Identifier: wallaceburnsstev00rose (find matches)
Title: Wallace, Burns, Stevenson; appreciations
Year: 1905 (1900s)
Authors: Rosebery, Archibald Philip Primrose, Earl of, 1847-1929
Subjects: Wallace, William, Sir, d. 1305 Burns, Robert, 1759-1796 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1850-1894
Publisher: Stirling : E. Mackay
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
ot-withstanding Mr. Pitts admiration of his poetry,snuffed out his politics without remorse. The name of Pitt leads me to add that Burnshad some sort of relation with three PrimeMinisters. Colonel Jenkinson, of the CinquePorts Fencible Cavalry—afterwards Ministerfor fifteen years under the title of Liverpool—was on duty at Burnss funeral, though we aretold—the good man—that he disapproved of thepoet, and declined to make his acquaintance.Pitt, again, passed on Burns one of his rare andcompetent literary judgments, so eulogistic,indeed, that one wonders that a powerfulMinister could have allowed one whom headmired so much to exist on an excisemans paywhen well, and an excisemans half-pay whendying. And from Addington, another PrimeMinister, Burns elicited a sonnet, which, in theAcademy of Lagado, would surely have beenheld a signal triumph of the art of extractingsunshine from cucumbers. So much for politics in the party sense. Amans a man for a that is not politics—it is the
Text Appearing After Image:
MAUSOLEUM, DUMFRIES. ROBERT BURNS. 57 assertion of the rights of humanity in a sensefar wider than politics. It erects all mankind ;it is the charter of its self-respect. It binds, itheals, it revives, it invigorates; it sets thebruised and broken on their legs, it refreshesthe stricken soul, it is the salve and tonic otcharacter ; it cannot be narrowed into politics.Burnss politics are indeed nothing but theoccasional overflow of his human sympathy intopast history and current events. And now, having discussed the two trains ofthought suggested by the words friend andpatriot, I come to the more dangerous word lover. There is an eternal controversy which,it appears, no didactic oil will ever assuage, asto Burnss private life and morality. Somemaintain that these have nothing to do with hispoems ; some maintain that his life must beread into his works, and here again some thinkthat his life damns his poems, while others averthat his poems cannot be fully appreciated with-out his life.

Note About Images