For we must suppose that the Burns-worship with which they are humorously taxed by some of their neighbours is not a mere matter of annual lip-service with most, however many live the museless life. For these last, the Burns Nicht is perhaps not a bad substitute for Christmas, a second New Year's Day touched with a specific commemoration, a reminder of the life of the mind. They might very easily do worse, on convivial pretext. As to the enthusiasts, if any of them be really chargeable with knowing or valuing only one poet, seeing in him only an unvarying and uncompared excellence, giving to every line a stereotyped applause, their sin be on their heads. It is a poor compliment to pay to the bard who gave them the Key of Heaven, thus to use it for only that one vestry, and to see in its every treasured garment the authentic singing robe. They really know him the less, and the less sensitively, if they know not also the many mansions in the House of Song, peopled with the spirits of great poets and true.

But, turned to the ends of culture and not of clanship, of humanity rather than of official patriotism, the cult of Burns may be made alike in æsthetics and in ethics an entrance to a truly liberal education. Burns's own hearty patriotism had its root in the positive and creative emotions, not in the negative or antipathetic, which narrow and constrict love of country to a mere aversion from other countries. There is nothing in him more truly characteristic than his boyish aspiration :

"That I for poor auld Scotland's sake
Some useful plan or book could make,
Or sing a sang at least."

And was ever an unselfish vow more richly fulfilled? To miss the inspiration is to miss him in essentials; and rightly to receive it is to be lifted alike above fanaticism and above all cheap complacencies. Out of the impulse to serve the motherland came a service to many lands, to

I

aliens, to humanity at large. If the Burns Cult in turn J. M. ROBERTSON.

should do that, it is well.

NOTES.

1. Coventry Patmore, Principle in Art, &c., ed. 1898, p. 123. The "thirteen " are Byron, Moore, Rogers, Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Burns, Campbell, Crabbe, Cowper, and Scott.

2. Miss Mitford, after rapturously calling him "the sweetest, the sublimest, the most tricksy poet who has blest the nether world since Shakespeare," urges the excellence of his English prose; and decides that "whenever his sweet muse takes her upward flight, she drops the Scottish pipes, and sings above the clouds in the language nearest to heaven. In plain prose, all his loftiest passages are pure English." But that dear lady was apt to change her mind; and her criticism, often good, is capricious.

3. Mr. Power, in his vivid essay on Burns (Robert Burns and other Essays, 1926), notes that in his own boyhood " all the Scottites were ardent Tories," politically and otherwise critical of Burns, while "most of the Burnsites were Radicals." This is. perhaps an exceptional experience. In the seventies I had a workman friend, a Radical, who adored both Scott and Burns.

4. The details are given as to Brome's piece by Mr. E. H. W. Meyerstein in The Times Literary Supplement of 13th December, 1923. See also the notes in Henley and Henderson's Centenary Edition of Burns, Vol. II., pp. 291-306, for further data as to prior suggestions of the themes in the "cantata."

5. This to the point, I think, of justly ranking him above Kipling. See the Letters of R. L. Stevenson to his Family and Friends, 1899, II., pp. 156-7. The question is whether the name left blank is Mr. Kipling's.

The poem is

But he has

6. By his father's fireside, the story says. biographically dated after his father's death. told that in those years he often had several poems stocks at once; and this may have been begun at Lochlea.

on the

7. It is to be hoped that the severe critic of The Times

Literary Supplement (17th March, 1921) was not a Scot setting out to wrong the wronger." The present writer, in his youth, was at feud with Henley on many points long before the issue of his and Mr. Henderson's Centenary Edition of Burns, being oppugnant to him alike in critical temperament and in many opinions. On these he would stillbide his feud and a' his kin's." Henley was largely incapable of critical justice as distinct from frequent intuitive rightness: witness his petulant vituperation of Browning and his resort to a Byron cult just after assailing the Burns cult— a movement of temper probably set up by contact with uncritical Burns-worship in Edinburgh. But criticism is nothing if it be not truth-testing. The critical verdict passed in favour of Henley's Book of Verses forty years ago endures the strictest revision. The merits of the Hospital Poems are further discussed hereinafter.

