Burns, when about to sail for America after the first publication of his poems, consoled himself with ‘the delicious thought of being regarded as a clever fellow, though on the other side of the Atlantic.’ Footnote 59: This man (Burke) who was a half poet and a half philosopher, has done more mischief than perhaps any other person in the world. His understanding was not competent to the discovery of any truth, but it was sufficient to palliate a falsehood; his reasons, of little weight in themselves, thrown into the scale of power, were dreadful. Without genius to adorn the beautiful, he had the art to throw a dazzling veil over the deformed and disgusting; and to strew the flowers of imagination over the rotten carcass of corruption, not to prevent, but to communicate the infection. His jealousy of Rousseau was one chief cause of his opposition to the French Revolution. The writings of the one had changed the institutions of a kingdom; while the speeches of the other, with the intrigues of his whole party, had changed nothing but the _turnspit of the King’s kitchen_. He would have blotted out the broad pure light of Heaven, because it did not first shine in at the little Gothic windows of St. Stephen’s Chapel. The genius of Rousseau had levelled the towers of the Bastile with the dust; our zealous reformist, who would rather be doing mischief than nothing, tried, therefore, to patch them up again, by calling that loathsome dungeon the King’s castle, and by fulsome adulation of the virtues of a Court strumpet. This man,—but enough of him here. Footnote 60: This word is not English. Footnote 61: Written in 1806. Footnote 62: Plato’s cave, in which he supposes a man to be shut up all his life with his back to the light, and to see nothing of the figures of men, or other objects that pass by, but their shadows on the opposite wall of his cell, so that when he is let out and sees the real figures, he is only dazzled and confounded by them, seems an ingenious satire on the life of a book-worm. Footnote 63: The following lively description of this actress is given by Cibber in his Apology:—