Well, hasn't the original enquiry been fairly comprehensively dealt with, at least with regard to the syntax and sense of the opening lines? It wasn't originally a discussion about the entire work, desirable as that might be, and the royalty material seems to be partly thrown in by those wanting to cut them down to size metaphorically, if not literally, that is, in the way that Mary Stuart and her grandson were cut down to size. I know that's what I've been doing; we pay enough for the bastards, so at least let's look and laugh at them. (Don't, for heaven's sake, someone start chatting about how each year the monarch signs over the Crown estates in return for a Civil List - you really need the horse-face of Norman StJohn Stevens to do that piece of horse-shit justice).

There's plenty to be made of Burns's "A Man's a Man", such as the fact that he stated it was not a song, but "a number of good prose thoughts inverted into rhyme", but all the royalty genealogy has brought this to mind; does anyone know the origin of the line Burns quoted about "my ancient, but ignoble blood/Has crept through scoundrels, ever since the Flood"?