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 environment 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 Cowper, 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 ‘common sense’ deism of England and France, the process by which he reached them was Scottish. The rigidity of the doctrines to which he was subjected in his youth determined the vigour of his reaction from them. As David Hume would scarcely have been so militantly sceptical if he had been reared in a milder faith, so Burns might have been less sentimental. His earliest teachings, it is true, did not stress the more rigorous themes in Scottish Calvinism. The preaching of Dr. William Dalrymple of Ayr, whose church the Burnes family attended during the years at Alloway and Mount Oliphant, was notably mild and gentle; William Burnes’s own little ‘Manual of Religious Belief’, though it gave a reasonably orthodox definition of the Fall of Man, was silent on such doctrinal points as predestination and the Four-Fold State. Undoubtedly, therefore, the Old Light tenets of Daddy Auld of Mauchline made a deeper impression on Burns’s eighteen-year-old mind than they would have done had he been exposed to them from infancy. Yet Burns had encountered _The Man of Feeling_ before he left Mount Oliphant; the doctrines of sentiment and deism were in the air he breathed; his emotional nature would have brought him to them sooner or later, regardless of other stimuli. The most that can be attributed to Auld is a little hastening and intensifying of the process of revolt.