Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Enlightenment and Revolution: A British Problematic
- Part I Constituencies
- 1 ‘English Men Went Head to Head with their Own Brethren’: The Welsh Ballad-Singers and the War of American Independence
- 2 Scottophobia versus Jacobitism: Political Radicalism and the Press in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland
- 3 Lord Daer, Radicalism, Union and the Enlightenment in the 1790s
- 4 The Political and Cultural Legacy of Robert Burns in Scotland and Ulster, c. 1796–1859
- 5 ‘Blessèd Jubil!’: Slavery, Mission and the Millennial Dawn in the Work of William Williams of Pantycelyn
- Part II The Geography of Utterance
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
3 - Lord Daer, Radicalism, Union and the Enlightenment in the 1790s
from Part I - Constituencies
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Enlightenment and Revolution: A British Problematic
- Part I Constituencies
- 1 ‘English Men Went Head to Head with their Own Brethren’: The Welsh Ballad-Singers and the War of American Independence
- 2 Scottophobia versus Jacobitism: Political Radicalism and the Press in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland
- 3 Lord Daer, Radicalism, Union and the Enlightenment in the 1790s
- 4 The Political and Cultural Legacy of Robert Burns in Scotland and Ulster, c. 1796–1859
- 5 ‘Blessèd Jubil!’: Slavery, Mission and the Millennial Dawn in the Work of William Williams of Pantycelyn
- Part II The Geography of Utterance
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
I watch'd the symptoms o' the Great,
The gentle pride, the lordly state,
The arrogant assuming;
The fient a pride, nae pride had he,
Nor sauce, nor state, that I could see,
Mair than an honest ploughman.
Then from his Lordship I shall learn,
Henceforth to meet with unconcern
One rank as weel's another;
Nae honest, worthy man need care
To meet with noble youthful Daer,
For he but meets a brother.
‘Lines on Meeting with Lord Daer’
The above verses were penned by Robert Burns after he had met Basil William Douglas, Lord Daer, eldest son of the fourth Earl of Selkirk, at Dugald Stewart's country house in Catrine, Ayrshire, on 23 October 1786. Daer was twenty-three years old. Endowed with abundant reserves of curiosity and intellectual energy, he was deeply immersed in Enlightenment learning and culture. He had just returned from France, where he had met the Marquis de Condorcet. Another of his French contacts was Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, who, together with Joseph Priestley, was in the 1780s forging a new understanding of the composition of the material world. As Richard Holmes has recently written, this was ‘a great new and revolutionary age of chemical experiment’. Chemistry held out the promise of rapid intellectual progress, as well as, in the eyes of some, portending great social and political transformation.
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- Cultures of Radicalism in Britain and Ireland , pp. 63 - 78Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014