86 FAMOUS SCOTS 



by the obtrusion of its more eminent members, but by 

 the average. We do not judge the provincial governors 

 of Rome by such men as the occasional Cicero and 

 Rutilius, but by the too frequent repetition of men like 

 Verres and Piso. Nor even in these very upper reaches 

 will the Moderates bear a close inspection. No one 

 now reads Home's Douglas. Young Norval has gone 

 the way, as the critic says, of all waxworks, and curious 

 is the fate of the great Blair : he lives not for the works 

 upon which immortality was fondly staked, but for 

 having given breakfasts to Burns in his Edinburgh 

 days. ' I have read them,' says Johnson of these ser- 

 mons ; ' they are sermones aurei ac auro magis aurei. I 

 had the honour of first finding and first praising his 

 excellencies. I did not stay to add my voice to that of 

 the public. I love Blair's sermons, though the dog is 

 a Scotchman and a Presbyterian, and everything he 

 should not be.' This avalanche of laudation seems 

 strange to the modern reader, who will find in them 

 the rhetoric of Hervey's Meditations on the Tombs^ 

 united to a theology that could pass muster in a 

 deistical writer. Burns, though he lent himself to be 

 the squib-writer of the Ayrshire Moderates, was fully 

 aware of the merely negative tenets of the school, and 

 in his Holy Fair he asks 



{ What signifies his barren shine 



Of moral powers and reason ? 

 His English style, and gestures fine 

 Are a* clean out o' season. 



