted himself in his language and of many of his sentiments: 'C'est honte de vivre et de n'être amoureux'—'it is shameful to live and not be in love.'

¹⁶Robert Burns, Leben und Wirken des schottischen Volksdichters, Carl Winter, Heidelberg. There is an excellent English translation by Jane Lymburn, first published in 1936 by William Hodge and Co. Alloway Publishing Ltd. of Ayr brought out a new edition in 1981.

¹⁷ Entry for 16 May 1916, Reith Diaries, BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham.

¹⁸ Lin Yutang, My Country and My People, New York, 1935. Another Chinese Burnsian, Dr. Wen Yuan-Ning, visiting Britain as a member of a Chinese goodwill parliamentary mission towards the end of the Second World War, was invited to propose the Immortal Memory in a BBC radio programme. Burns's treatment of common incidents and feelings, he said, reminded him very much of the poetry of his own country. ('Robert Burns: Songs and Poems to Celebrate the Anniversary of the Poet's Birth', BBC Home Service, 9.40 p.m., 25th January 1944.)

¹⁹ There were exceptions. James Mackay notes that Cheyenne, Wyoming, boasts an elegant bronze on a granite pedestal, erected in 1929; it was presented by Mary Gemmell Gilchrist, the widow of one of Wyoming's most colourful cattle-barons—and a native of Ayrshire. An enormous Burns Memorial was also put up in Canberra, Australia, in 1935. (Mackay, Burnsiana, op. cit., p. 46.)