They need not have been quite so shocked if they had viewed the matter more in its political and less in its literary aspect. But most of the partisans of Corsica were men, or amateurs, of letters, and they believed its defeat meant the loss to the world of that outburst of song which they had made up their minds they would hear as soon as Corsica should be free. Without liberty, they thought, there would be no lyres. At the very moment when countless peasants of England, unable or unwilling to endure the hard conditions of life in that tight realm, were taking themselves off in droves to the colonies, the poets of the country, partly stifled by a smug atmosphere and a tame tradition, sent their imaginations voyaging into lands and ages more hospitable to their profession. In _The Progress of Poetry_ Gray talked about the behaviour of the Muse in Lapland and Chile; in _The Bard_ he set forth the figure of an ancient minstrel whose rage lifts him to the point of prophecy. And whereas Gray had created a primitive singer, James Macpherson created a primitive song and filled the world with the wails of Ossian. The dream of a State of Nature had borne at least that much fruit. But there was more to come. Romance had sown its seeds broadcast and the mood of the race kept on writhing in parturition. Gray had brooded over the mute Miltons of Stoke Poges churchyard; the generation which saw his poem did what it could to see that no such persons should be mute. With the somewhat famous Stephen Duck the Poetical Thresher must stand, Professor Tinker points out, Mary Collier the Poetical Washerwoman and Henry Jones the Poetical Bricklayer and James Woodhouse the Poetical Shoemaker and Ann Yearsley the Poetical Milkwoman—all of them being wonders whom the fashionable exploited to this or that extent. Poetically, it happened, they were unanimously fizzles; and yet they paved a kind of way for a later peasant who was a genius. The discoverers of Robert Burns the Poetical Ploughman must at first have thought that here was merely another Duck. When they had caught him, indeed, they did not know what to do with him, and it is a question whether they helped or hurt him. He did not come, somehow, in the garb and gesture they had expected. Where were the high strains of the primitive bard? Where were the abstract declamations about liberty? Where the novel “numbers” in which he might be expected to dress his “natural” thought? Where the noble suavity? Where, I am afraid they asked in some chagrin, was the meek gratitude that even an inspired peasant should feel towards those who had unearthed him? So far as they could see, this was a man very much like other men.