Why should a sober, respectable and hard-headed people like the Scots choose for their national poet a romantic rebel who thumbed his nose at all authority and was as free with liquor as he was with women? Instead of Burns Night suppers, asks Morton, shouldn’t we expect the practical-minded Scots to have founded Macadam Societies, to honor the pioneer of improved roads? Or Mackintosh Societies, to honor the inventor of the waterproof?