Title: Essay on Burns
Author: Carlyle, Thomas
Language: English
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  The Riverside Literature Series



  ESSAY ON BURNS


  BY

  THOMAS CARLYLE


  EDITED
  _WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES_
  BY GEORGE R. NOYES



  HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
  Boston: 4 Park Street; New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street
  Chicago: 158 Adams Street

  The Riverside Press, Cambridge



  Copyright, 1896,
  By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.

  _All rights reserved._


  _The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
  Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton and Company.



{iii}

INTRODUCTION.

Carlyle's _Essay on Burns_ was first printed in the _Edinburgh
Review_ for December, 1828.  Though in form a review of the _Life of
Robert Burns_, by John Gibson Lockhart, it is really, like many of
the articles in the _Edinburgh Review_, an entirely independent work.
The present art of book reviewing is a creation of our own times.
The English magazines of the eighteenth century were mere publishers'
organs, and are inferior to even second-rate periodicals of our own
day.  The book notices in them are comparable to those that we see in
our poorer daily newspapers.  The reviewers were usually mere
literary hacks, and were content to give a summary of the contents of
a book, and then pass judgment on it as a whole, meting out praise or
blame in set, formal terms.  The foundation of the _Edinburgh
Review_, in 1802, by Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, Brougham, and others,
marks the beginning of a new era in English periodical literature.
The new magazine had for contributors men of marked learning and
originality, leaders in the thought of their time, who were not
satisfied, in reviewing a book, with recording the impression that
any sane man would gather from a casual reading, but took the title
of the book as the text for a thoroughly original treatment of its
subject.  Succeeding periodicals, as the _Quarterly_ and
_Blackwood's_, however much they differed from the _Edinburgh_ in
politics and general tendencies, were all affected by its methods.
So it happens that many book reviews in the English magazines, by men
like Carlyle, Macaulay, and Matthew Arnold, have become permanent
additions to literature, sometimes surpassing in interest the works
that occasioned them.

{iv}

In the present case, however, the book reviewed continues to be a
standard authority.  Its author, John Gibson Lockhart, was born in
1794, at Cambusnethan, about twelve miles southeast of Glasgow.  When
_Blackwood's Magazine_ was founded, in 1817, Lockhart became one of
its chief contributors.  In 1820 he married the eldest daughter of
Sir Walter Scott.  In the years following his marriage he published
several novels, an edition of _Don Quixote_, and his translations of
_Ancient Spanish Ballads_.  This last work has never been superseded,
and is often reprinted.  In 1826 he became editor of the _Quarterly
Review_, and retained the position until the year before his death,
in 1854.  His _Life of Robert Burns_ appeared in 1828, and a _Life of
Napoleon Bonaparte_ in the next year.  His greatest work, the _Life
of Scott_, appeared in 1836-38, and by general consent has taken in
English biographical literature a place second only to that of
Boswell's _Life of Johnson_.

Carlyle was introduced to Lockhart when on a visit to London, in
1832.  In his Note Book at that time he calls Lockhart "a precise,
brief, active person of considerable faculty," and confesses that he
"rather liked the man."[1]  A month later, in a letter to his
brother, he calls him "not without force, but barren and
unfruitful."[2]  Seven years after this, when Carlyle was settled in
London, he formed the project of writing an article on the
working-classes for the _Quarterly_; with this in mind he called upon
Lockhart, and, he says, "found him a person of sense, good breeding,
even kindness."[3]  Ever after this, though the two men were never
intimate friends, they had warm affection and esteem for each other.
Lockhart feared to accept Carlyle's article because of its radical
opinions, and it was published separately, under the title of
_Chartism_.  One more link between {v} the men is Carlyle's
review--one of his least satisfactory essays--of the _Life of Scott_,
published in 1838, in the _London and Westminster Review_.  And
Carlyle's own judgment of Lockhart widens our knowledge of the
character of both men.

"A hard, proud, but thoroughly honest, singularly intelligent, and
also affectionate man, whom in the distance I esteemed more than
perhaps he ever knew.  Seldom did I speak to him; but hardly ever
without learning and gaining something."[4]


Thomas Carlyle was born December 4, 1795, at Annandale, in
Dumfriesshire, in southeast Scotland.  His life offers many
resemblances, though perhaps more contrasts, to that of Burns.  Like
Burns, he came from the strong, rough stock of the Scotch peasantry.
Of his father, James Carlyle, a man like Burns's father in his
strength of character and deeply religious temperament, but unlike
him in his complete ignorance of all books except the Bible, Carlyle
has himself left us a grand portrait in the _Reminiscences_.  When
ten years old, Carlyle was sent to the Annan grammar school.  Of his
life there we may judge from the veiled account in _Sartor
Resartus_:--

"My Teachers were hide-bound Pedants, without knowledge of man's
nature, or of boy's; or of aught save their lexicons and quarterly
account-books.  Innumerable dead Vocables (no dead Language, for they
themselves knew no Language) they crammed into us, and called it
fostering the growth of mind....  The Professors knew syntax enough;
and of the human soul thus much: that it had a faculty called Memory,
and could be acted-on through the muscular integument by the
appliance of birch-rods."[5]

James Carlyle recognized his son's ability, and resolved {vi} that he
should be an educated man.  Yet Carlyle can hardly be said to have
been "sent" to the University, for he _walked_ the distance of
seventy miles over rough country to Edinburgh.  There he worked
industriously in the library, and laid the foundations for his
wonderful knowledge of books.  He tells us later:--

"What I have found the University did for me, was that it taught me
to read in various languages and various sciences, so that I could go
into the books that treated of these things, and try anything I
wanted to make myself master of gradually, as I found it suit me."[6]

Carlyle had been intended for the ministry, but money was lacking,
and he took up school teaching as a temporary occupation.  In 1818,
having saved ninety pounds, he returned to Edinburgh for study.
Meanwhile, the ministry had become closed to him, for reading and
thought had undermined his belief in the creed of the Scotch Kirk.
But Carlyle's reaction from his ancestral beliefs was occasioned by
different circumstances from that of Burns.  Carlyle, by deep study
and meditation, was stirred from the dogmas of the Scotch Kirk, but
adhered strictly to its stern, severe code of morals.  Burns, who had
a lighter, more facile nature, became disgusted with the hypocrisy of
those high in church authority, and was attracted by the more winning
characters of the leaders of the progressive party.  His passions had
already weakened his morals; and though he still professed the
highest respect for religion in the abstract, he was led on from
distrust of orthodox Calvinism to what often seems general skepticism
and indifference on religious matters.

After an experiment in legal study, Carlyle finally settled on his
trade as a "writer of books."  From 1818 to 1822 he lived in
Edinburgh, and did hack literary work, largely articles for the
_Edinburgh Encyclopedia_.  In 1822 he {vii} became tutor in a private
family, with whom he travelled, not returning to Edinburgh until
1825.  During these years of indecision as to what should be his life
pursuit he had been occupied with German literature, and had
published his translation of _Wilhelm Meister_ and his _Life of
Schiller_.  For these works he received grateful acknowledgment from
Goethe, and by them established a reputation as a writer.  In 1827 he
met Jeffrey, and made a contract with him to write for the _Edinburgh
Review_.

Meanwhile, in 1826, Carlyle had married Jane Baillie Welsh.  Two
years later, through the failure of some literary plans, he decided
to remove, for the sake of economy, to his wife's farm of
Craigenputtock, in southwest Dumfriesshire, in the wild moorland
country, fifteen miles from any town.  There he resolved, in spite of
poverty, to publish no work that did not satisfy his ideal.
Carlyle's impressions of his hermit life vary with his changing
moods,--now he praises his home as a rural paradise; again he writes
in his diary, "Finished a paper on Burns September 16, 1828, at this
Devil's Den, Craigenputtock."[7]

This last phrase shows us that the _Essay on Burns_ was one of the
first products of Carlyle's self-imposed exile.  Of all his essays,
this is on the topic nearest to the author's life.  Carlyle was drawn
to his subject by every bond of race, language, and association.  His
birthplace, Annandale, is only ten miles from Dumfries, Burns's last
home.  He had talked with many who had known Burns in life, among
them Gilbert Burns, the poet's brother.  Though an estimate of the
merits of the essay will be more appropriate later, some
circumstances connected with its publication must here be noted, for
the light which they throw on Carlyle's character.  The account of
them is quoted, with some small changes, from Froude.

Jeffrey "found the article long and diffuse, though he {viii} did not
deny that 'it contained much beauty and felicity of diction.'  He
insisted that it must be cut down," and received permission from
Carlyle to make some alterations.[8]  "When the proof-sheets came,
Carlyle found 'the first part cut all into shreds,--the body of a
quadruped with the head of a bird, a man shortened by cutting out the
thighs and fixing the knee-caps on the hips.'[9]  He refused to let
it appear 'in such a horrid shape.'  He replaced the most important
passages, and returned the sheets with an intimation that the paper
might be cancelled, but should not be mutilated.  Few editors would
have been so forbearing as Jeffrey when so audaciously defied.  He
complained, but he acquiesced.  He admitted that the article would do
the Review credit, though it would be called tedious and sprawling by
people of weight whose mouths he could have stopped.  He had wished
to be of use to Carlyle by keeping out of sight in the Review his
mannerism and affectation; but if Carlyle persisted he might have his
way.

"Carlyle was touched; such kindness was more than he had looked for.
The proud self-assertion was followed by humility and almost
penitence, and the gentle tone in which he wrote conquered Jeffrey in
turn.  Jeffrey said that he admired and approved of Carlyle's letter
to him in all respects.  'The candour and sweet blood' which was
shown in it deserved the highest praise.  'Your virtues are your
own,' said Jeffrey, 'and you shall have anything you like.'"[10]

During Carlyle's residence at Craigenputtock, which lasted, with
slight interruption, for six years, were produced most of the
miscellaneous essays, and his first great original work, _Sartor
Resartus_.  This is the formative period of his literary life, from
which he came forth, to quote {ix} Mr. Stephen, "a master of his
craft."  In 1834 he moved to London, where he resided until his
death, in 1881.  To this later period belong his greatest works, on
which his fame depends: _Heroes and Hero-Worship_, _The French
Revolution_, _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches_, and _The History of
Frederick the Great_.  But the earlier works have the same tonic
quality as the later, and are free from many of their defects.  As a
teacher, especially if we take an American point of view, Carlyle
grows less trustworthy with advancing years.  His cynicism becomes
more bitter, his hero-worship leads him to sympathize with autocracy,
while his contempt for the stupidity of the masses leads him to
distrust all popular government.  In Lowell's words, quoting
Carlyle's contemptuous phrase, "he saw 'only the burning of a dirty
chimney' in the war which a great people was waging under his very
eyes for the idea of nationality and orderly magistrature."

In the _Essay on Burns_, then, we have a work of Carlyle's early
prime.  We might infer this from the style alone, which shows a
transition from his early clearness and simplicity to the "piebald,
entangled, hyper-metaphorical style of writing" characteristic of his
later works, and always associated with his name.

In the _Essay on Burns_ it is not the author's intention to give a
connected sketch of Burns's life,[11] or to pass a cool, critical
judgment on his poetry as a whole.  Carlyle has himself, on page 6 of
this essay, given us his idea of the true purpose of biography.  The
following words from his second essay on Richter make his meaning
still clearer:--

"If the acted life of a _pius Vates_ is so high a matter, the written
life, which, if properly written, would be a translation and
interpretation thereof, must also have great value.  It has been said
that no Poet is equal to his Poem, which saying is partially true;
but in a deeper sense, it {x} may also be asserted, and with still
greater truth, that no Poem is equal to its Poet.  Now, it is
Biography which first gives us both Poet and Poem; by the
significance of the one, elucidating and completing that of the
other.  That ideal outline of himself, which a man unconsciously
shadows forth in his writings, and which, rightly deciphered, will be
truer than any other representation of him, it is the task of the
Biographer to fill up into an actual coherent figure, and bring home
to our experience, or at least clear, undoubting admiration, thereby
to instruct and edify us in many ways.  Conducted on such principles,
the Biography of great men, especially of great poets, that is, of
men in the highest degree noble minded and wise, might become one of
the most dignified and valuable species of composition.  As matters
stand, indeed, there are few Biographies that accomplish anything of
this kind; the most are mere Indexes of a Biography, which each
reader is to write out for himself, as he peruses them; not the
living body, but the dry bones of a body, which should have been
alive.  To expect any such Promethean virtue in a common Life-writer
were unreasonable enough.  How shall that unhappy Biographic
brotherhood, instead of writing like Index-makers and
Government-clerks, suddenly become enkindled with some sparks of
intellect, or even of genial fire; and not only collecting dates and
facts, but making use of them, look beyond the surface and economical
form of a man's life, into its substance and spirit?"

