Without Burns’s share in the work of gathering old Jacobite songs, for instance, and composing new ones, it may be questioned if such a halo of romance would have surrounded, in the next generation, the Rebellions of 1715 and 1745; without that halo, Sir Walter Scott would have been less readily attracted to them; without Sir Walter, the romantic vision of Scottish history would never have conquered the world. No Scottish writer of the eighteenth century, except Burns, passed on the torch of national pride. Without him, the fact that Hume and Boswell were Scotsmen, that Thomson was born on Tweed instead of Thames, would mean no more to the ordinary reader than does the fact that Swift was born in Ireland or Wordsworth in Cumberland. Without him, Ramsay and Fergusson would be forgotten minor poets who wrote in a difficult and obsolete dialect. He gathered together in his own work all that was vital in the work of his predecessors, infused it with the fire of his own personality, and sent it out again to keep Scotland alive. Burns came at the last moment when a national poet could succeed in his task. A few decades later, and the vernacular would have sunk too low for preservation. Even as it was, he could only embalm it and not renew it as poetic speech. Except for Lady Nairne’s, scarcely any vernacular poetry written in Scotland since 1800 deserves higher ranking than the _Barrack-Room Ballads_. As a poetic influence, Burns’s work was weak. As a national influence, its force is not yet spent. He revealed the richness and colour of Scottish life, and in revealing it gave direction and vitality to the long and noble line of novelists which began with Sir Walter Scott and John Galt, and continued through Stevenson to John Buchan and the late Neil Munro. Through these men the Scotland which was no longer, politically, a nation became more enduring than anything which depends on rulers and boundaries--a nation of the mind and heart, a home of lost causes, of impossible loyalties, of high romance and simple faith. It is not Scott’s kings and ladies and nobles who keep his books alive; it is people like Edie Ochiltree, Jeanie Deans, Meg Dods, and Dandie Dinmont--in other words, the characters who are part and parcel of the world which Burns depicted and glorified. Steenie Steenson, like Thrawn Janet and Tod Lapraik, carries on the great tradition of Tam o’ Shanter. Without Burns the Scottish novel as we know it would never have been; without the Scottish novel, the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would be as much the poorer as seventeenth-century poetry would be without the Cavaliers.