The Man of Feeling had bruised himself against a harsher reality than anything Harley had found in London or Bedlam; the idealist in politics had learned the substance of which politicians are made. Brimming with New Light theories about the Moral Sense, convinced by primitivists like Rousseau that ‘mankind are by nature benevolent creatures’ whom mere stress of hunger and poverty makes selfish, Burns had come naked to battle against the forces of alarmed conservatism and privilege. Like thousands of others he had taken seriously the slogans of ‘Liberty’ and ‘the Rights of Man’, and had seen in the French Revolution the signs that the world’s great age was beginning anew. His disillusionment went deeper than mere realization of his own unsafe position as a government employee. He was watching the ancient forces of selfishness and aggression capture the movement from which he had hoped so much. His enlistment in the Dumfries Volunteers was not wholly from dread of further jeopardizing his livelihood by holding aloof. He still believed in the principles of the Revolution, but that belief did not commit him to endorsement of its practices, and so, like many another pacifist, he found himself, still hating war, nevertheless engaged in supporting it. Though he dared no longer give direct utterance to revolutionary sympathies, he could, and did, express his detestation of war in a song like ‘Logan Braes’, and couple the ideas of his generation with the patriotic tradition of medieval Scotland. The low estate of contemporary Scottish liberty threw into more glorious relief the traditions of Bannockburn and the lost cause of the Stuarts. His patriotism accepted without question the legend that ‘Hey tutti taitie’ had been Bruce’s battle-march, as it accepted the romantic interpretation of Mary Queen of Scots. Burns might call himself an unprejudiced inquirer and a sceptic, but his nature had no kinship with the cool remorseless scepticism of a man like David Hume. Hume’s was the keenest Scottish mind of his century; Burns, at least in the height of his rebellion against the Kirk, might have been expected to find the philosopher congenial. But Burns could endure destructive criticism only of things he hated. Hume did not confine his scepticism to religion, and when he brought his devastating intellect to bear on the romantic traditions of his country Burns turned away in anger. He might endorse Hume’s demolition of the supernatural sanctions of the church, but he was disquieted by the application of the same scepticism to the belief in immortality, and infuriated when it was turned upon Queen Mary. Hume was mentally akin to Voltaire and Samuel Butler; Burns to Rousseau and Dickens.