In pursuit of this great aim, Carlyle has to adapt his method to his
subject.  In writing of Richter, a man unknown to the British public
of his time, he has to give us himself the "dry bones" of fact,
before he can give the "living body."  But in the case of Burns, as
he can assume that his readers are familiar with Burns's chief poems,
and know the main events of his life, he brushes aside all detail,
and treats at once the inner meaning and value of the poet's life and
work.  To appreciate Carlyle's essay, we must {xi} fulfil his
expectation of us, and know Burns at first hand before we start to
read about him.

We must now ask how far Carlyle corresponds to his own ideal
biographer.  No one can read this essay without admitting that we
have in it a powerful and sympathetic conception of Burns.  To decide
whether this conception is just and impartial we must take into
account the writer's general temperament and leading ideas.

Carlyle is a hero-worshipper in all his work, as a quotation from
_Sartor Resartus_ will best explain:--

"Meanwhile, observe with joy, so cunningly has Nature ordered it,
that whatsoever man ought to obey, he cannot but obey.  Before no
faintest revelation of the Godlike did he ever stand irreverent;
least of all, when the Godlike showed itself revealed in his
fellow-man.  Thus there is a true religious Loyalty forever rooted in
his heart; nay in all ages, even in ours, it manifests itself as a
more or less orthodox _Hero-worship_.  In which fact, that
Hero-worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist, universally
among Mankind, mayest thou discern the corner-stone of living-rock,
whereon all Politics for the remotest time may stand secure.

"Hast thou forgotten Paris and Voltaire?  How the aged, withered man,
though but a skeptic, mocker, and millinery Court-poet, yet because
even he seemed the Wisest, Best, could drag mankind at his
chariot-wheels, so that princes coveted a smile from him, and the
loveliest of France would have laid their hair beneath his feet.  All
Paris was one vast Temple of Hero-worship; though their Divinity,
moreover, was of feature too apish."[12]

As Carlyle is fallible, like other men, the practical effect of his
doctrine is that he exalts those whom he likes, and throws contempt
on those whom he dislikes.  Since he is attracted by Burns's noble
qualities, above all by his sincerity, he forms a grand ideal
conception of him.  Indeed, {xii} in his _Heroes and Hero-Worship_,
written twelve years later, he boldly pronounces Burns "the most
gifted British soul we had in all that century of his."  The lecture
upon "the hero as man of letters" should be studied carefully by all
who wish to understand Carlyle's attitude towards the great writers
of the world, and towards Burns as one of them.  It would, however,
be of small use to read, as a sort of postscript to this essay, the
half-dozen pages which Carlyle there devotes especially to Burns.  He
there repeats many of the thoughts of this essay,--when a writer has
once clearly and fully spoken his mind of a man he cannot well treat
of him again without repetition.  The value of the lecture on "the
hero as man of letters" is, that it gives us in brief form general
ideas, of which the _Essay on Burns_ is a particular application.

In consequence of his conception of Burns as a hero, Carlyle casts
aside, as of slight importance in the general estimate, evidence that
opposes his own view, or even entirely refuses to believe it.  Thus
he dwells on Burns's finest poems, and pays little heed to his
affected English verse and stilted prose.  Yet they, too, are of
Burns's writing, and demand full consideration, if we are to
understand the whole man.  Again, he will not credit an anecdote for
which there is fairly good evidence, because it shows in Burns a
foolish vanity that seems to him impossible.  So, at the best, our
essay gives only a partial view of Burns.  Those who wish to learn
more of the seamy side of the poet's character will do well to read
an essay by as loyal a son of Scotland, and as kindly and sympathetic
a writer, as Carlyle himself,--Robert Louis Stevenson.[13]

Much more might be said in dispraise of Carlyle's work, and yet its
essential greatness would remain unaffected.  After the lapse of
nearly seventy years, this essay is still by far our best portrait of
Burns.  All succeeding critics have had to take Carlyle into account.
They may differ {xiii} widely from his conclusions, but they cannot
fail to recognize his transcendent merits.  Though the judgments of
Carlyle on Burns have, in the main, stood well the test of time, yet
in this, as in all his writings, his excellence lies less in his own
opinions than in his power to make others think for themselves.
Carlyle has little of the finish, proportion, discrimination, that we
find in Matthew Arnold or Sainte-Beuve.  But for the ordinary reader
he is far more useful than many a writer who comes nearer the
absolute truth.  He touches our hearts and arouses our sympathies.
Most readers of a critic ask, not: "After reading this essay can I
distinguish more accurately between the good and bad art in my
author, and judge better of their comparative importance?" but: "Does
this critic make me more able to understand the best that is in my
poet, so that I share more deeply in his highest life and thought?"
Let us then, with due reverence, approach the thoughts of one of the
greatest thinkers of Scotland upon the greatest of her poets.



[1] Froude: _Thomas Carlyle, a History of the First Forty Years of
his Life_, ii. 188.

[2] _Ibid._, ii. 212.

[3] Quoted in Froude: _Thomas Carlyle, a History of his Life in
London_, i. 140, from a letter of Carlyle's to his brother.

[4] See note by Carlyle in _Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh
Carlyle_, ed. Froude, i. 107.

[5] _Sartor Resartus_, II. iii.

[6] _Address delivered to the Students of Edinburgh
University_--April 2, 1866.

[7] Froude: _Thomas Carlyle, a History of the First Forty Years of
his Life_, ii. 26.

[8] _Letters of Thomas Carlyle_, 1826-1836, p. 123.

[9] Quoted from a letter from Carlyle to his brother, October 10,
1828.  There is here a reminiscence of the opening lines of Horace's
_Ars Poetica_.

[10] Froude: _Thomas Carlyle, a History of the First Forty Years of
his Life_, ii. 31-35.

[11] For this reason, a brief sketch of the poet's life is given the
reader after this Introduction.  See pp. xiv.-xvii.

[12] _Sartor Resartus_, III. vii.

[13] In _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_.



{xiv}

A SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS.

Robert Burns was born on January 25, 1759, in a clay-built cottage,
at Alloway in Ayrshire, in southwest Scotland.  Except for the
personal character of his father, his lot was that of any poor
peasant lad.  But the elder Burns had a natural love of learning,
attended carefully to his sons' education himself, and, further, gave
them as good schooling as it lay in his power to do.  The teacher of
Robert Burns and his younger brother Gilbert was John Murdoch, a
young man of uncommon merit, who interested himself in the boys, and
lent them various books.  Robert grew thoroughly familiar with his
small library, learned French fairly well, and began Latin.  He was
particularly fascinated by a book of English songs, and carried it
with him into the fields.  He early became noted as the best
converser and the best letter writer in the parish.  When Burns was
still a child his father had removed to another farm, at Mount
Oliphant; later, when Burns was eighteen, to Lochlea, in the parish
of Tarbolton.  The family affairs were never long prosperous; and the
distress endured at Mount Oliphant from a tyrannical _factor_, or
landlord's agent, is commemorated in _The Twa Dogs_, just as the
happy home life is reproduced in _The Cotter's Saturday Night_.
Through all his youth Burns was a laborer for his father; and his
first song, _Handsome Nell_, written when he was only fifteen, is in
honor of a chance partner in the harvest field.

In 1782, when he was twenty-three years old, Burns engaged in
business at the town of Irvine, but was reduced to poverty by the
burning of his shop, and returned to Lochlea.  The short residence at
the thriving seaport affected for the {xv} worse his habits of life
and thought.  Until then Burns had led an ordinarily correct life;
but at Irvine he learned to drink, and to think lightly of infidelity
to women.  _The Poet's Welcome to his Illegitimate Child_ bears sad
witness to this alteration in his character.

In 1784, soon after Burns's return home, his father died, leaving his
affairs in utter ruin.  Three months before his death Robert and
Gilbert had taken the farm of Mossgiel, in the neighboring parish of
Mauchline, and thither the whole family now removed.  The years 1785
and 1786 are Burns's great period of poetical production; within them
fall most of the pieces, exclusive of _Tam O'Shanter_ and of his
songs, by which he is now best known.  At this time the theological
controversy between the two parties in the Scotch Kirk occupied the
attention of every one.  Burns was attracted by the personal
character of the leaders of the _New Light_, or progressive, party;
and aided them in their warfare upon the _Old Light_ divines by many
stinging satires, notably _The Holy Fair_, _The Twa Herds_, and _Holy
Willie's Prayer_.  Readers to-day have come to have a new interest in
the _Old Lights_, or _Auld Lichts_, as the Scotch term is, through J.
M. Barrie's tales and sketches.

In 1785 Burns met and fell in love with Jean Armour, and the next
year twin children were born to them.  Burns, in order to save the
girl from disgrace, had given her a written acknowledgment of
marriage; but her father, who had a poor opinion of the poet's
general character, had forced her to destroy this.  Burns, finding
himself without money or position in society, resolved to emigrate to
Jamaica, and published a thin volume of his poems in order to raise
money for the passage.  The success of the book was great and
immediate, and altered the whole course of Burns's life.  Dugald
Stewart, the philosopher, entertained him at his house; Henry
MacKenzie, the novelist, gave him a flattering review; and, finally,
an enthusiastic letter from Dr. Blacklock, one of the most celebrated
Edinburgh critics, {xvi} made him decide to give up his plan of
flight from his native country, and to try his fortune at the Scotch
capital.  The volume of poems was also the means of his acquaintance
with the excellent Mrs. Dunlop, with whom he corresponded until the
end of his life.

In November, 1786, Burns went to Edinburgh, and was the "lion" of the
following winter.  A new edition of his poems received three thousand
subscribers, and brought him in about £500.  Of this he lent £180 to
his brother Gilbert, to help in the management of Mossgiel,--the loan
was finally repaid some thirty years later to the poet's family.
During the following year he made two trips through Scotland, partly
to collect songs, and began to contribute to Johnson's _Scot's
Musical Museum_ and Thomson's _Collection of Scottish Airs_.  The
poet applied for, and obtained, a commission in the Excise, the only
worldly advantage, except the profits of his poems, that he derived
from his triumphal Edinburgh season.  Reserving his commission as a
last resort, Burns rented a farm at Ellisland, near Dumfries, where
he settled, in the summer of 1788.  He had renewed his intimacy with
Jean Armour, and, when she became once more exposed to the anger of
her father, made her all the reparation in his power, by marriage.
The farm was not a success, and Burns tried to carry on the Excise
business along with it.  When this division of labor also proved
unsatisfactory, he abandoned Ellisland, and, in November, 1792, moved
to Dumfries.

At Dumfries Burns was advanced to all Excise division, with a salary
of seventy pounds, and retained the position until his death.  His
hopes of further promotion were cut off by his ill-timed expressions
of sympathy with the American Revolution, and with the republican
party in France.  He attended well to the duties of his office, but
occasional drunkenness and other misconduct brought on him the ill
favor of the "Dumfries aristocracy."  The boon companions with whom
he mingled, and the curious tourists attracted by {xvii} his fame,
were in no small measure the cause of his poor success.  On January
2, 1793, he writes to Mrs. Dunlop:--

"Occasionally hard drinking is the devil to me.  Against this I have
again and again bent my resolution, and have greatly succeeded.
Taverns I have totally abandoned: it is the private parties in the
family way, among the hard-drinking gentlemen of this country, that
do me the mischief."

The poet's excesses did not keep him from being an affectionate
father, and attending carefully to his children's education.  He died
on July 21, 1796.

Burns's life since leaving Edinburgh had, on the whole, been one of
decline.  With the exception of his songs, which he never ceased to
contribute to Thomson's _Collection of Scottish Airs_, and of _Tam
O'Shanter_, written at Ellisland, he had produced no important poem
since that time.  But this sketch of Burns's life must not attempt an
estimate of his character as poet or man.  Its only object is to
furnish for ready reference a few of the facts necessary for
understanding Carlyle's work.



