in "Holy Willie's Prayer," ""The Dedication to Gavin Hamilton, Esquire," and the "Address to the Unco Guid, or the Rigidly Righteous," were induced by the corruption and rampant hypocricy of the system, rather than as justification of his own moral defects, as has been frequently alleged. It was surely a great achievement for the peasant Poet to have so extended the intellectual horizon of his countrymen that their range of vision could penetrate beyond the narrow confines the Church had so firmly drawn around them. Even taking him in a poetical sense alone, it is difficult to imagine what the condition of Scotland and Scottish poetry would have been to-day had he never lived to shed the fervid glow of his genius on the literature of his country. The nation could have dispensed with every other poet who preceded him and not been much the loser. He was the mouth-piece and intellectual exponent of the many in whom similar thoughts and aspirations long had dwelt, but who made little mark for lack of a suitable vehicle of expression. However much Burns's poetry and song may be read and admired in other tongues, it is only the native-born Scot to whom they appeal in their true measure and comprehensive significance. Burns gave new tone and vigour to national sentiment, while his poetic form made the native dialect a picturesque and fascinating medium of literary expression. In Scotland no truly original poetry, redolent of the soil, had arisen since Dunbar, and he had long become as a voice crying in the wilderness, conveying indefinite sound and hazy imagery. More than three hundred years before Burns, it is true, Scotland possessed a national poetical literature, in many respects rich and scholarly; but the works of such poets as Henryson, Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and Sir David Lindsay appealed more exclusively to the monks of the cloister, and were practically unknown to the outside world and the toiling masses of Scotia. The result of this was that by the end of the sixteenth century, and in spite of the brilliant achievements of those old lights, a long period of literary stagnation fell upon Scotland just at the time the literature of her English sister, after a period of inactivity, found new life and expression in the great Elizabethan writers. The literary history of nations is that when they have attained a certain intellectual standard they have their periods of fluctuation, of ebb and flow, of feebleness and strength; but the main current of thought and culture never disappears, and Scotland was no exception. In no period of the literary history of Scotland can it be shown to have been otherwise, and it cannot be said in truth that Burns, with all his exceptional genius, was a prodigy whose advent was independent of antecedent influences or environment. Nay, rather he is the culmination of a literary movement which was commenced upwards of half a century before he was born. The movement declared itself in an outbreak of the national literary spirit, and an ardent desire to make the Scottish vernacular a vehicle of form and expression, and it was stimulated by such writers as William Hamilton of Gilbertfield, Allan Ramsay, and Robert Fergusson. Burns himself acknowledges, in the most emphatic manner, his obligations to the two latter poets. Indeed, he rather overestimates than under-estimates his obligations to them, and in Fergusson especially he recognised a man of similar poetic temperament, and like passions with himself. To Fergusson, with all his weakness and folly, Burns extended his sympathetic charity, and regarded him as an erring brother bard, more entitled to love and pity than condemnation and neglect. This induced him to pay the first tribute of respect yet done to the memory of poor Fergusson, though he had been dead fifteen years, by erecting at his own expense a memorial stone above his last resting-place. In a passing reference to the subject of Scottish song it must not be forgotten that many beautiful songs circulated in Scotland before either Ramsay's or Burns's day—most of them of unknown authorship-for from very early times the country appears to have been favourable to, or the people susceptible of, poetic inspiration. As far as the substance of Ramsay's poems are concerned, he was not much more than an imitator; but by the function he fulfilled he showed unmistakably that original and truly national forms lay ready to the hand of the Scottish Poet, and thus paved the way 1 for a greater genius. The fact that Burns was not the first gleaner in the field of Scottish poetry does not lessen his claim to originality, for his treatment was original and unique. Making every allowance for Burns's indebtedness to Ramsay and Fergusson, his obligations to them cannot explain why he is not only the Poet of Scotland but an English classic, which the others are not and can never be. The political union of England and Scotland in 1707 merged, to a great extent, the life of Scotland in that of England, and thus introduced a rival to the native dialect. The Lowland Scots was a speech the origin of which could be traced to the same source as Southern English, although it had developed on independent lines, and had fallen from its former prestige, and become the vehicle of ribald songs and rude ballads. It was by the occasional appearance of flashes of true poetry, which gave some indication of