MacDonald describes Ogilvie's "Essay" as "a pastoral prose poem, through which we can realise this beautiful world, with its ample provision for satisfying man's instinctive and rational faculties of enjoyment." Ogilvie wrote his revolutionary masterwork between 1776 (the US declaration of independence) and 1781—eight years before the storming of the Bastille. He presented the work as a warning to the "friends of mankind", he being "well aware that great changes suddenly accomplished are always pregnant with danger".