{xviii}

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.

Every author should be studied, as far as possible, from his own
writings.  Carlyle's voluminous correspondence furnishes rich
materials for the history of his life and thought.  The best editions
of his letters are those edited by Professor Charles Eliot Norton:
_Early Letters of Thomas Carlyle_ (1814-1826), _Letters of Thomas
Carlyle_ (1826-1836), _Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph
Waldo Emerson_.  These may be supplemented by Froude's edition of the
_Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle_.  Next to these
first-hand documents, Froude's _Thomas Carlyle_, in spite of its
inaccuracy and its prejudiced point of view, will remain the great
storehouse of information for students of the subject.  There are
good short lives of Carlyle by John Nichol (_English Men of Letters_
Series) and Richard Garnett (_Great Writers_ Series).  The former
deals more fully in criticism on his literary work.  There are
excellent critical appreciations of Carlyle by James Russell Lowell,
Augustine Birrell (in _Obiter Dicta_), and Matthew Arnold (in _Essay
on Emerson_).

The best way to study Burns is to learn the outline of the external
events of his life from any short sketch, and then to read his poems
and letters in chronological order.  Besides the life by Lockhart,
there are good accounts of him by Principal Shairp (_English Men of
Letters_ Series) and John Stuart Blackie (_Great Writers_ Series).
Carlyle mentions by name Currie and Walker among the biographers of
Burns previous to Lockhart.  Dr. James Currie (1756-1805), a famous
Scotch physician, published in 1800 an edition of Burns's works, with
an account of his life, in aid of the poet's family.  The _Life of
Burns_, written by Josiah Walker, later Professor of Humanity in
Glasgow University, to accompany an edition of Burns's works
published in 1811, has no permanent value.

Unlike the other two men, Lockhart does not appeal to us as much by
his personal character as by his writings.  The _Life and Letters of
John Gibson Lockhart_, by Andrew Lang, is the best book with regard
to him.



{1}

ESSAY ON BURNS.[1]


In the modern arrangements of society, it is no uncommon thing that a
man of genius must, like Butler,[2] "ask for bread and receive a
stone;" for, in spite of our grand maxim of supply and demand, it is
by no means the highest excellence that men are most forward to
recognize.  The inventor of a spinning-jenny is pretty sure of his
reward in his own day; but the writer of a true poem, like the
apostle of a true religion, is nearly as sure of the contrary.  We do
not know whether it is not an aggravation of the injustice, that
there is generally a posthumous retribution.  Robert Burns, in the
course of Nature, might yet have been living; but his short life was
spent in toil and penury; and he died, in the prime of his manhood,
miserable and neglected: and yet already a brave mausoleum shines
over his dust,[3] and more {2} than one splendid monument has been
reared in other places to his fame; the street where he languished in
poverty is called by his name;[4] the highest personages in our
literature have been proud to appear as his commentators and
admirers; and here is the _sixth_ narrative of his life that has been
given to the world![5]

Mr. Lockhart thinks it necessary to apologize for this new attempt on
such a subject: but his readers, we believe, will readily acquit him;
or, at worst, will censure only the performance of his task, not the
choice of it.  The character of Burns, indeed, is a theme that cannot
easily become either trite or exhausted; and will probably gain
rather than lose in its dimensions by the distance to which it is
removed by Time.  No man, it has been said, is a hero to his valet;
and this is probably true; but the fault is at least as likely to be
the valet's as the hero's.  For it is certain, that to the vulgar eye
few things are wonderful that are not distant.  It is difficult for
men to believe that the man, the mere man whom they see, nay perhaps
painfully feel toiling at their side through the poor jostlings of
existence, can be made of finer clay than themselves.  Suppose that
some dining acquaintance of Sir Thomas Lucy's, and neighbor of John a
Combe's,[6] had snatched an hour or two from the preservation of his
game, and written us a Life {3} of Shakespeare!  What dissertations
should we not have had,--not on "Hamlet" and "The Tempest," but on
the wool-trade, and deer-stealing, and the libel and vagrant laws;
and how the Poacher became a Player; and how Sir Thomas and Mr. John
had Christian bowels, and did not push him to extremities!  In like
manner, we believe, with respect to Burns, that till the companions
of his pilgrimage, the Honorable Excise Commissioners, and the
Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt,[7] and the Dumfries Aristocracy,
and all the Squires and Earls, equally with the Ayr Writers,[8] and
the New and Old Light Clergy, whom he had to do with, shall have
become invisible in the darkness of the Past, or visible only by
light borrowed from _his_ juxtaposition, it will be difficult to
measure him by any true standard, or to estimate what he really was
and did, in the eighteenth century, for his country and the world.
It will be difficult, we say; but still a fair problem for literary
historians; and repeated attempts will give us repeated
approximations.

His former Biographers have done something, no doubt, but by no means
a great deal, to assist us.  Dr. Currie and Mr. Walker, the principal
of these writers, have both, we think, mistaken one essentially
important thing: Their own and the world's true relation to their
author, and the style in which it {4} became such men to think and to
speak of such a man.  Dr. Currie loved the poet truly; more perhaps
than he avowed to his readers, or even to himself; yet he everywhere
introduces him with a certain patronizing, apologetic air: as if the
polite public might think it strange and half unwarrantable that he,
a man of science, a scholar and gentleman, should do such honor to a
rustic.  In all this, however, we readily admit that his fault was
not want of love, but weakness of faith; and regret that the first
and kindest of all our poet's biographers should not have seen
farther, or believed more boldly what he saw.  Mr. Walker offends
more deeply in the same kind: and both err alike in presenting us
with a detached catalogue of his several supposed attributes, virtues
and vices, instead of a delineation of the resulting character as a
living unity.  This, however, is not painting a portrait; but gauging
the length and breadth of the several features, and jotting down
their dimensions in arithmetical ciphers.  Nay, it is not so much as
that: for we are yet to learn by what arts or instruments the mind
_could_ be so measured and gauged.

Mr. Lockhart, we are happy to say, has avoided both these errors.  He
uniformly treats Burns as the high and remarkable man the public
voice has now pronounced him to be: and in delineating him, he has
avoided the method of separate generalities, and rather sought for
characteristic incidents, habits, actions, sayings; in a word, for
aspects which exhibit the whole man, as he looked and lived among his
fellows.  The book accordingly, with all its deficiencies, gives more
insight, we think, into the true character of Burns than any prior
biography: though, being {5} written on the very popular and
condensed scheme of an article for "Constable's Miscellany,"[9] it
has less depth than we could have wished and expected from a writer
of such power; and contains rather more, and more multifarious
quotations than belong of right to an original production.  Indeed,
Mr. Lockhart's own writing is generally so good, so clear, direct and
nervous, that we seldom wish to see it making place for another
man's.  However, the spirit of the work is throughout candid,
tolerant and anxiously conciliating; compliments and praises are
liberally distributed, on all hands, to great and small; and, as Mr.
Morris Birkbeck[10] observes of the society in the backwoods of
America, "the courtesies of polite life are never lost sight of for a
moment."  But there are better things than these in the volume; and
we can safely testify, not only that it is easily and pleasantly read
a first time, but may even be without difficulty read again.[11]

{6}

Nevertheless, we are far from thinking that the problem of Burns's
Biography has yet been adequately solved.  We do not allude so much
to deficiency of facts or documents,--though of these we are still
every day receiving some fresh accession,--as to the limited and
imperfect application of them to the great end of Biography.  Our
notions upon this subject may perhaps appear extravagant; but if an
individual is really of consequence enough to have his life and
character recorded for public remembrance, we have always been of
opinion that the public ought to be made acquainted with all the
inward springs and relations of his character.  How did the world and
man's life, from his particular position, represent themselves to his
mind?  How did co-existing circumstances modify him from without; how
did he modify these from within?  With what endeavors and what
efficacy rule over them; with what resistance and what suffering sink
under them?  In one word, what and how produced was the effect of
society on him; what and how produced was his effect on society?  He
who should answer these questions, in regard to any individual,
would, as we believe, furnish a model of perfection in Biography.
Few individuals, indeed, can deserve such a study; and many _lives_
will be written, and, for the gratification of innocent curiosity,
ought to be written, and read and forgotten, which are not in this
sense _biographies_.  But Burns, if we mistake not, is one of these
few individuals; and such a study, at least with such a result, he
has not yet obtained.  Our own contributions to it, we are aware, can
be but scanty and feeble; but we offer them with good-will, and trust
{7} they may meet with acceptance from those they are intended
for.[12]


Burns first came upon the world as a prodigy; and was, in that
character, entertained by it, in the usual fashion, with loud, vague,
tumultuous wonder, speedily subsiding into censure and neglect; till
his early and most mournful death again awakened an enthusiasm for
him, which, especially as there was now nothing to be done, and much
to be spoken, has prolonged itself even to our own time.  It is true,
the "nine days" have long since elapsed; and the very continuance of
this clamor proves that Burns was no vulgar wonder.  Accordingly,
even in sober judgments, where, as years passed by, he has come to
rest more and more exclusively on his own intrinsic merits, and may
now be well-nigh shorn of that casual radiance, he appears not only
as a true British poet, but as one of the most considerable British
men of the eighteenth century.  Let it not be objected that he did
little.  He did much, if we consider where and how.  If the work
performed was small, we must remember that he had his very materials
to discover; for the metal he worked in lay hid under the desert
moor, where no eye but his had guessed its existence; and we may
almost say, that with his own hand he had to construct the tools for
fashioning it.  For he found himself in deepest obscurity, without
help, without instruction, without model; or with models only of the
meanest sort.  An educated man stands, as it were, in the midst of a
boundless arsenal and {8} magazine, filled with all the weapons and
engines which man's skill has been able to devise from the earliest
time; and he works, accordingly, with a strength borrowed from all
past ages.  How different is his state who stands on the outside of
that storehouse, and feels that its gates must be stormed, or remain
forever shut against him!  His means are the commonest and rudest;
the mere work done is no measure of his strength.  A dwarf behind his
steam-engine may remove mountains; but no dwarf will hew them down
with a pickaxe; and he must be a Titan that hurls them abroad with
his arms.

It is in this last shape that Burns presents himself.  Born in an age
the most prosaic Britain had yet seen, and in a condition the most
disadvantageous, where his mind, if it accomplished aught, must
accomplish it under the pressure of continual bodily toil, nay of
penury and desponding apprehension of the worst evils, and with no
furtherance but such knowledge as dwells in a poor man's hut, and the
rhymes of a Ferguson or Ramsay[13] for his standard of beauty, he
sinks not under all these impediments: through the fogs and darkness
of that obscure region, his lynx eye discerns the true relations of
the world and human life; he grows into intellectual strength, and
trains himself into intellectual expertness.  Impelled by the
expansive movement of his own irrepressible soul, he {9} struggles
forward into the general view; and with haughty modesty lays down
before us, as the fruit of his labor, a gift which Time has now
pronounced imperishable.  Add to all this, that his darksome drudging
childhood and youth was by far the kindliest era of his whole life;
and that he died in his thirty-seventh year: and then ask, If it be
strange that his poems are imperfect, and of small extent, or that
his genius attained no mastery in its art?  Alas, his Sun shone as
through a tropical tornado; and the pale Shadow of Death eclipsed it
at noon!  Shrouded in such baleful vapors, the genius of Burns was
never seen in clear azure splendor, enlightening the world: but some
beams from it did, by fits, pierce through; and it tinted those
clouds with rainbow and orient colors, into a glory and stern
grandeur, which men silently gazed on with wonder and tears!