how much had been obscured by vulgar and commonplace thoughts, that the potentialities of the native material was gradually made manifest. Although Hamilton, Ramsay, and Fergusson had done much to restore vernacular poetry to its former glory, it remained for Burns to complete the work they had begun. In comparison with his models Burns is far ahead, and if we search their writings critically we find they lack most of his characteristics-his fire, his satire, his pathos, his humour-and the result has been that he has been an influence in Scotland more powerful than them all put together. Matthew Arnold, in an impromptu which savours more of smartness than truth, said Burns lived in a world. of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners. The provincialism thus indicated cannot be correctly applied to Burns, whose works have been translated into the language of almost every country which makes any pretence to literary taste and culture. Nor does the local colour detract from his greatness and universality, for the obvious reason that it is in reality the production of genius. In his portrayal of Scottish life and character he embraces what is eternal and true of human nature everywhere. The fact of "Alloway's auld haunted Kirk " being made the scene of the witches' revel in "Tam o' Shanter" does not make Burns more exclusively the Poet of Scotland than the powerful scene on the Brochen on Walpurgis Nicht confines Goethe to Germany. The Germans are proud to claim Goethe as their countryman as Scotsmen are proud to claim Burns; but his poetry is no more for Scotland and Scotsmen alone than the poems of Goethe are exclusively for Germany and Germans. The fame of Burns, therefore, is not wholly due to the perfervidum ingenium Scotorum, however much it acted upon himself and re-acted upon his countrymen, but rather because he was a great poetic artist. His mastery of his art was the result of intense and careful study, and had its origin in the same intuitive faculty which made him a critic of English grammar at eleven years of age. Those who have studied the best examples of eighteenth century literature need not be reminded that perfection of expression was the ruling passion which was carried to its highest pitch in poetry by Alexander Pope, who derived his impetus from William Walsh, a man of wit and fashion. As far as the great republic of letters was concerned, Walsh for some time had been a silent and exclusive influence who had not yet proclaimed himself on the house-top. With Dryden's translation of Virgil's "Eclogues was published an elegant discourse on pastoral poetry in general by William Walsh, Esquire, in the course of which he set forth what pastoral poetry ought to be; but his views were too deeply tinged with the imaginary scenes of Arcadia for the more prosaic conditions of modern life. Thus, when Pope commenced to write, Walsh, deeply steeped in formative classicalism, strove to impress him with the idea that the ancients had said everything that was worth saying, and there was nothing left for the modern poet but to improve upon their manner of saying it. Burns did not stand outside the sphere of those tendencies which were aspiring after literary perfection, and, though he gained much from Ramsay and Fergusson, much of the influence which made him what he was can be traced to a period anterior to theirs. He himself tells us that "he had felt early stirrings of ambition, but they were but the blind gropings of Homer's Cyclops round the walls of his cave." This evidently applied to a time before the idea of a poetic mission had become fixed in his mind. In the course of his literary development his poems must be divided into two distinct groups, the first belonging to the period when he was more immediately under the influence of Ramsay, Fergusson, and the earlier Scottish poets. In those belonging to the second period we observe the Poet under the influence of wider reading and more comprehensive poetical ideals, when he has become dissatisfied "with a Muse sae mean as his." By means of his own critical faculty he has become deeply impressed with the idea that much of his early work is at variance with the prevailing tone-the measured and artistically constructed poetry of the eighteenth century. While in this mood of dissatisfaction he strove with praise. worthy effort to bring himself into harmony with the popular literary idea. But this was not his true and natural vein, and he could not so freely imp his wing as he could in his natural atmosphere. With all his gifts, it does not appear that Burns had the gift of sustained dramatic concentration, although he contemplated engaging in work requiring this. On this point, however, no critic can dogmatise with any degree of certainty, for his life was short; and while his poems are full of vivacity and dazzling flashes of genius, these are seldom long sustained. "No poet, with the exception of Shakespeare," says Sir Walter Scott, "ever possessed the power of exciting the most varied and discordant emotions with such rapid transition." The storm in "Tam o' Shanter," for instance, is great in conception, powerful and graphic in its description, and is worthy of comparison with the storm which raged round the dishevelled locks of King Lear "The wind blew as 'twad blawn its last; "Before him 'Doon' pours all his floods; The doubling storm roars through the woods; |