The Canongate Burns (78 page)

These footnotes are derived from Professor Lucylle Werkmeister who first attributed the song to Burns in her seminal essay
Robert
Burns and the London Daily Press,
published in
Modern Philology
(1966). Werkmeister explains the appearance of the poem:

Unaware of her work, it was recently re-attributed to Burns in Scott Hogg's
The Lost Poems
, where Werkmeister's research procedures and results were frequently replicated. The poem appears first in
The Morning Chronicle
, but a copy was also sent to
The Edinburgh
Gazetteer
where it appears within a week of the London paper. Werkmeister goes on to argue:

She illustrates the fact that it was a customary tactic for Burns regularly to submit radical material to the Opposition press, while at the same time, sending non-radical verse under his own name to the pro-government Ministerial newspapers.

Not only do we see here Burns's unparalleled skill in turning old Scots lyrics into contemporary radical song, but his remarkable ability to compress a range of historical events into six condensed stanzas, always hitting the prime targets with satirical wit.
When
Guilford Good Our Pilot Stood
is the perfect case in point, which meticulously chronicles the key events of the American-British war.

The chief satirical victims here are William Pitt and his deputy Henry Dundas (l. 42), who was in charge of the Home Office spy network which existed throughout Britain and successfully infiltrated many groups such as The Friends of the People in Scotland and monitored the London Corresponding Society, the leading intellectual and propaganda arm of British radicalism. John Reeves (l. 42) set up the Association for Protecting Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, a propaganda arm of government supporters which rallied ‘men of rank' to support the King and Constitution against the fear of invading Jacobins and their supporters at home. Charles Long (l. 42) was Secretary to the Treasury and through paying the pro-government press to speak the ministerial line, he was made a Baron. As Werkmeister comments, there is no evidence that these ‘wanton wags' visited Walmer Castle at this time (1794) for a weekend's drinking session, so this visit may be poetic licence. It was, though, common knowledge that when announcing Britain's involvement in the war against Revolutionary France, both Pitt and Dundas were drunk; the latter falling and faltering at the despatch box. Burns would have been wholly aware of Dundas's public reputation for heavy drinking. Coleridge, accordingly, called him ‘brazen faced' and Dr Wolcot (Peter Pindar) and Professor Richard Porson also emphasised this issue in their satires on him.

Werkmeister did not feel the need to strengthen her case with textual comparison. A few examples, though, are persuasive. The echo of Burns's song
Duncan Davidson
, ll. 5–8 is apparent:

The
New Song
(ll. 33–36) has virtually the same text, suitably adapted. The similarity is striking. The same poetic sentiment, mourning the death caused by war; the ‘widow's tears, the orphan's cry', is found in the final stanza of
Logan Braes
. A further description employing the Scots-derived ‘Kate'for ‘Catherine', referring to Catherine the Great, is also found in Burns's
Why Should Na Poor Folk Mowe
, ‘Auld Kate laid her claws on poor Stanislaus,/ And Poland has bent like a bow'.
The textual similarities cannot, however, be explained by another poet's imitation of
Duncan Davison
and
Logan Braes:
the fomer was printed anonymously and the latter was yet to be published.

Moreover, the poem contains a stylistic peculiarity of Burns, evident in his Kilmarnock edition (where he acted as publisher): an excessive use of italics, compared to other contemporaneous poetry. It is probably no coincidence that a month after Burns mentioned
Willie is A Wanton Wag
to George Thomson that a political version of it appeared in
The Morning Chronicle
. Thomson had already poured scorn on Burns's anti-war
Logan Braes
and his squeamish, at best apolitical views would have warned Burns never to send him another overtly political piece.

In recent research on interactive British radical poetry of the 1790s, we are beginning to understand not simply English-Scottish interaction, but how Burns influenced the dissenting Ulster poets. This example, signed ‘Paddy Burns', possibly written by John Orr, shows not simply radical Ulster's assimilation of Burns's poetic form (as in
The Holy Fair
) but also the Scottish poet's radical subject matter. Here, for example, are the first two stanzas of
An
Address to Mr Pitt, In Guid Braid Scotch:

We are not only indebted to Dr Liam McIlvanney's archival retrieval of this particular poem, but to his innovative awareness of the influence of Burns's political poetry in Ulster in the 1790s. As McIlvanney notes: ‘The common vogue for Burns's poems is itself a symptom of this shared political culture. Burns's egalitarian and democratic sentiments, his outspoken pro-Americanism, and his
depiction of the Westminster government as a ‘system of corruption all endeared him to an Ulster Presbyterian audience, and to poets like Orr and Campbell, who were to participate in the 1798 Rising'. (‘Robert Burns and the Ulster–Scots Literary Revival of the 1790s',
Bullán
, Vol. IV, No. 2, pp. 125–43).

This is attributed to Burns in Hogg's
The Lost Poems
(1997). The crucial pen-name ‘A. Briton' was first used by Burns in his anti-Hanoverian letter in
The Edinburgh Evening Courant
of November 1788 (Letter 283). We know from his personal correspondence that he was the author of this seditious letter. We are now confronted in this section with two recently discovered poems and a political essay which use this pseudonymn. Checking of the
Dictionary of Anon
ymous and Pseudonymous Literature
showed no other usage of ‘A. Briton' other than the Burns
Courant
letter during this period and mentions an obscure booklet of 1819 on bank coins, signed A. Briton. We then embarked on a sustained textual scansion of period newspapers and journals in order to discover this pen-name any-where other than in
Lines on Ambition, The Cob-Web
and the political essay from Burns's main London radical outlet,
The Morn
ing Chronicle.
No other usage was found. As we shall see, regarding the new essay, Burns was particularly keen to emphasise to
The Morning Chronicle
that he was, indeed ‘a Briton'. Further, in the late eighteenth century, this pseudonym does not precede Burns's usage and also disappears after his death.

Textually, the new poem is strikingly similar to lines written by Burns during mid-1793 in John Syme's copy of
The British Album
, a volume of the Della Cruscan poets led by Robert Merry:

These lines not only read as though they were embryonic of
Lines on
Ambition
but could easily be inserted in the final part of the poem. Although the first part of the poem is rather cumbersome, Burns did compose very similar lines during mid-1793.

That the subject of ‘Ambition' might be a topic for the poet's pen is evident if a letter to Thomson, written in June 1793, is considered:

Moreover, the notion that Burns might curse the leaders of Britain for involving the country in a war against France (ll. 19–20, ll. 25–8), is clearly seen in a letter to Peter Hill in 1793: ‘O! may the wrath & curse of all mankind, haunt and harass these turbulent
unprincipled misc [reants] who have involved a people in this ruinous business!!!' (Letter 553).

There isno evidence to suggest this poem was copied from an English newspaper or was the work of an English poet. It does not appear in English radical newspapers. It was almost certainly sent to
The Edin
burgh Gazetteer
by Burns, who had previously employed the pen-name.

Indeed, the poet's primary educational text, under his influential tutor Murdoch, that is Arthus Masson's
A Collection of Prose and
Verse from the Best English Authors
, carries a powerful essay ‘The Twelve Caesars' which dwells on the corrupt abuse of power by the ambitious, beginning with the reign of Julius Caesar.