friends procured his appointment as exciseman for his district. But poverty, disappointment, irregular habits, and broken health clouded his last years, and brought him to an untimely death at the age of thirty-seven. He continued, however, to pour forth songs of unequaled sweetness and force. The man sank," said Coleridge, "but the poet was bright to the last." Burns is the best of British song-writers. His songs are singable; they are not merely lyrical poems. They were meant to be sung, and they are sung. They were mostly set to old Scottish airs, and sometimes they were built up from ancient fragments of anonymous popular poetry, a chorus, or stanza, or even a single line. Such are, for example, "Auld Lang Syne," "My Heart's in the Highlands," and "Landlady, Count the Lawin'." Burns had a great, warm heart. His sins were sins of passion, and sprang from the same generous soil that nourished his impulsive virtues. His elementary qualities as a poet were sincerity, a healthy openness to all impressions of the beautiful, and a sympathy which embraced men, animals, and the dumb objects of nature. His tenderness toward flowers and the brute creation may be read in his lines "To a Mountain Daisy," "To a Mouse," and "The Auld Farmer's New Year's Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare Maggie." Next after love and good-fellowship, patriotism is the most frequent motive of his song. Of his national anthem, "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled," Carlyle said: "So long as there is warm blood in the heart of Scotchman, or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war ode." Burns's politics were a singular mixture of sentimental Toryism with practical democracy. A romantic glamour was thrown over the fortunes of the exiled His supremacy as a song writer. His politics. Stuarts, and to have been "out" in '45 with the Young Pretender was a popular thing in parts of Scotland. To this purely poetic loyalty may be attributed such Jacobite ballads of Burns's as "Over the Water to Charlie." But his sober convictions were on the side of liberty and human brotherhood, and are expressed in "The Twa Dogs," "The First Epistle to Davie,” and "A Man's a Man for a' that." His sympathy with the Revolution led him to send four pieces of ordnance, taken from a captured smuggler, as a present to the French Convention, a piece of bravado which got him into difficulties with his superiors in the excise. The poetry which Burns wrote, not in dialect, but in the classical English, is in the stilted manner of his century, and his prose correspondence betrays his lack of culture by its constant lapse into rhetorical affectation and fine writing. I. JAMES THOMSON: "The Castle of Indolence." 2. "The Poems of Thomas Gray.' 3. WILLIAM COLLINS: " Odes.' 4. "The Six Chief Lives from Johnson's 'Lives of the Poets.'" Edited by Matthew Arnold. London : 1878. 5. Boswell: "Life of Johnson" [abridged]. New York: 1878. 6. SAMUEL RICHARDSON : "Clarissa Harlowe." 8. TOBIAS SMOLLETT: "Humphrey Clinker." IO. OLIVER GOLDSMITH: "The Vicar of Wakefield" and "The Deserted Village." II. WILLIAM COWPER: "The Task" and "John Gilpin." I 2. "The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns." CHAPTER VII. FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH OF SCOTT, 1789-1832. the Georgian THE burst of creative activity at the opening of the nineteenth century has but one parallel in English Productivity of literary history, namely, the somewhat similar flowering period. out of the national genius in the time of Elizabeth and the first two Stuart kings. The later age gave birth to no supreme poets, like Shakspere and Milton. It produced no "Hamlet" and no 'Paradise Lost"; but it offers a greater number of important writers, a higher average of excellence, and a wider range and variety of literary work than any preceding era. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats are all great names; while Southey, Landor, Moore, Lamb, and De Quincey would be noteworthy figures at any period, and deserve a fuller mention than can be here accorded them. But in so crowded a generation, selection becomes increasingly needful, and in the present chapter, accordingly, the emphasis will be laid upon the first-named group as not only the most important, but the most representative of the various tendencies of their time. The conditions of literary work in this century have been almost unduly stimulating. The rapid advance in population, wealth, education, and the means of communication has vastly increased the number of readers. Newspapers Every one who has anything to say can say it in print, and is sure of some sort of a hearing. A special and reviews. |