We are anxious not to exaggerate; for it is exposition rather than
admiration that our readers require of us here; and yet to avoid some
tendency to that side is no easy matter.  We love Burns, and we pity
him; and love and pity are prone to magnify.  Criticism, it is
sometimes thought, should be a cold business; we are not so sure of
this;[14] but, at all events, our concern with Burns is not
exclusively that of critics.  True and genial as his poetry must
appear, it is not chiefly as a poet, but as a man, that he interests
and affects us.  He was often advised to write a tragedy;[15] time
and means were not lent him for {10} this; but through life he
enacted a tragedy, and one of the deepest.  We question whether the
world has since witnessed so utterly sad a scene; whether Napoleon
himself, left to brawl with Sir Hudson Lowe, and perish on his rock,
"amid the melancholy main," presented to the reflecting mind such a
"spectacle of pity and fear" as did this intrinsically nobler,
gentler and perhaps greater soul, wasting itself away in a hopeless
struggle with base entanglements, which coiled closer and closer
round him till only death opened him an outlet.  Conquerors are a
class of men with whom, for most part, the world could well dispense;
nor can the hard intellect, the unsympathizing loftiness and high but
selfish enthusiasm of such persons inspire us in general with any
affection; at best it may excite amazement; and their fall, like that
of a pyramid, will be beheld with a certain sadness and awe.  But a
true Poet, a man in whose heart resides some effluence of Wisdom,
some tone of the "Eternal Melodies," is the most precious gift that
can be bestowed on a generation: we see in him a freer, purer
development of whatever is noblest in ourselves; his life is a rich
lesson to us; and we mourn his death as that of a benefactor who
loved and taught us.[16]

Such a gift had Nature, in her bounty, bestowed on us in Robert
Burns; but with queenlike indifference she cast it from her hand,
like a thing of no {11} moment; and it was defaced and torn asunder,
as an idle bauble, before we recognized it.  To the ill-starred Burns
was given the power of making man's life more venerable, but that of
wisely guiding his own life was not given.  Destiny,--for so in our
ignorance we must speak,--his faults, the faults of others, proved
too hard for him; and that spirit, which might have soared could it
but have walked, soon sank to the dust, its glorious faculties
trodden under foot in the blossom; and died, we may almost say,
without ever having lived.  And so kind and warm a soul; so full of
inborn riches, of love to all living and lifeless things!  How his
heart flows out in sympathy over universal Nature; and in her
bleakest provinces discerns a beauty and a meaning!  The "Daisy"
falls not unheeded under his ploughshare; nor the ruined nest of that
"wee, cowering, timorous beastie," cast forth, after all its
provident pains, to "thole the sleety dribble and cranreuch
cauld."[17]  The "hoar visage" of Winter delights him; he dwells with
a sad and oft-returning fondness in these scenes of solemn
desolation; but the voice of the tempest becomes an anthem to his
ears; he loves to walk in the sounding woods, for "it raises his
thoughts to _Him that walketh on the wings of the wind_."[18]  A true
Poet-soul, for it needs but to be struck, and the sound it yields
will be music!  But observe him chiefly as he mingles with his
brother men.  What warm, all-comprehending fellow-feeling; what {12}
trustful, boundless love; what generous exaggeration of the object
loved!  His rustic friend, his nut-brown maiden, are no longer mean
and homely, but a hero and a queen, whom he prizes as the paragons of
Earth.  The rough scenes of Scottish life, not seen by him in any
Arcadian illusion, but in the rude contradiction, in the smoke and
soil of a too harsh reality, are still lovely to him: Poverty is
indeed his companion, but Love also, and Courage; the simple
feelings, the worth, the nobleness, that dwell under the straw roof,
are dear and venerable to his heart: and thus over the lowest
provinces of man's existence he pours the glory of his own soul; and
they rise, in shadow and sunshine, softened and brightened into a
beauty which other eyes discern not in the highest.  He has a just
self-consciousness, which too often degenerates into pride; yet it is
a noble pride, for defence, not for offence; no cold suspicious
feeling, but a frank and social one.  The Peasant Poet bears himself,
we might say, like a King in exile: he is cast among the low, and
feels himself equal to the highest; yet he claims no rank, that none
may be disputed to him.  The forward he can repel, the supercilious
he can subdue; pretensions of wealth or ancestry are of no avail with
him; there is a fire in that dark eye, under which the "insolence of
condescension" cannot thrive.  In his abasement, in his extreme need,
he forgets not for a moment the majesty of Poetry and Manhood.  And
yet, far as he feels himself above common men, he wanders not apart
from them, but mixes warmly in their interests; nay throws himself
into their arms, and, as it were, entreats them to love him.  It is
moving to see how, in his darkest despondency, this proud being still
seeks {13} relief from friendship; unbosoms himself, often to the
unworthy; and, amid tears, strains to his glowing heart a heart that
knows only the name of friendship.  And yet he was "quick to learn;"
a man of keen vision, before whom common disguises afforded no
concealment.  His understanding saw through the hollowness even of
accomplished deceivers; but there was a generous credulity in his
heart.  And so did our Peasant show himself among us; "a soul like an
Æolian harp, in whose strings the vulgar wind, as it passed through
them, changed itself into articulate melody."[19]  And this was he
for whom the world found no fitter business than quarrelling with
smugglers and vintners, computing excise-dues upon tallow, and
gauging ale-barrels!  In such toils was that mighty Spirit
sorrowfully wasted: and a hundred years may pass on before another
such is given us to waste.


All that remains of Burns, the Writings he has left, seem to us, as
we hinted above, no more than a poor mutilated fraction of what was
in him; brief, broken glimpses of a genius that could never show
itself complete; that wanted all things for completeness: culture,
leisure, true effort, nay even length of life.  His poems are, with
scarcely any exception, mere occasional effusions; poured forth with
little premeditation; expressing, by such means as offered, the
passion, opinion, or humor of the hour.  Never in one instance was it
permitted him to grapple with {14} any subject with the full
collection of his strength, to fuse and mould it in the concentrated
fire of his genius.  To try by the strict rules of Art such imperfect
fragments, would be at once unprofitable and unfair.  Nevertheless,
there is something in these poems, marred and defective as they are,
which forbids the most fastidious student of poetry to pass them by.
Some sort of enduring quality they must have: for after fifty years
of the wildest vicissitudes in poetic taste, they still continue to
be read; nay are read more and more eagerly, more and more
extensively; and this not only by literary virtuosos, and that class
upon whom transitory causes operate most strongly, but by all
classes, down to the most hard, unlettered and truly natural class,
who read little, and especially no poetry, except because they find
pleasure in it.  The grounds of so singular and wide a popularity,
which extends, in a literal sense, from the palace to the hut, and
over all regions where the English tongue is spoken, are well worth
inquiring into.  After every just deduction, it seems to imply some
rare excellence in these works.  What is that excellence?

To answer this question will not lead us far.  The excellence of
Burns is, indeed, among the rarest, whether in poetry or prose; but,
at the same time, it is plain and easily recognized: his _Sincerity_,
his indisputable air of Truth.  Here are no fabulous woes or joys; no
hollow fantastic sentimentalities; no wire-drawn refinings, either in
thought or feeling: the passion that is traced before us has glowed
in a living heart; the opinion he utters has risen in his own
understanding, and been a light to his own steps.  He does not write
from hearsay, but from sight and experience; it is the scenes that he
has lived and labored {15} amidst, that he describes: those scenes,
rude and humble as they are, have kindled beautiful emotions in his
soul, noble thoughts, and definite resolves; and he speaks forth what
is in him, not from any outward call of vanity or interest, but
because his heart is too full to be silent.  He speaks it with such
melody and modulation as he can; "in homely rustic jingle;" but it is
his own, and genuine.  This is the grand secret for finding readers
and retaining them: let him who would move and convince others, be
first moved and convinced himself.  Horace's rule, _Si vis me
flere_,[20] is applicable in a wider sense than the literal one.  To
every poet, to every writer, we might say: Be true, if you would be
believed.  Let a man but speak forth with genuine earnestness the
thought, the emotion, the actual condition of his own heart; and
other men, so strangely are we all knit together by the tie of
sympathy, must and will give heed to him.  In culture, in extent of
view, we may stand above the speaker, or below him; but in either
case, his words, if they are earnest and sincere, will find some
response within us; for in spite of all casual varieties in outward
rank or inward, as face answers to face, so does the heart of man to
man.[21]

This may appear a very simple principle, and one {16} which Burns had
little merit in discovering.  True, the discovery is easy enough: but
the practical appliance is not easy; is indeed the fundamental
difficulty which all poets have to strive with, and which scarcely
one in the hundred ever fairly surmounts.  A head too dull to
discriminate the true from the false; a heart too dull to love the
one at all risks, and to hate the other in spite of all temptations,
are alike fatal to a writer.  With either, or as more commonly
happens, with both of these deficiencies combine a love of
distinction, a wish to be original, which is seldom wanting, and we
have Affectation, the bane of literature, as Cant, its elder brother,
is of morals.  How often does the one and the other front us, in
poetry, as in life!  Great poets themselves are not always free of
this vice; nay it is precisely on a certain sort and degree of
greatness that it is most commonly ingrafted.  A strong effort after
excellence will sometimes solace itself with a mere shadow of
success; he who has much to unfold, will sometimes unfold it
imperfectly.  Byron, for instance, was no common man: yet if we
examine his poetry with this view, we shall find it far enough from
faultless.  Generally speaking, we should say that it is not true.
He refreshes us, not with the divine fountain, but too often with
vulgar strong waters, stimulating indeed to the taste, but soon
ending in dislike, or even nausea.  Are his Harolds and Giaours, we
would ask, real men; we mean, poetically consistent and conceivable
men?  Do not these characters, does not the character of their
author, which more or less shines through them all, rather appear a
thing put on for the occasion; no natural or possible mode of being,
but something intended to look much grander than nature?  {17}
Surely, all these stormful agonies, this volcanic heroism, superhuman
contempt and moody desperation, with so much scowling, and
teeth-gnashing, and other sulphurous humor, is more like the brawling
of a player in some paltry tragedy, which is to last three hours,
than the bearing of a man in the business of life, which is to last
threescore and ten years.  To our minds there is a taint of this
sort, something which we should call theatrical, false, affected, in
every one of these otherwise so powerful pieces.  Perhaps "Don Juan,"
especially the latter parts of it, is the only thing approaching to a
_sincere_ work, he ever wrote; the only work where he showed himself,
in any measure, as he was; and seemed so intent on his subject as,
for moments, to forget himself.  Yet Byron hated this vice; we
believe, heartily detested it: nay he had declared formal war against
it in words.  So difficult is it even for the strongest to make this
primary attainment, which might seem the simplest of all: _to read
its own consciousness without mistakes_, without errors involuntary
or wilful!  We recollect no poet of Burns's susceptibility who comes
before us from the first, and abides with us to the last, with such a
total want of affectation.  He is an honest man, and an honest
writer.  In his successes and his failures, in his greatness and his
littleness, he is ever clear, simple, true, and glitters with no
lustre but his own.  We reckon this to be a great virtue; to be, in
fact, the root of most other virtues, literary as well as moral.

Here, however, let us say, it is to the poetry of Burns that we now
allude; to those writings which he had time to meditate, and where no
special reason existed to warp his critical feeling, or obstruct his
{18} endeavor to fulfil it.  Certain of his Letters, and other
fractions of prose composition, by no means deserve this praise.
Here, doubtless, there is not the same natural truth of style; but on
the contrary, something not only stiff, but strained and twisted; a
certain high-flown inflated tone; the stilting emphasis of which
contrasts ill with the firmness and rugged simplicity of even his
poorest verses.  Thus no man, it would appear, is altogether
unaffected.  Does not Shakespeare himself sometimes premeditate the
sheerest bombast!  But even with regard to these Letters of Burns, it
is but fair to state that he had two excuses.  The first was his
comparative deficiency in language.  Burns, though for most part he
writes with singular force and even gracefulness, is not master of
English prose, as he is of Scotch verse; not master of it, we mean,
in proportion to the depth and vehemence of his matter.  These
Letters strike us as the effort of a man to express something which
he has no organ fit for expressing.  But a second and weightier
excuse is to be found in the peculiarity of Burns's social rank.  His
correspondents are often men whose relation to him he has never
accurately ascertained; whom therefore he is either forearming
himself against, or else unconsciously flattering, by adopting the
style he thinks will please them.[22]  At all events, we should
remember that these faults, even in his Letters, are not the rule,
but the exception.  Whenever he writes, as one would ever wish {19}
to do, to trusted friends and on real interests, his style becomes
simple, vigorous, expressive, sometimes even beautiful.  His letters
to Mrs. Dunlop are uniformly excellent.

