Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/826

820  "With the additions of, — It was not known to the general public that this poem, begun nearly sixty-three years ago, was ever completed. All who admire Burns, and their name is legion, will be glad to see it in full. It runs thus: Judging from internal evidence, there can be no doubt of the authenticity of this lay of liberty, although it has never appeared in any edition of Burns. To Mrs. Dunlap, the gentle, highly intellectual, and well-informed lady, who, on the first accidental perusal of "The Cotter's Saturday Night," solicited his acquaintance, and was his best and wisest friend ever after, Burns had communicated a few stanzas of his Washington ode, and we find them in the above poem with a few alterations, which prove the authorship. Considering that when he wrote it Burns was himself an official under "the despot" he condemned, and that he seems to have endorsed the execution of poor Louis Capet, a weak rather than a bad man, it must be confessed that the poet was as bold as thoughtless. As it is, the poem evidently did not receive its maker's latest touches.

The question, "'Whence comes it now?" is to be answered in a little narrative. About the year 1833 William Wilson, of gentle blood and culture, arrived in the United States, with his family, from Scotland, and settled in Poughkeepsie, on the Hudson, as bookseller and publisher, and continued there until his death, in his fifty-ninth year, in August, 1860. Like 