I. SCOTLAND 3 II. EDUCATION 34 III. MEN 79 IV. WOMEN 135 V. LIVELIHOOD 188 VI. SONG 234 VII. THE SCOT 278 PRIDE AND PASSION ROBERT BURNS 1759-1796 PRIDE AND PASSION I SCOTLAND A Scot in the eighteenth century was a poor relation, subject to the slights and scorns of more prosperous kinfolk, and reared amid poverty, theology, and filth. When Robert Burns was born, on January 25, 1759, his native land was almost at the nadir of its independent existence. Proud and warlike and desperately poor, Scotland had been still an essentially feudal nation when King James VI was called from amid the bickerings of his jealous nobles and intransigent clergy to become James I of England. The permanent removal of the court to London left the country more than ever the prey of contention among its nobles and fanaticism among its ecclesiastics; governed by a parliament without authority; torn at intervals by rebellion and civil strife; denied commercial parity with England, and cut off from the old-time free intercourse with France. The Act of Union of 1707, by admitting Scotland to commercial privileges formerly restricted to England, started the country on the road to material prosperity, but promised to destroy the last vestiges of national pride. It was ‘the end of an old song’. Thenceforward the affairs of Scotland were entrusted to a handful of representatives at Westminster, too small, in those days of patronage and pocket-boroughs, to have enabled even a Scottish Parnell, had there been one, to sway the balance of power. Scotland was no longer Scotland; it was North Britain. And when the House of Hanover succeeded to the English throne, the last vestige of Scottish influence in the government seemed to have vanished. Ruled no longer by the Stuarts--her own kings, even though absentee--but by ‘an insolent, beef-witted race of foreigners’, Scotland turned more and more to the things of the flesh. The last flicker of the ancient loyalties in the ’45 shed only light enough to reveal their death. The Lowlands, though they could not stomach the double treason of a man like Murray of Broughton, acquiesced in the brutal destruction of the Highland clans. Most of the comfortable merchants and landed gentry had viewed the uprising with an apprehension even livelier than that felt by the German court four hundred miles away; when the Highlands were crushed they rejoiced in their own increased security, and showed their loyalty to the reigning House by christening their daughters Charlotte and Wilhelmina, and their new streets and squares Hanover and Brunswick and George.