Sunday Reverie: “Wee, sleeket, cowrin, tim’rous beastie …”

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“To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plow”. Burns apologises with stunning sincerity:

I’m truly sorry man’s dominion,
Has broken nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!

But it’s not just the natural world we need to apologise to. It’s our own History. Imagine if a Government somewhere allowed an army of forty thousand mercenaries to hunt it down and mostly destroy it by keeping shtum?

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More Heritage Journal views on artefact collecting

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