But we return to his Poetry.  In addition to its Sincerity, it has
another peculiar merit, which indeed is but a mode, or perhaps a
means, of the fore-going: this displays itself in his choice of
subjects; or rather in his indifference as to subjects, and the power
he has of making all subjects interesting.  The ordinary poet, like
the ordinary man, is forever seeking in external circumstances the
help which can be found only in himself.  In what is familiar and
near at hand, he discerns no form or comeliness: home is not poetical
but prosaic; it is in some past, distant, conventional heroic world,
that poetry resides; were he there and not here, were he thus and not
so, it would be well with him.  Hence our innumerable host of
rose-colored Novels and iron-mailed Epics, with their locality not on
the Earth, but somewhere nearer to the Moon.  Hence our Virgins of
the Sun, and our Knights of the Cross, malicious Saracens in turbans,
and copper-colored Chiefs in wampum, and so many other truculent
figures from the heroic times or the heroic climates, who on all
hands swarm in our poetry.  Peace be with them!  But yet, as a great
moralist proposed preaching to the men of this century, so would we
fain preach to the poets, "a sermon on the duty of staying at home."
Let them be sure that heroic ages and heroic climates can do little
for them.  That form of life has attraction for us, less because it
is better or nobler than our own, than simply because it is
different; and even this attraction must be of the most transient
{20} sort.  For will not our own age, one day, be an ancient one; and
have as quaint a costume as the rest; not contrasted with the rest,
therefore, but ranked along with them, in respect of quaintness?
Does Homer interest us now, because he wrote of what passed beyond
his native Greece, and two centuries before he was born; or because
he wrote what passed in God's world, and in the heart of man, which
is the same after thirty centuries?  Let our poets look to this: is
their feeling really finer, truer, and their vision deeper than that
of other men,--they have nothing to fear, even from the humblest
subject; is it not so,--they have nothing to hope, but an ephemeral
favor, even from the highest.[23]

The poet, we imagine, can never have far to seek for a subject: the
elements of his art are in him, and around him on every hand; for him
the Ideal world is not remote from the Actual, but under it and
within it: nay he is a poet, precisely because he can discern it
there.  Wherever there is a sky above him, and a world around him,
the poet is in his place; for here too is man's existence, with its
infinite longings and small acquirings; its ever-thwarted,
ever-renewed endeavors; its unspeakable aspirations, its fears and
hopes that wander through Eternity; and all the mystery of brightness
and of gloom that it was ever made of, in any age or climate, since
man first began {21} to live.  Is there not the fifth act of a
Tragedy in every deathbed, though it were a peasant's, and a bed of
heath?  And are wooings and weddings obsolete, that there can be
Comedy no longer?  Or are men suddenly grown wise, that Laughter must
no longer shake his sides, but be cheated of his Farce?  Man's life
and nature is, as it was, and as it will ever be.  But the poet must
have an eye to read these things, and a heart to understand them; or
they come and pass away before him in vain.  He is a _vates_, a seer;
a gift of vision has been given him.  Has life no meanings for him,
which another cannot equally decipher? then he is no poet, and Delphi
itself will not make him one.

In this respect, Burns, though not perhaps absolutely a great poet,
better manifests his capability, better proves the truth of his
genius, than if he had by his own strength kept the whole Minerva
Press[24] going, to the end of his literary course.  He shows himself
at least a poet of Nature's own making; and Nature, after all, is
still the grand agent in making poets.  We often hear of this and the
other external condition being requisite for the existence of a poet.
Sometimes it is a certain sort of training; he must have studied
certain things, studied, for instance, "the elder dramatists," and so
learned a poetic language; as if poetry lay in the tongue, not in the
heart.  At other times we are told he must be bred in a certain rank,
and must be on a confidential footing with the higher classes;
because, above all things, he must see the world.  As to seeing the
world, we {22} apprehend this will cause him little difficulty, if he
have but eyesight to see it with.  Without eyesight, indeed, the task
might be hard.  The blind or the purblind man "travels from Dan to
Beersheba, and finds it all barren."  But happily every poet is born
in the world; and sees it, with or against his will, every day and
every hour he lives.  The mysterious workmanship of man's heart, the
true light and the inscrutable darkness of man's destiny, reveal
themselves not only in capital cities and crowded saloons, but in
every hut and hamlet where men have their abode.  Nay, do not the
elements of all human virtues and all human vices; the passions at
once of a Borgia and of a Luther, lie written, in stronger or fainter
lines, in the consciousness of every individual bosom, that has
practised honest self-examination?  Truly, this same world may be
seen in Mossgiel and Tarbolton, if we look well, as clearly as it
ever came to light in Crockford's,[25] or the Tuileries itself.

But sometimes still harder requisitions are laid on the poor aspirant
to poetry; for it is hinted that he should have _been born_ two
centuries ago; inasmuch as poetry, about that date, vanished from the
earth, and became no longer attainable by men![26]  Such cobweb
speculations have, now and then, overhung the field of literature;
but they obstruct not the growth of any plant there: the Shakespeare
or the Burns, unconsciously and merely as he walks onward, silently
brushes them away.  Is not every genius an impossibility till he
appear?  Why do we call him new and original, if we saw where his
marble was lying, and what fabric he could rear from it?  It is {23}
not the material but the workman that is wanting.  It is not the dark
place that hinders, but the dim eye.  A Scottish peasant's life was
the meanest and rudest of all lives, till Burns became a poet in it,
and a poet of it; found it a man's life, and therefore significant to
men.  A thousand battlefields remain unsung; but the "Wounded Hare"
has not perished without its memorial; a balm of mercy yet breathes
on us from its dumb agonies, because a poet was there.  Our
"Halloween" had passed and repassed, in rude awe and laughter, since
the era of the Druids; but no Theocritus, till Burns, discerned in it
the materials of a Scottish Idyl: neither was the "Holy Fair" any
Council of Trent or Roman Jubilee; but nevertheless, Superstition and
Hypocrisy and Fun having been propitious to him, in this man's hand
it became a poem, instinct with satire and genuine comic life.[27]
Let but the true poet be given us, we repeat it, place him where and
how you will, and true poetry will not be wanting.

Independently of the essential gift of poetic feeling, as we have now
attempted to describe it, a certain rugged sterling worth pervades
whatever Burns has written; a virtue, as of green fields and mountain
breezes, dwells in his poetry; it is redolent of natural life and
hardy natural men.  There is a decisive strength in him, and yet a
sweet native gracefulness: he is tender, he is vehement, yet without
constraint or too visible effort; he melts the heart, or inflames it,
with a power which seems habitual and familiar to him.  We see that
in this man there was {24} the gentleness, the trembling pity of a
woman, with the deep earnestness, the force and passionate ardor of a
hero.  Tears lie in him, and consuming fire; as lightning lurks in
the drops of the summer cloud.  He has a resonance in his bosom for
every note of human feeling; the high and the low, the sad, the
ludicrous, the joyful, are welcome in their turns to his
"lightly-moved and all-conceiving spirit."  And observe with what a
fierce prompt force he grasps his subject, be it what it may!  How he
fixes, as it were, the full image of the matter in his eye; full and
clear in every lineament; and catches the real type and essence of
it, amid a thousand accidents and superficial circumstances, no one
of which misleads him!  Is it of reason; some truth to be discovered?
No sophistry, no vain surface-logic detains him; quick, resolute,
unerring, he pierces through into the marrow of the question; and
speaks his verdict with an emphasis that cannot be forgotten.  Is it
of description some visual object to be represented?  No poet of any
age or nation is more graphic than Burns: the characteristic features
disclose themselves to him at a glance; three lines from his hand and
we have a likeness.  And, in that rough dialect, in that rude, often
awkward metre, so clear and definite a likeness!  It seems a
draughtsman working with a burnt stick; and yet the burin of a
Retzsch[28] is not more expressive or exact.

Of[29] this last excellence, the plainest and most {25} comprehensive
of all, being indeed the root and foundation of _every_ sort of
talent, poetical or intellectual, we could produce innumerable
instances from the writings of Burns.  Take these glimpses of a
snowstorm from his "Winter Night" (the italics are ours):--

  When biting Boreas, fell and doure,
  _Sharp shivers_ thro' the leafless bow'r,
  And Phœbus _gies a short-liv'd glowr
              Far south the lift,
  Dim-darkening thro' the flaky shower
              Or whirling drift:_

  'Ae night the storm the steeples rock'd,
  Poor labour sweet in sleep was lock'd,
  While burns _wi' snawy wreeths upchok'd
              Wild-eddying swirl,_
  Or thro' the mining outlet bock'd[30]
              Down headlong hurl.

Are there not "descriptive touches" there?  The describer _saw_ this
thing; the essential feature and true likeness of every circumstance
in it; saw, and not with the eye only.  "Poor labour locked in sweet
sleep;" the dead stillness of man, unconscious, vanquished, yet not
unprotected, while such strife of the material elements rages, and
seems to reign supreme in loneliness: this is of the heart as well as
of the eye!--Look also at his image of a thaw, and prophesied fall of
the "Auld Brig:"--

  When heavy, dark, continued, a'-day rains
  Wi' deepening deluges o'erflow the plains;
  When from the hills where springs the brawling Coil,
  Or stately Lugar's _mossy_ fountains _boil_,
  Or where the Greenock winds his _moorland_ course,
  Or haunted Garpal[31] draws his feeble source,
{26}
  Arous'd by blust'ring winds and _spotting_ thowes,[32]
  _In mony a torrent down his snaw-broo rowes;[33]
  While crashing ice, borne on the roaring speat,[34]
  Sweeps dams and mills and brigs a' to the gate;_
  And from Glenbuck down to the Rottonkey,
  Auld Ayr is just one lengthen'd _tumbling_ sea;
  Then down ye'll hurl, Deil nor ye never rise!
  And _dash the gumlie jaups[35] up to the pouring skies_.[36]

The last line is in itself a Poussin-picture of that Deluge!  The
welkin has, as it were, bent down with its weight; the "gumlie jaups"
and the "pouring skies" are mingled together; it is a world of rain
and ruin.--In respect of mere clearness and minute fidelity, the
_Farmer's_ commendation of his _Auld Mare_ in plough or in cart, may
vie with Homer's Smithy of the Cyclops, or yoking of Priam's
Chariot.[37]  Nor have we forgotten stout Burn-the-wind[38] and his
brawny customers, inspired by Scotch Drink: but it is needless to
multiply examples.  One other trait of a much finer sort we select
from multitudes of such among his "Songs."  It gives, in a single
line, to the saddest feeling the saddest environment and local
habitation:--

  _The pale Moon is setting beyond the white wave,
  And time is setting wi' me, O;_
{27}
  Farewell, false friends! false lover, farewell!
  I'll nae mair trouble them nor thee, O.[39]


This clearness of sight we have called the foundation of all talent;
for in fact, unless we see our object, how shall we know how to place
or prize it, in our understanding, our imagination, our affections?
Yet it is not in itself, perhaps, a very high excellence; but capable
of being united indifferently with the strongest, or with ordinary
power.  Homer surpasses all men in this quality: but strangely
enough, at no great distance below him are Richardson and Defoe.  It
belongs, in truth, to what is called a lively mind; and gives no sure
indication of the higher endowments that may exist along with it.  In
all the three cases we have mentioned, it is combined with great
garrulity; their descriptions are detailed, ample and lovingly exact:
Homer's fire bursts through, from time to time, as if by accident;
but Defoe and Richardson have no fire.  Burns, again, is not more
distinguished by the clearness than by the impetuous force of his
conceptions.  Of the strength, the piercing emphasis with which he
thought, his emphasis of expression may give a humble but the
readiest proof.  Whoever uttered sharper sayings than his; words more
memorable, now by their burning vehemence, now by their cool vigor
and laconic pith?  A single phrase depicts a whole subject, a whole
scene.  We hear of "a gentleman that derived his patent of nobility
direct {28} from Almighty God."  Our Scottish forefathers in the
battlefield struggled forward "_red-wat-shod_:"[40] in this one word
a full vision of horror and carnage, perhaps too frightfully accurate
for Art!