8. The Times critic, perversely unjust, decides that the Hospital Poems "remain a clever journalist's pictures of a medical institution." What other "clever journalist could have done them, even in prose, to say nothing of consummate verse and intensive feeling?

9. He really made life much easier for his farm-hands than it had ever been for him. See Allan Cunningham's account of his father's comments.

10. That Burns had proclivities to the improper we know from his own written avowal. The fact remains that he has been saddled with a compilation of such matter mainly made by other hands, and of cheap quality.

11. Mr. Power has written (p. 14) that if Burns "had lived to read the Lyrical Ballads and 'Christabel' he would have cared as little for them as did Byron." So much the worse for him, in that event. But that Burns would not have appreciated the Ancient Mariner " seems to me excessively unlikely.

12. The analysis of the differentia of the work and the mentality of Burns and Fergusson is one of the best pieces of criticism in Mr. Power's essay.

ROBERT BURNS AND WALTER SCOTT.

NOTES OF AN ADDRESS.

The following notes of the address delivered by Mr. Walter T. Watson, K.C., when unveiling the tablet to commemorate the meeting of Robert Burns and (Sir) Walter Scott at Sciennes Hill House, Edinburgh, in the winter of 1786-87, are reprinted by permission from the Annual Report of the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club. The unveiling ceremony is recorded, with illustration, in the 1928 issue of the Burns Chronicle, pp. 102-103.

on

One of the greatest of the untrumpeted services rendered to the nation during the war was the publication by the Poet Laureate in 1916 of The Spirit of Man. That noble anthology is founded an implication "that spirituality is the basis and foundation of human life-in so far as our life is a worthy subject for ideal philosophy and pure æsthetic-rather than the apex or final attainment of it." When it was published I looked to see what selection had been made by Dr. Bridges to represent the contribution of Burns to the Life of Humanity; and I saw with great surprise, but a surprise which time has diminished, that our national poet was only represented by the two lines

"Wha does the utmost that he can
Will whyles do mair."

This thought gives sustaining power to one who occupies the place which could only have been filled perfectly by him who was the voice of Scotland in the Humanities for nearly two generations. Though the silver voice of Lord Rosebery can no longer be heard among us, we may fall back on his exquisite diction to express what is deepest in our minds this day. When Lord Rosebery spoke of the Miracle called Burns," and "The divine

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Sir Walter Scott," he said all that is needed by us. Since, however, we have gathered here to take away a reproach from the walls of Edinburgh by placing a tablet to mark the meeting-place of the poet who was the incarnation of the spirit of passionate realism with the novelist and poet who was the incarnation of the spirit of romantic naturalism, it is fitting that we should reflect a little upon them-what they mean to us, and what they have meant to the world. For as surely as it was Wallace and Bruce who established the kingdom of Scotland among the nations of the earth, so surely did Scott and Burns establish the Scots Empire in the life of the world.

It would be superfluous to recall the variety of their forms of achievement, to think particularly of Sir Walter as a novelist, poet, essayist, editor, biographer, or historian; or of Burns in the many-sidedness of his character and his poetry. It would be superfluous to recall what they had in common in so outstanding a degree as their fervent patriotism, their love of nature, their intense humanity. What I should like to do is to dwell on some of the less obvious features which they had in common, and of which we may regard their single meeting here as in a sense symbolic. (1) The first characteristic to which I would advert is their common acceptance of the social pyramid of their day. This acceptance is very notable in the case of Scott. He himself belonged to a well-defined professional class, and had few stronger passions than to become one of the landed class. The strength of this desire was so great that with some it has been conceived as a ground of reproach. But we must remember how deeply rooted was his passion for the land. He could not have lived without seeing the heather once a year; and it was an early wish on his part to be associated with the creative work of nature. Burns's acceptance of the social pyramid, on the other hand, would not be so universally or so readily