IN 1834, almost four decades after his death, the unmarked grave of Robert Burns — or Rabbie, as he is known to those who insist on saying slainge instead of cheers — was prised open and inspected; as far as we can tell, this is what passed for entertainment in 19th century Dumfriesshire.

At its height at the time was the pseudo-science of phrenology, or the study of character as expressed by cranial lumps. With its late possessor by now firmly established as Scotland’s favourite son, its Bard of Immortal Memory, the skull of Burns was clearly one for phrenologists to die for.

It was analysed by one George Combe, who was kept ignorant of the previous owner’s identity. In life, Combe reported, the subject had possessed high levels of “combativeness”, not to mention “philoprogenitiveness”, which was late Hanoverian slang for the inability to keep it in one’s trousers — a shrewd observation on a man like Burns, who sired numerous illegitimate offspring.

Vaguer, however, was the verdict on what the head disclosed about its former owner’s linguistic abilities — “uncertain” was the best that the skull-inspecting Combe could hazard.

It’s doubtful whether phrenology is a discipline of which Jeremy Paxman would approve; the host of Newsnight has always taken a more brusque and two-fisted approach to winkling disclosure from his subjects. On this occasion, though, he and the lump-inspectors have proven to be oddly like-minded.

Having previously described the former home secretary John Reid as an “attack dog” and fretted over the “Scottish Raj” he believes is in control of the country’s media and political elites, Paxman this week extended his vendetta of mischief against the Scots.

In his foreword to the latest edition of the Chambers Dictionary Paxman describes, en passant, Scotland’s national poet as “a king of sentimental doggerel”, useful for coining such vivid terms as forswunk (translation: tired) and ramfeezled (also meaning tired — Burns rarely failed to put himself about) but very little else.

“This is obviously Mr Paxman indulging in the beautiful sport of teasing the Scots,” says the novelist Alasdair Gray, whose best-known work Lanark is partly a tribute to the “humane and lyrical rationalism” of Burns. “What Paxman said is obviously not true at all, it’s just that English folk today don’t read Burns any more.”

Much like insulting a man’s horse outside an Alloway tavern, of course, this was fighting talk. To rank the Immortal Bard as a source of vexation no better than a baggy pair of Marks and Spencer underpants — a previous source of Paxman’s ire — was taking poetic licence too far.

The Burns industry, custodians of the sacred Burnsian sites in Ayrshire and Dumfriesshire, got on its hind legs to whinny the insult away; the Scottish academic community closed ranks. Alex Salmond, meanwhile, got personal: “Jeremy should spend more time reading Burns. As the Bard wrote in To a Louse: ‘O wad some pow’r the giftie gie us, to see oursels as others see us.’ In light of his daft comments about Burns, Jeremy looks like a gowk.”

Combe’s and Paxman’s conclusions, though, are ones with which the English literary establishment has seldom rushed to disagree. The classic pantheon of the Romantic poets remains ruled by Byron, Shelley, Keats and Coleridge; men, according to Edmund Blackadder in the television sitcom, much given to “poncing round Italy in frilly shirts”.

In this company Burns hardly gets a look-in, still officially considered something of a country cousin; a manure-spattered lightweight.

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