Seemingly the idea that his opinions might get him into trouble had never occurred to Burns. The threat of an official investigation threw him into a humiliating panic, and must also have alarmed his friends in the higher ranks of the Excise. It is difficult otherwise to account for Supervisor Corbet’s coming in person to Dumfries to look into the charges. An accusation brought against a minor officer in the service was scarcely in ordinary routine a serious enough affair to call in one of the highest officials; the inference is that Corbet was rightly fearful of the results if Burns were investigated by an unfriendly agent. Accordingly the Supervisor examined the poet across a dinner-table in company with Findlater and Syme, and in that mellow atmosphere found no ground for the charges ‘save some witty sayings’. But even so, Corbet, in the name of the Board, had to admonish Burns--so the poet reported to Erskine of Mar--‘that _my_ business was to _act_, not to think; & that whatever might be Men or Measures, it was for me to be silent and obedient.’ The hair-splitting particularity of Burns’s defence of his conduct is in itself proof of the real basis of the charges against him. He revered the King, he declared, in his public capacity as ‘the sacred Keystone of our Royal Arch Constitution’, but George’s ‘private worth, it is altogether impossible that such a man as I can appreciate.’ (On the report of the King’s first admitted insanity in 1788 he had said, ‘I am not sure whether he is not a gainer, by how much a Madman is a more respectable character than a Fool.’) He had joined no party for revolution or reform; his contributions to the radical _Edinburgh Gazetteer_ had been only a couple of non-political verses. But he did not mention that in subscribing to the _Gazetteer_ he had urged its editor, William Johnston, to ‘lay bare, with undaunted heart & steady hand, that horrid mass of corruption called Politics & State-Craft!’ and to ‘dare to draw in their native colours these “Calm, thinking Villains whom no faith can fix”--whatever be the Shibboleth of their pretended Party.’ Oddly enough, the _Rosamond’s_ carronades had not been brought up against him. Hence he naturally did not mention them, but he took occasion to avow that though he had been an enthusiastic votary of France at the beginning, he had changed his sentiments since the Revolution had embarked on a career of bloodshed and military aggression.