THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS
To what other cause can you ascribe, what in my mind is still more astonishing, in such a country as Scotland, a nation cast in the happy medium between the spiritless acquiescence of submissive poverty and the sturdy credulity of pampered wealth; cool and ardent, adventurous and persevering; winging her eagle flight against the blaze of every science, with an eye that never winks, and a wing that never tires; crowned as she is with the spoils of every art, and decked with the wreath of every muse; from the deep and scrutinizing researches of her Hume, to the sweet and simple, but not the less sublime and pathetic morality of her Burns[1]—how, from the bosom of a country like that, genius and character and talents should be banished to a distant, barbarous soil; condemned to pine under the horrid communion of vulgar vice and base-born profligacy for twice the period that ordinary calculation gives to the continuance of human life?
But I will not further press any idea that is painful to me and I am sure must be painful to you. I will only say you have now an example of which neither England nor Scotland had the advantage. You have the example of the panic, the infatuation, and the contrition of both. It is now for you to decide whether you will profit by their experience of idle panic and idle regret,
- ↑ Hume at this time had been dead twenty years, but Burns was still living, a third edition of his poems having appeared the year before Curran's speech was made.
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