NOT merely in his struggle for livelihood and in the
poetic art which immortalized him was Burns a
Scot of the Scots. He was equally so in his religion,
his politics, and, above all, his patriotism. Only in
this last was he untypical of his generation. Yet such
statements are misleadingly simple. All they can
safely mean is that Burns, like all men in all ages,
was influenced in thought and conduct by the en-
vironment in which he lived. Nevertheless, in a
nation so small and self-contained as Scotland in
the eighteenth century the pressure of environment
was felt to a degree unrealized in larger and more
cosmopolitan communities. In England during
Burns's manhood the social and literary worlds of
Burke and Sheridan and Horace Walpole, of Cow-
per, of John Wesley, of Godwin, of Blake, touched
each other only lightly and tangentially; in the rising
generation of Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Lamb,
and Byron the separations would be even wider.
Scotland by comparison was all of a piece. Even her
greatest philosophers, Adam Smith and David
Hume, even the much-travelled and Anglophile
Boswell, retained their national stamp.

Though in their final form Burns's religious ideas
differed little, if at all, from the sentimental 'com-

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