I stood unintoxicated with the inebriating cup in my hand, looking forward with rueful resolve to the hastening time when the blow of Calumny should dash it to the ground, with all the eagerness of vengeful triumph."

The next verse in the Seventh Elegy is:

"Too proud with servile tone to deign address,
Too mean to think that honours are my due;
Yet should some patron yield my store to bless,

I sure should deem my boundless thanks were few."

A similar coupling of pride and servility is to be found in Burns's letter to the Earl of Eglinton, in January, 1787 :

"Selfish ingratitude I hope I am incapable of; and mercenary servility, I trust, I shall ever have so much honest pride as to detest."

And about the same time he writes to Mrs Dunlop :

"For my part, Madam, I trust I have too much pride for servility, and too little prudence for selfishness."

The sentiment of the line

"Check not my speed where social joys invite,"

requires no comparison in the often-expressed sentiments of Burns.

Taken over all, the Seventh Elegy must have made a considerable impression on the memory of the Scottish Poet.

The whole of the Eleventh Elegy, in which Shenstone complains "How soon the pleasing novelty of life is over," must have been the direct inspiration for a letter from Burns to Richard Brown, of 24th February, 1788. In both elegy and letter life is compared to a "Faery scene," and

the line-

"O Youth, enchanting stage, profusely blest,"

is quoted as from the elegy. The letter also says that almost all that deserves the name of enjoyment or pleasure is only a charming delusion; and in comes repining

age, in all the gravity of hoary wisdom, and wretchedly chases away the bewitching phantom." This is a para

phrase of the lines in the Elegy:

"But now 'tis o'er, the dear delusion's o'er,

Not Science shall extort that dear delight

Which gay Delusion gave the tender mind."

The tenderness and affectionate disposition of Shenstone would naturally appeal to Burns, and the quotation from Burns's letter to Peter Hill, on 2nd March, 1790:

"Even the knaves who have injured me, I would oblige them; though, to tell the truth, it would be more out of vengeance, to show them that I was independent of and above them, not out of the overflowing of my benevolence,"

is an adaptation of the peculiar kind of revenge that Shenstone indicates in paragraph 51 of his "Man and

Manners

"The only kind of revenge which a man of sense need take upon a scoundrel, is, by a series of worthy behaviour, to force him to admire and esteem his name, and yet irritate his animosity by declining a reconciliation. As Sir John Falstaff might say, 'Turning even quarrels to commodity.''

Burns, writing to Mrs Dunlop on 16th August, 1788,

says:

"I could indulge these reflections till my humour could ferment into the most acid chagrin that would corrode the very thread of life,"

an idea of chemical action that he very likely got from the following observation of Shenstone, p. 116:—

"A poet that fails in writing, becomes fast a morose critic. The weak and insipid white-wine makes at length excellent vinegar."

A direct similarity occurs, when Burns, in writing to Gavin Hamilton, April, 1788, says :--

"The language of refusal is to me the most difficult thing

on earth."

This expression, it is obvious, he must have got from Shenstone's

"Not Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Coptic, not even the Chinese language, seems half so difficult to me as the language of refusal.”

Whether Burns was conversant with Dodsley's description of Shenstone's ferme ornée "The Leasowes " is not very evident, but when we find that one of Shenstone's inscriptions, "at the bottom of a large root on the side of a slope," contains-

"The trout bedropp'd with crimson stains,"

one is inclined, though the same idea occurs in other Georgian poets, to conclude that Burns might have taken his description from Shenstone, for in "Tam Samson's Elegy we find the words:

:

"Trouts bedropp'd wi' crimson hail."

The word "bedropp'd" is common to both.

Burns may have perused Shenstone's letters, but a perusal of them does not suggest any ideas that Burns may have benefited from that are not used also in his obserMan and Manners."

vations upon

Similarities, of course, may be found in the letters, but these are not frequent enough to repay research, and may be neglected.

One authority has it that Burns was largely influenced by Shenstone's Schoolmistress as regards the rhyme and theme and rhythm. Such coincidences or similarities as we find common to both are not very numerous, and to say that Burns took the Spenserian stanza from Shenstone is open to doubt, when we consider that Mrs Dunlop tells Burns that he taught her to know Spenser; and in Thomson's works, which Burns acquired simultaneously with Shenstone's at Kirkoswald, there is the "Castle of Indolence" in true Spenserian stanza. Yet there is undoubtedly more than a hazy idea and a sough between the "Cottar's Saturday Night" and the "School

mistress." The expression "modest worth applied to the School Dame, is also applied to Coila in the " Vision," and russet weed is used by Burns in contradistinction to" silk" in the lines " Written in Friars' Carse Hermitage," to indicate modest position in the world. Still one can only bring oneself to the opinion that, whatever influence Shenstone's Schoolmistress had on Burns, such

influence is not so marked as other similarities cited.

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Claims have been made as to the greater influence of Shenstone's Schoolmistress " or Fergusson's Farmer's Ingle" on the "Cottar's Saturday Night." These contentions exhibit in different aspects two kinds of influence of different classes of poets on Burns's literary work. When a solution is sought of the question-where did Burns get his ideas to clothe in a new light?-we must recognise the influence of Shenstone as of a different kind from that he

derived from Ramsay and Fergusson. The relationship of Burns and Fergusson is almost, one might say, personal. Burns and Fergusson belonged to the same era and the same stage. Fergusson died only thirteen years before Burns came to Edinburgh. Burns addresses Fergusson in homely and affectionate terms as My elder brother in misfortune, by far my elder brother in the Muses." Such a familiar term of affinity would be absurd, indeed untrue, if applied to Shenstone.

Burns knew Shenstone as a popular poet and a cultured man, with all the advantages of an Oxford education. He also recognised in Shenstone's life and works the social man of tender and sincere feeling, combined with a simplicity and a love of truth. Burns's envisaging of Shenstone was not that of a man he could be familiar with yet could love and respect in the abstract. in Shenstone models for the plots of or the "Cottar's Saturday Night." Shenstone's essay on Man and and philosophical reflections. In these respects the influences were different-on the one hand, the homely influences of his Scottish poetical forebears, and on the

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He did not find Tam o' Shanter He rather looked to Manners " for moral

other, the educative influences of such poets as Shenstone, Crabbe, and Goldsmith, and others of the early Georgian era shed their influences or conveyed ideas.

In Elegy VII. we have:

""Tis no Italian song nor senseless ditty cheers
the vernal tree,"

and in Elegy IX. :—

"Nor boast the produce of Peruvian mines,

Nor with Italian sounds deceive the day."

Compare those two references to Italian music with the line in the "Cottar's Saturday Night "

Compared with these, Italian trills are tame,”

and, without enquiries whether Shenstone and Burns interested themselves in the contemporaneous discussion on the merits of the French and Italian Schools, it is evident that they both preferred the tunes of their native country to any foreign innovation. In this predilection they were joined by Fergusson in his Elegy on "Scots Music," where the sounds fresh from Italy" are called are called "a bastard breed.'

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22

Allusions to Peruvian mines are to be found in Burns. In the Vision he

says:

"And trust me not Potosi's mine."

It would be hypercritical to discount this allusion because Potosi happened to be in Bolivia and not Peru.

Other allusions to Potosi will be found in the apostrophe to" Frugality," in a letter to Peter Hill, of 2nd April, 1789. It is curious to note that Shenstone, in one of his bestknown poems, "Nancy of the Vale," describes "Her leg so taper, straight and fair," while Burns's Coila in the Vision," is described as "Sae taper, tight and clean,' so that one is inclined to think that the lilt of the one description infected the other.

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