Scotland/Scots > Life of Robert Burns

124 LIFE OF
by the loss of the court under whose immediate
patronage it had, in almost all preceding times,
found a measure of protection that will ever do
honour to the memory of the unfortunate house
of Stuart, appears to he indicated with sufficient
plainness in the single fact, that no man can
point out any Scottish author of the first rank
in all the long period which intervened between
Buchanan and Hume. The removal of the
chief nobility and gentry, consequent on the
Legislative Union, appeared to destroy our last
hopes as a separate nation, possessing a separate
literature of our own; nay, for a time to have
all hut extinguished the flame of intellectual exer-
ertion and ambition. Long torn and harassed by
religious and political feuds, this people had at
last heard, as many believed, the sentence of irre¬
mediable degradation pronounced by the lips of
their own prince and parliament. The universal
spirit of Scotland was humbled; the unhappy in¬
surrections of 1715 and 1745, revealed the full ex¬
tent of her internal disunion; and England took, in
some respects, merciless advantage of the fallen.
Time, however, passed on; and Scotland, reco¬
vering at last from the blow which had stunned
her energies, began to vindicate her pretensions,
in the only departments which had been left open
to her, with a zeal and a success which will ever
distinguish one of the brightest pages of her his¬
tory. Deprived of every national honour and dis¬
tinction which it was possible to remove—all the
high branches of external ambition lopped off—
sunk at last, as men thought, effectually into a
province, willing to take law with passive submis¬
sion, in letters as well as polity, from her power¬
ful sister—the old kingdom revived suddenly from