In fact, one of the leading features in the mind of Burns is this
vigor of his strictly intellectual perceptions.  A resolute force is
ever visible in his judgments, and in his feelings and volitions.
Professor Stewart says of him, with some surprise:[41] "All the
faculties of Burns's mind were, as far as I could judge, equally
vigorous; and his predilection for poetry was rather the result of
his own enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of a genius
exclusively adapted to that species of composition.  From his
conversation I should have pronounced him to be fitted to excel in
whatever walk of ambition he had chosen to exert his abilities."  But
this, if we mistake not, is at all times the very essence of a truly
poetical endowment.  Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats,
where the whole consists in a weak-eyed maudlin sensibility, and a
certain vague random tunefulness of nature, is no separate faculty,
no organ which can be superadded to the rest, or disjoined from them;
but rather the result of their general harmony and completion.[42]
The feelings, the gifts {29} that exist in the Poet are those that
exist, with more or less development, in every human soul: the
imagination, which shudders at the Hell of Dante, is the same
faculty, weaker in degree, which called that picture into being.  How
does the Poet speak to men, with power, but by being still more a man
than they?  Shakespeare, it has been well observed, in the planning
and completing of his tragedies, has shown an understanding, were it
nothing more, which might have governed states, or indited a "Novum
Organum."  What Burns's force of understanding may have been, we have
less means of judging: it had to dwell among the humblest objects;
never saw Philosophy; never rose, except by natural effort and for
short intervals, into the region of great ideas.  Nevertheless,
sufficient indication, if no proof sufficient, remains for us in his
works: we discern the brawny movements of a gigantic though untutored
strength; and can understand how, in conversation, his quick sure
insight into men and things may, as much as aught else about him,
have amazed the best thinkers of his time and country.

But, unless we mistake, the intellectual gift of Burns is fine as
well as strong.  The more delicate relations of things could not well
have escaped his eye, for they were intimately present to his heart.
The logic of the senate and the forum is indispensable, but not
all-sufficient; nay perhaps the highest Truth is that which will the
most certainly elude it.  For {30} this logic works by words, and
"the highest," it has been said, "cannot be expressed in words."  We
are not without tokens of an openness for this higher truth also, of
a keen though uncultivated sense for it, having existed in Burns.
Mr. Stewart, it will be remembered, "wonders," in the passage above
quoted, that Burns had formed some distinct conception of the
"doctrine of association."  We rather think that far subtler things
than the doctrine of association had from of old been familiar to
him.  Here for instance:--

"We know nothing," thus writes he, "or next to nothing, of the
structure of our souls, so we cannot account for those seeming
caprices in them, that one should be particularly pleased with this
thing, or struck with that, which, on minds of a different cast,
makes no extraordinary impression.  I have some favorite flowers in
spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the harebell, the
foxglove, the wild-brier rose, the budding birch, and the hoary
hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight.  I never
hear the loud solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the
wild mixing cadence of a troop of gray plover in an autumnal morning,
without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion
or poetry.  Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be owing?  Are
we a piece of machinery, which, like the Æolian harp, passive, takes
the impression of the passing accident; or do these workings argue
something within us above the trodden clod?  I own myself partial to
such proofs of those awful and important realities: a God that made
all things, man's immaterial and immortal nature, {31} and a world of
weal or woe beyond death and the grave."[43]

Force and fineness of understanding are often spoken of as something
different from general force and fineness of nature, as something
partly independent of them.  The necessities of language so require
it; but in truth these qualities are not distinct and independent:
except in special cases, and from special causes, they ever go
together.  A man of strong understanding is generally a man of strong
character; neither is delicacy in the one kind often divided from
delicacy in the other.  No one, at all events, is ignorant that in
the Poetry of Burns keenness of insight keeps pace with keenness of
feeling; that his _light_ is not more pervading than his _warmth_.
He is a man of the most impassioned temper; with passions not strong
only, but noble, and of the sort in which great virtues and great
poems take their rise.  It is reverence, it is love towards all
Nature that inspires him, that opens his eyes to its beauty, and
makes heart and voice eloquent in its praise.  There is a true old
saying, that "Love furthers knowledge:" but above all, it is the
living essence of that knowledge which makes poets; the first
principle of its existence, increase, activity.  Of Burns's fervid
affection, his generous all-embracing Love, we have spoken already,
as of the grand distinction of his nature, seen equally in word and
deed, in his Life and in his Writings.  It were easy to multiply
examples.  Not man only, but all that environs man in the material
and moral universe, is lovely in his sight: "the hoary hawthorn," the
"troop of gray plover," the "solitary {32} curlew," all are dear to
him; all live in this Earth along with him, and to all he is knit as
in mysterious brotherhood.  How touching is it, for instance, that,
amidst the gloom of personal misery, brooding over the wintry
desolation without him and within him, he thinks of the "ourie
cattle" and "silly sheep," and their sufferings in the pitiless storm!

  I thought me on the ourie cattle,
  Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle
                    O' wintry war,
  Or thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle,[44]
                    Beneath a scaur.
  Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing,
  That in the merry months o' spring
  Delighted me to hear thee sing,
                    What comes o' thee?
  Where wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing?
                    And close thy ee?[45]

The tenant of the mean hut, with its "ragged roof and chinky
wall,"[46] has a heart to pity even these!  This is worth several
homilies on Mercy; for it is the voice of Mercy herself.  Burns,
indeed, lives in sympathy; his soul rushes forth into all realms of
being; nothing that has existence can be indifferent to him.  The
very Devil he cannot hate with right orthodoxy:--

  But fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben;
  O, wad ye tak a thought and men'!
  Ye aiblins might--I dinna ken,--
                  Still hae a stake;
  I'm wae to think upo' yon den,
                  Even for your sake![47]

"He is the father of curses and lies," said Dr. Slop; {33} "and is
cursed and damned already."--"I am sorry for it," quoth my uncle
Toby![48]--a Poet without Love were a physical and metaphysical
impossibility.

But[49] has it not been said, in contradiction to this principle,
that "Indignation makes verses"?[50]  It has been so said, and is
true enough: but the contradiction is apparent, not real.  The
Indignation which makes verses is, properly speaking, an inverted
Love; the love of some right, some worth, some goodness, belonging to
ourselves or others, which has been injured, and which this
tempestuous feeling issues forth to defend and avenge.  No selfish
fury of heart, existing there as a primary feeling, and without its
opposite, ever produced much Poetry: otherwise, we suppose, the Tiger
were the most musical of all our choristers.  Johnson said, he loved
a good hater; by which he must have meant, not so much one that hated
violently, as one that hated wisely; hated baseness from love of
nobleness.  However, in spite of Johnson's paradox, tolerable enough
for once in speech, but which need not have been so often adopted in
print since then, we rather believe that good men deal sparingly in
hatred, either wise or unwise: nay that a "good" hater is still a
desideratum in this world.  The Devil, at least, who passes for the
chief {34} and best of that class, is said to be nowise an amiable
character.[51]

Of the verses which Indignation makes, Burns has also given us
specimens: and among the best that were ever given.  Who will forget
his "Dweller in yon Dungeon dark;" a piece that might have been
chanted by the Furies of Æschylus?  The secrets of the infernal Pit
are laid bare; a boundless baleful "darkness visible;"[52] and
streaks of hell-fire quivering madly in its black haggard bosom!

  Dweller in yon Dungeon dark,
  Hangman of Creation, mark!
  Who in widow's weeds appears,
  Laden with unhonoured years,
  Noosing with care a bursting purse,
  Baited with many a deadly curse![53]


Why should we speak of "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled;" since all
know of it, from the king to the meanest of his subjects?  This
dithyrambic was composed on horseback; in riding in the middle of
tempests, over the wildest Galloway moor, in company with a Mr. Syme,
who, observing the poet's looks, forbore to speak,--judiciously
enough, for a man composing "Bruce's Address" might be unsafe to
trifle with.  Doubtless this stern hymn was singing itself, as he
formed it, through the soul of Burns; but to the external ear, it
should be sung with the throat {35} of the whirlwind.[54]  So long as
there is warm blood in the heart of Scotchman or man, it will move in
fierce thrills under this war-ode; the best, we believe, that was
ever written by any pen.

Another wild stormful Song, that dwells in our ear and mind with a
strange tenacity, is "Macpherson's Farewell."  Perhaps there is
something in the tradition itself that cooperates.  For was not this
grim Celt, this shaggy Northland Cacus,[55] that "lived a life of
sturt and strife, and died by treacherie,"--was not he too one of the
Nimrods and Napoleons of the earth, in the arena of his own remote
misty glens, for want of a clearer and wider one?  Nay, was there not
a touch of grace given him?  A fibre of love and softness, of poetry
itself, must have lived in his savage heart: for he composed that air
the night before his execution; on the wings of that poor melody his
better soul would soar away above oblivion, pain and all the ignominy
and despair, which, like an avalanche, was hurling him to the abyss!
Here also, as at Thebes, and in Pelops' line,[56] was material Fate
matched against man's Free-will; matched in bitterest though obscure
duel; and the ethereal soul sank not, even in its blindness, without
a cry which has survived it.  But who, except Burns, could have given
words to such a soul; words that we never {36} listen to without a
strange half-barbarous, half-poetic fellow-feeling?

  Sae rantingly, sae wantonly,
    Sae dauntingly gaed he;
  He play'd a spring, and danced it round,
    Below the gallows-tree.


Under a lighter disguise, the same principle of Love, which we have
recognized as the great characteristic of Burns, and of all true
poets, occasionally manifests itself in the shape of Humor.
Everywhere, indeed, in his sunny moods, a full buoyant flood of mirth
rolls through the mind of Burns; he rises to the high, and stoops to
the low, and is brother and playmate to all Nature.  We speak not of
his bold and often irresistible faculty of caricature; for this is
Drollery rather than Humor: but a much tenderer sportfulness dwells
in him; and comes forth here and there, in evanescent and beautiful
touches; as in his "Address to the Mouse," or the "Farmer's Mare," or
in his "Elegy on poor Mailie," which last may be reckoned his
happiest effort of this kind.  In these pieces there are traits of a
Humor as fine as that of Sterne;[57] yet altogether different,
original, peculiar,--the Humor of Burns.

Of the tenderness, the playful pathos, and many other kindred
qualities of Burns's Poetry, much more might be said; but now, with
these poor outlines of a sketch, we must prepare to quit this part of
our subject.  To speak of his individual Writings, adequately and
with any detail, would lead us far beyond our limits.  As already
hinted, we can look on {37} but few of these pieces as, in strict
critical language, deserving the name of Poems: they are rhymed
eloquence, rhymed pathos, rhymed sense; yet seldom essentially
melodious, aerial, poetical.  "Tam o' Shanter" itself, which enjoys
so high a favor, does not appear to us at all decisively to come
under this last category.  It is not so much a poem, as a piece of
sparkling rhetoric; the heart and body of the story still lies hard
and dead.  He has not gone back, much less carried us back, into that
dark, earnest, wondering age, when the tradition was believed, and
when it took its rise; he does not attempt, by any new-modelling of
his supernatural ware, to strike anew that deep mysterious chord of
human nature, which once responded to such things; and which lives in
us too, and will forever live, though silent now, or vibrating with
far other notes, and to far different issues.  Our German readers
will understand us, when we say, that he is not the Tieck but the
Musäus of this tale.[58]  Externally it is all green and living; yet
look closer, it is no firm growth, but only ivy on a rock.  The piece
does not properly cohere: the strange chasm which yawns in our
incredulous imaginations between the Ayr publichouse and the gate of
Tophet, is nowhere bridged over, nay the idea of such a bridge is
laughed at; and thus the Tragedy of the adventure becomes a mere
drunken phantasmagoria, or many-colored spectrum painted on
ale-vapors, and the Farce {38} alone has any reality.  We do not say
that Burns should have made much more of this tradition; we rather
think that, for strictly poetical purposes, not much was to be made
of it.  Neither are we blind to the deep, varied, genial power
displayed in what he has actually accomplished; but we find far more
"Shakespearean" qualities, as these of "Tam o' Shanter" have been
fondly named, in many of his other pieces; nay we incline to believe
that this latter might have been written, all but quite as well, by a
man who, in place of genius, had only possessed talent.

