Only, the liberating process so powerfully initiated by Henley has farther to go. It is much to have Burns organically related to a vernacular literature centuries old, and shown as the destined, and in himself richly-endowed, heir of a great inheritance of song which was his to appropriate, re-express, glorify, and complete. It is much to have it established that while there was nothing accidental about his genius, save as all genius is an accident, so there was, in the final result and value, nothing local about his quality and work save as Pindar and Aristophanes were also local. But it still remains that for the aspirational, resistant, and prophetic spirit of Burns—for the positive forces of his thought and character, and for the moral, social, and political declarations laid up in his work—there should be effected a similar liberation from the prejudgments which localise, belittle, and obscure. It has yet to become a matter of common recognition that the appearance of Burns was more than an event in the history of Scottish national sentiment, or in the history of English literature; that it was an event of moment in the history of human ideals. The lad who was born in Kyle had a message for all Europe, and a message that must reach Cathay in time. So far from being local, he stands among the figures of literature, boldly and in a kind of isolation, as more than any other that ever lived and sang, the sheer Man. By his contact with the primeval occupation, by the splendour of his spirit and the courage of his heart, not least by the final ruin of his life, he is indeed the symbol of Man inhabitant of the earth, as we contrast him with the gods, as we oppose him to Destiny. Standing thus in the midst of Nature, yet with a clear inlook upon Society—as it were with one hand upon the plough and another on the pen—he saw that the supreme injustice of the world was not in its acts but its estimates; not in the inequalities of worldly fortune, but in the accumulations of arrogance and the distribution of contempt. He had himself been delivered only by the blossoming of his genius from the doom which would have consigned him to obscurity as one of “the common herd” whose qualities are of no consequence; and he resented the wrong for the sake of all those who have no genius to deliver them. He grudged no man his honours or his possessions. But he grudged that the exaltation of some should be made the debasement of many, and that worth in a poor man should be worth so little in the world’s view of him. Against the oceanic vulgar vice in which society welters, against the habitual easy refusal of respect, his heart was hot with generous protest, as against the spirit that denies and would make abject. And so his message is a claim, unique in its quality and power, that the man of independent mind is kingly in his degree, and that the man of good heart—“the heart compassionate and kind”—is the nearest image of God.