Here Burns was making a Galileo recantation. On the same day on which he thus denied to Robert Graham that he any longer supported the Revolution he was using French in a letter to Mrs. Dunlop and adding that he hoped it was correct, for ‘much would it go against my soul, to mar anything belonging to that gallant people: though my real sentiments of them shall be confined alone to my letters to you.’ Despite her repeated warnings to drop the subject, he continued to talk about his devotion to Liberty, his friendship with Dr. Maxwell, and his approval of ‘the delivering over a perjured Blockhead & an unprincipled Prostitute to the hands of the hangman’ until the offended lady broke off the correspondence. Seething, as he had said of his feeling in 1788, with the impotent ‘madness of an enraged Scorpion shut up in a thumb-phial’, Burns had to express himself to someone. He had lied about his sentiments, and though the lie was to save his family rather than himself, its taste was bitter in his mouth. Nor was he helped by the realization that all Scotland was equally cowed and that if he had not made his recantation he would have shared the fate of four other citizens of Dumfries who were imprisoned for drinking seditious toasts. Once before he had challenged authority in the shape of the temporal power of the Kirk, and had come off not unscathed but undefeated. Now he had challenged much less openly the State, and had learned the difference in strength between a vital institution and a moribund one. The realization of defeat shook his self-confidence as nothing else had ever done, and helped to drive him to such unmanly conduct as that which followed his quarrel with Maria Riddell. He who had refused to sell his songs for money had sold his independence for bread. That it was his children’s bread and not his own might salve his conscience, but it could not heal his pride.