Perhaps we may venture to say, that the most strictly poetical of all
his "poems" is one which does not appear in Currie's Edition; but has
been often printed before and since, under the humble title of "The
Jolly Beggars."  The subject truly is among the lowest in Nature; but
it only the more shows our Poet's gift in raising it into the domain
of Art.  To our minds, this piece seems thoroughly compacted; melted
together, refined; and poured forth in one flood of true _liquid_
harmony.  It is light, airy, soft of movement; yet sharp and precise
in its details; every face is a portrait: that _raucle carlin_,[59]
that _wee Apollo_, that _Son of Mars_, are Scottish, yet ideal; the
scene is at once a dream, and the very Ragcastle of
"Poosie-Nansie."[60]  Farther, it seems in a considerable degree
complete, a real self-supporting Whole, which is the highest merit in
a poem.  The blanket of the Night is drawn asunder for a moment; in
full, ruddy, flaming light, these rough tatterdemalions are seen in
their boisterous revel; for the strong pulse of {39} Life vindicates
its right to gladness even here; and when the curtain closes, we
prolong the action, without effort; the next day as the last, our
_Caird_ and our _Balladmonger_ are singing and soldiering; their
"brats and callets" are hawking, begging, cheating; and some other
night, in new combinations, they will wring from Fate another hour of
wassail and good cheer.  Apart from the universal sympathy with man
which this again bespeaks in Burns, a genuine inspiration and no
inconsiderable technical talent are manifested here.  There is the
fidelity, humor, warm life and accurate painting and grouping of some
Teniers,[61] for whom hostlers and carousing peasants are not without
significance.  It would be strange, doubtless, to call this the best
of Burns's writings: we mean to say only, that it seems to us the
most perfect of its kind, as a piece of poetical composition,
strictly so called.  In "The Beggar's Opera,"[62] in the "Beggar's
Bush,"[63] as other critics[64] have already remarked, there is
nothing which, in real poetic vigor, equals this _Cantata_; nothing,
as we think, which comes within many degrees of it.


But by far the most finished, complete and truly inspired pieces of
Burns are, without dispute, to be found among his "Songs."  It is
here that, although through a small aperture, his light shines with
least obstruction; in its highest beauty and pure sunny clearness.
The reason may be, that Song is a brief simple species of
composition; and requires nothing {40} so much for its perfection as
genuine poetic feeling, genuine music of heart.  Yet the Song has its
rules equally with the Tragedy; rules which in most cases are poorly
fulfilled, in many cases are not so much as felt.  We might write a
long essay on the Songs of Burns; which we reckon by far the best
that Britain has yet produced: for indeed, since the era of Queen
Elizabeth, we know not that, by any other hand, aught truly worth
attention has been accomplished in this department.  True, we have
songs enough "by persons of quality;" we have tawdry, hollow,
wine-bred madrigals; many a rhymed speech "in the flowing and watery
vein of Osorius the Portugal Bishop,"[65] rich in sonorous words,
and, for moral, dashed perhaps with some tint of a sentimental
sensuality; all which many persons cease not from endeavoring to
sing; though for most part, we fear, the music is but from the throat
outwards, or at best from some region far enough short of the _Soul_;
not in which, but in a certain inane Limbo of the Fancy, or even in
some vaporous debatable-land on the outskirts of the Nervous System,
most of such madrigals and rhymed speeches seem to have originated.

With the Songs of Burns we must not name these things.  Independently
of the clear, manly, heartfelt {41} sentiment that ever pervades
_his_ poetry, his Songs are honest in another point of view: in form,
as well as in spirit.  They do not _affect_ to be set to music, but
they actually and in themselves are music; they have received their
life, and fashioned themselves together, in the medium of Harmony, as
Venus rose from the bosom of the sea.  The story, the feeling, is not
detailed, but suggested; not _said_, or spouted, in rhetorical
completeness and coherence; but _sung_, in fitful gushes, in glowing
hints, in fantastic breaks, in _warblings_ not of the voice only, but
of the whole mind.  We consider this to be the essence of a song; and
that no songs since the little careless catches, and as it were drops
of song, which Shakespeare has here and there sprinkled over his
Plays, fulfil this condition in nearly the same degree as most of
Burns's do.  Such grace and truth of external movement, too,
presupposes in general a corresponding force and truth of sentiment
and inward meaning.  The Songs of Burns are not more perfect in the
former quality than in the latter.  With what tenderness he sings,
yet with what vehemence and entireness!  There is a piercing wail in
his sorrow, the purest rapture in his joy; he burns with the sternest
ire, or laughs with the loudest or sliest mirth; and yet he is sweet
and soft, "sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet, and soft as
their parting tear."  If we further take into account the immense
variety of his subjects; how, from the loud flowing revel in "Willie
brew'd a Peck o' Maut," to the still, rapt enthusiasm of sadness of
"Mary in Heaven;" from the glad kind greeting of "Auld Lang Syne," or
the comic archness of "Duncan Gray," to the fire-eyed fury of "Scots
wha hae wi' Wallace bled," he has found a tone and words for {42}
every mood of man's heart,--it will seem a small praise if we rank
him as the first of all our Song-writers; for we know not where to
find one worthy of being second to him.

It is on his Songs, as we believe, that Burns's chief influence as an
author will ultimately be found to depend: nor, if our Fletcher's[66]
aphorism is true, shall we account this a small influence.  "Let me
make the songs of a people," said he, "and you shall make its laws."
Surely, if ever any Poet might have equalled himself with Legislators
on this ground, it was Burns.  His Songs are already part of the
mother-tongue, not of Scotland only, but of Britain, and of the
millions that in all ends of the earth speak a British language.  In
hut and hall, as the heart unfolds itself in many-colored joy and woe
of existence, the _name_, the _voice_ of that joy and that woe, is
the name and voice which Burns has given them.  Strictly speaking,
perhaps no British man has so deeply affected the thoughts and
feelings of so many men, as this solitary and altogether private
individual, with means apparently the humblest.

In another point of view, moreover, we incline to think that Burns's
influence may have been considerable: we mean, as exerted specially
on the Literature of his country, at least on the Literature of
Scotland.  Among the great changes which British, particularly
Scottish literature, has undergone since that period, one of the
greatest will be found to consist in its {43} remarkable increase of
nationality.  Even the English writers most popular in Burns's time
were little distinguished for their literary patriotism, in this its
best sense.  A certain attenuated cosmopolitanism had, in good
measure, taken place of the old insular home-feeling; literature was,
as it were, without any local environment; was not nourished by the
affections which spring from a native soil.  Our Grays and
Glovers[67] seemed to write almost as if _in vacuo_; the thing
written bears no mark of place; it is not written so much for
Englishmen, as for men; or rather, which is the inevitable result of
this, for certain Generalizations which philosophy termed men.
Goldsmith is an exception: not so Johnson; the scene of his "Rambler"
is little more English than that of his "Rasselas."

But if such was, in some degree, the case with England, it was, in
the highest degree, the case with Scotland.  In fact our Scottish
literature had, at that period, a very singular aspect; unexampled,
so far as we know, except perhaps at Geneva, where the same state of
matters appears still to continue.  For a long period after Scotland
became British, we had no literature; at the date when Addison and
Steele were writing their "Spectators," our good John Boston was
writing, with the noblest intent, but alike in defiance of grammar
and philosophy, his "Fourfold State {44} of Man."[68]  Then came the
schisms in our National Church, and the fiercer schisms in our Body
Politic: Theologic ink, and Jacobite blood, with gall enough in both
cases, seemed to have blotted out the intellect of the country:
however, it was only obscured, not obliterated.  Lord Kames made
nearly the first attempt at writing English; and ere long, Hume,
Robertson, Smith, and a whole host of followers, attracted hither the
eyes of all Europe.  And yet in this brilliant resuscitation of our
"fervid genius," there was nothing truly Scottish, nothing
indigenous; except, perhaps, the natural impetuosity of intellect,
which we sometimes claim, and are sometimes upbraided with, as a
characteristic of our nation.  It is curious to remark that Scotland,
so full of writers, had no Scottish culture, nor indeed any English;
our culture was almost exclusively French.  It was by studying Racine
and Voltaire, Batteux and Boileau, that Kames had trained himself to
be a critic and philosopher; it was the light of Montesquieu and
Mably that guided Robertson in his political speculations; Quesnay's
lamp that kindled the lamp of Adam Smith.[69]  Hume was too rich a
man to borrow; and perhaps he reacted on the French more than he was
acted on by them; but neither had he aught to do with Scotland;
Edinburgh, equally with La Fleche,[70] {45} was but the lodging and
laboratory, in which he not so much morally _lived_, as
metaphysically _investigated_.  Never, perhaps, was there a class of
writers so clear and well-ordered, yet so totally destitute, to all
appearance, of any patriotic affection, nay of any human affection
whatever.  The French wits of the period were as unpatriotic: but
their general deficiency in moral principle, not to say their avowed
sensuality and unbelief in all virtue, strictly so called, render
this accountable enough.  We hope there is a patriotism founded on
something better than prejudice; that our country may be dear to us,
without injury to our philosophy; that in loving and justly prizing
all other lands, we may prize justly, and yet love before all others,
our own stern Motherland, and the venerable Structure of social and
moral Life, which Mind has through long ages been building up for us
there.  Surely there is nourishment for the better part of man's
heart in all this: surely the roots, that have fixed themselves in
the very core of man's being, may be so cultivated as to grow up not
into briers, but into roses, in the field of his life!  Our Scottish
sages have no such propensities: the field of their life shows
neither briers nor roses; but only a flat, continuous thrashing-floor
for Logic, whereon all questions, from the "Doctrine of Kent" to the
"Natural History of Religion," are thrashed and sifted with the same
mechanical impartiality![71]

With Sir Walter Scott at the head of our literature, it cannot be
denied that much of this evil is past, or rapidly passing away: our
chief literary men, {46} whatever other faults they may have, no
longer live among us like a French Colony, or some knot of Propaganda
Missionaries; but like natural-born subjects of the soil, partaking
and sympathizing in all our attachments, humors, and habits.  Our
literature no longer grows in water but in mould, and with the true
racy virtues of the soil and climate.  How much of this change may be
due to Burns, or to any other individual, it might be difficult to
estimate.[72]  Direct literary imitation of Burns was not to be
looked for.  But his example, in the fearless adoption of domestic
subjects, could not but operate from afar; and certainly in no heart
did the love of country ever burn with a warmer glow than in that of
Burns: "a tide of Scottish prejudice,"[73] as he modestly calls this
deep and generous feeling, "had been poured along his veins; and he
felt that it would boil there till the flood-gates shut in eternal
rest."  It seemed to him, as if _he_ could do so little for his
country, and yet would so gladly have done all.  One small province
stood open for him,--that of Scottish Song; and how eagerly he
entered on it, how devotedly he labored there!  In his toilsome
journeyings, this object never quits him; it is the little
happy-valley of his careworn heart.  In the gloom of his own
affliction, {47} he eagerly searches after some lonely brother of the
muse, and rejoices to snatch one other name from the oblivion that
was covering it![74]  These were early feelings, and they abode with
him to the end:--

  ... A wish (I mind its power),
  A wish, that to my latest hour
    Will strongly heave my breast,--
  That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake,
  Some useful plan or book could make,
    Or sing a sang at least.

  The rough bur Thistle spreading wide
    Amang the bearded bear,
  I turn'd my weeding-clips aside,
    And spared the symbol dear.[75]


But to leave the mere literary character of Burns, which has already
detained us too long.  Far more interesting than any of his written
works, as it appears to us, are his acted ones: the Life he willed
and was fated to lead among his fellow-men.  These Poems are but like
little rhymed fragments scattered here and there in the grand
unrhymed Romance of his earthly existence; and it is only when
intercalated in this at their proper places, that they attain their
full measure of significance.  And this too, alas! was but a
fragment!  The plan of a mighty edifice had been sketched; some
columns, porticos, firm masses of building, stand completed; the rest
more or less clearly indicated; with many a far-stretching {48}
tendency, which only studious and friendly eyes can now trace towards
the purposed termination.  For the work is broken off in the middle,
almost in the beginning; and rises among us, beautiful and sad, at
once unfinished and a ruin!  If charitable judgment was necessary in
estimating his Poems, and justice required that the aim and the
manifest power to fulfil it must often be accepted for the
fulfilment; much more is this the case in regard to his Life, the sum
and result of all his endeavors, where his difficulties came upon him
not in detail only, but in mass; and so much has been left
unaccomplished, nay was mistaken, and altogether marred.

