Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 5, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume II

SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS
capable of moving mountains, should have spent
his later years in whittling cherry-stones.
Meanwhile the farm did not prosper; he had
to join to it the salary of an exciseman ; at last he
had to give it up, and rely altogether on the latter
resource. He was an active officer ; and, though
he sometimes tempered severity with mercy, we
have local testimony, oddly representing the pubhc
feeling of the period, that, while ' in everything else
he was a perfect gentleman, when he met with
anything seizable he was no better than any other
gauger.'
There is but one manifestation of the man in
these last years which need delay us : and that
was the sudden interest in politics which arose from
his sympathy with the great French Revolution.
His only political feeling had been hitherto a
sentimental Jacobitism, not more or less respect-
able than that of Scott, Aytoun, and the rest of
what George Borrow has nicknamed the ' Charlie
over the water' Scotsmen. It was a sentiment
almost entirely literary and picturesque in its origin,
built on ballads and the adventures of the Young
Chevalier; and in Burns it is the more excusable,
because he lay out of the way of active politics in
his youth. With the great French Revolution,
something living, practical, and feasible appeared to
him for the first time in this realm of human action.
The young ploughman who had desired so earnestly
to rise, now reached out his sympathies to a whole
nation animated with the same desire. Already in
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