Properly speaking, there is but one era in the life of Burns, and
that the earliest.  We have not youth and manhood, but only youth:
for, to the end, we discern no decisive change in the complexion of
his character; in his thirty-seventh year, he is still, as it were,
in youth.  With all that resoluteness of judgment, that penetrating
insight, and singular maturity of intellectual power, exhibited in
his writings, he never attains to any clearness regarding himself: to
the last, he never ascertains his peculiar aim, even with such
distinctness as is common among ordinary men; and therefore never can
pursue it with that singleness of will which insures success and some
contentment to such men.[76]  To the last, he wavers between two
purposes: glorying in his talent, like a true poet, he yet cannot
consent to make this his chief and sole glory, and to follow it as
the one thing needful, through poverty or riches, through good or
evil {49} report.[77]  Another far meaner ambition still cleaves to
him; he must dream and struggle about a certain "Rock of
Independence;" which, natural and even admirable as it might be, was
still but a warring with the world, on the comparatively
insignificant ground of his being more completely or less completely
supplied with money than others; of his standing at a higher or at a
lower altitude in general estimation than others.  For the world
still appears to him, as to the young, in borrowed colors; he expects
from it what it cannot give to any man; seeks for contentment, not
within himself, in action and wise effort, but from without, in the
kindness of circumstances, in love, friendship, honor, pecuniary
ease.  He would be happy, not actively and in himself, but passively
and from some ideal cornucopia of Enjoyments, not earned by his own
labor, but showered on him by the beneficence of Destiny.  Thus, like
a young man, he cannot gird himself up for any worthy well-calculated
goal, but swerves to and fro, between passionate hope and remorseful
disappointment: rushing onwards {50} with a deep tempestuous force,
he surmounts or breaks asunder many a barrier; travels, nay advances
far, but advancing only under uncertain guidance, is ever and anon
turned from his path; and to the last cannot reach the only true
happiness of a man, that of clear decided Activity in the sphere for
which, by nature and circumstances, he has been fitted and appointed.

We do not say these things in dispraise of Burns; nay, perhaps, they
but interest us the more in his favor.  This blessing is not given
soonest to the best; but rather, it is often the greatest minds that
are latest in obtaining it; for where most is to be developed, most
time may be required to develop it.  A complex condition had been
assigned him from without; as complex a condition from within: no
"pre-established harmony" existed between the clay soil of Mossgiel
and the empyrean soul of Robert Burns; it was not wonderful that the
adjustment between them should have been long postponed, and his arm
long cumbered, and his sight confused, in so vast and discordant an
economy as he had been appointed steward over.  Byron was, at his
death, but a year younger than Burns; and through life, as it might
have appeared, far more simply situated: yet in him too we can trace
no such adjustment, no such moral manhood; but at best, and only a
little before his end, the beginning of what seemed such.

By much the most striking incident in Burns's Life is his journey to
Edinburgh; but perhaps a still more important one is his residence at
Irvine so early as in his twenty-third year.  Hitherto his life had
been poor and toilworn; but otherwise not ungenial, and, with all its
distresses, by no means unhappy.  In his {51} parentage, deducting
outward circumstances, he had every reason to reckon himself
fortunate.  His father was a man of thoughtful, intense, earnest
character, as the best of our peasants are; valuing knowledge,
possessing some, and, what is far better and rarer, openminded for
more: a man with a keen insight and devout heart; reverent towards
God, friendly therefore, at once, and fearless towards all that God
has made: in one word, though but a hard-handed peasant, a complete
and fully unfolded _Man_.  Such a father is seldom found in any rank
in society; and was worth descending far in society to seek.[78]
Unfortunately he was very poor; had he been even a little richer,
almost never so little, the whole might have issued far otherwise.
Mighty events turn on a straw; the crossing of a brook decides the
conquest of the world.  Had this William Burns's small seven acres of
nursery-ground anywise prospered, the boy Robert had been sent to
school; had struggled forward, as so many weaker men do, to some
university; come forth not as a rustic wonder, but as a regular
well-trained intellectual workman, and changed the whole course of
British Literature,--for it lay in him to have done this![79]  But
the nursery did not prosper; poverty sank his whole family below the
help of even our cheap school-system: Burns remained a hard-worked
ploughboy, and British literature took its own course.  Nevertheless,
even in this rugged scene there is much to nourish him.  If he
drudges, it is {52} with his brother, and for his father and mother,
whom he loves, and would fain shield from want.  Wisdom is not
banished from their poor hearth, nor the balm of natural feeling: the
solemn words, "Let us worship God," are heard there from a
"priest-like father;"[80] if threatenings of unjust men throw mother
and children into tears, these are tears not of grief only, but of
holiest affection; every heart in that humble group feels itself the
closer knit to every other; in their hard warfare they are there
together, a "little band of brethren."  Neither are such tears, and
the deep beauty that dwells in them, their only portion.  Light
visits the hearts as it does the eyes of all living: there is a
force, too, in this youth, that enables him to trample on misfortune;
nay to bind it under his feet to make him sport.  For a bold, warm,
buoyant humor of character has been given him; and so the
thick-coming shapes of evil are welcomed with a gay, friendly irony,
and in their closest pressure he bates no jot of heart or hope.
Vague yearnings of ambition fail not, as he grows up; dreamy fancies
hang like cloud-cities around him; the curtain of Existence is slowly
rising, in many-colored splendor and gloom: and the auroral light of
first love is gilding his horizon, and the music of song is on his
path; and so he walks

          ... "in glory and in joy,
  Behind his plough, upon the mountain side."[81]


We ourselves know, from the best evidence, that up to this date Burns
was happy; nay that he was {53} the gayest, brightest, most
fantastic, fascinating being to be found in the world; more so even
than he ever afterwards appeared.[82]  But now, at this early age, he
quits the paternal roof; goes forth into looser, louder, more
exciting society; and becomes initiated in those dissipations, those
vices, which a certain class of philosophers have asserted to be a
natural preparative for entering on active life: a kind of mud-bath,
in which the youth is, as it were, necessitated to steep, and, we
suppose, cleanse himself, before the real toga of Manhood can be laid
on him.  We shall not dispute much with this class of philosophers;
we hope they are mistaken: for Sin and Remorse so easily beset us at
all stages of life, and are always such indifferent company, that it
seems hard we should, at any stage, be forced and fated not only to
meet but to yield to them, and even serve for a term in their leprous
armada.  We hope it is not so.  Clear we are, at all events, it
cannot be the training one receives in this Devil's service, but only
our determining to desert from it, that fits us for true manly
Action.  We become men, not after we have been dissipated, and
disappointed in the chase of false pleasure; but after we have
ascertained, in any way, what impassable barriers hem us in through
this life; how mad it is to hope for contentment to our infinite soul
from the _gifts_ of this extremely finite world; {54} that a man must
be sufficient for himself; and that for suffering and enduring there
is no remedy but striving and doing.  Manhood begins when we have in
any way made truce with necessity; begins even when we have
surrendered to necessity, as the most part only do; but begins
joyfully and hopefully only when we have reconciled ourselves to
Necessity; and thus, in reality, triumphed over it, and felt that in
Necessity we are free.  Surely such lessons as this last, which, in
one shape or other, is the grand lesson for every mortal man, are
better learned from the lips of a devout mother, in the looks and
actions of a devout father, while the heart is yet soft and pliant,
than in collision with the sharp adamant of Fate, attracting us to
shipwreck us, when the heart is grown hard, and may be broken before
it will become contrite.  Had Burns continued to learn this, as he
was already learning it, in his father's cottage, he would have
learned it fully, which he never did; and been saved many a lasting
aberration, many a bitter hour and year of remorseful sorrow.

It seems to us another circumstance of fatal import in Burns's
history, that at this time too he became involved in the religious
quarrels of his district; that he was enlisted and feasted, as the
fighting man of the New-Light Priesthood, in their highly
unprofitable warfare.  At the tables of these freeminded clergy he
learned much more than was needful for him.  Such liberal ridicule of
fanaticism awakened in his mind scruples about Religion itself; and a
whole world of Doubts, which it required quite another set of
conjurers than these men to exorcise.  We do not say that such an
intellect as his could have escaped similar doubts at some period of
his history; or even {55} that he could, at a later period, have come
through them altogether victorious and unharmed: but it seems
peculiarly unfortunate that this time, above all others, should have
been fixed for the encounter.  For now, with principles assailed by
evil example from without, by "passions raging like demons"[83a] from
within, he had little need of sceptical misgivings to whisper treason
in the heat of the battle, or to cut off his retreat if he were
already defeated.  He loses his feeling of innocence; his mind is at
variance with itself; the old divinity no longer presides there; but
wild Desires and wild Repentance alternately oppress him.  Ere long,
too, he has committed himself before the world; his character for
sobriety, dear to a Scottish peasant as few corrupted worldlings can
even conceive, is destroyed in the eyes of men; and his only refuge
consists in trying to disbelieve his guiltiness, and is but a refuge
of lies.  The blackest desperation now gathers over him, broken only
by red lightnings of remorse.  The whole fabric of his life is
blasted asunder; for now not only his character, but his personal
liberty is to be lost; men and Fortune are leagued for his hurt;
"hungry Ruin has him in the wind."  He sees no escape but the saddest
of all: exile from his loved country, to a country in every sense
inhospitable and abhorrent to him.  While the "gloomy night is
gathering fast,"[83b] in mental storm and solitude, as well as in
physical, he sings his wild farewell to Scotland:--

  Farewell, my friends; farewell, my foes!
  My peace with these, my love with those:
{56}
  The bursting tears my heart declare;
  Adieu, my native banks of Ayr![84]


Light breaks suddenly in on him in floods; but still a false
transitory light, and no real sunshine.  He is invited to Edinburgh;
hastens thither with anticipating heart; is welcomed as in a triumph,
and with universal blandishment and acclamation; whatever is wisest,
whatever is greatest or loveliest there, gathers round him, to gaze
on his face, to show him honor, sympathy, affection.  Burns's
appearance among the sages and nobles of Edinburgh must be regarded
as one of the most singular phenomena in modern Literature; almost
like the appearance of some Napoleon among the crowned sovereigns of
modern Politics.  For it is nowise as "a mockery king,"[85] set there
by favor, transiently and for a purpose, that he will let himself be
treated, still less is he a mad Rienzi, whose sudden elevation turns
his too weak head: but he stands there on his own basis; cool,
unastonished, holding his equal rank from Nature herself; putting
forth no claim which there is not strength in him, as well as about
him to vindicate.  Mr. Lockhart has some forcible observations on
this point:--

"It needs no effort of imagination," says he, "to conceive what the
sensations of an isolated set of {57} scholars (almost all either
clergymen or professors) must have been in the presence of this
big-boned, black-browed, brawny stranger, with his great flashing
eyes, who, having forced his way among them from the plough-tail at a
single stride, manifested in the whole strain of his bearing and
conversation a most thorough conviction, that in the society of the
most eminent men of his nation he was exactly where he was entitled
to be; hardly deigned to flatter them by exhibiting even an
occasional symptom of being flattered by their notice; by turns
calmly measured himself against the most cultivated understandings of
his time in discussion; overpowered the _bon-mots_ of the most
celebrated convivialists by broad floods of merriment, impregnated
with all the burning life of genius; astounded bosoms habitually
enveloped in the thrice-piled folds of social reserve, by compelling
them to tremble,--nay to tremble visibly,--beneath the fearless touch
of natural pathos; and all this without indicating the smallest
willingness to be ranked among those professional ministers of
excitement, who are content to be paid in money and smiles for doing
what the spectators and auditors would be ashamed of doing in their
own persons, even if they had the power of doing it; and last, and
probably worst of all, who was known to be in the habit of enlivening
societies which they would have scorned to approach, still more
frequently than their own, with eloquence no less magnificent; with
wit, in all likelihood still more daring; often enough, as the
superiors whom he fronted without alarm might have guessed from the
beginning, and had ere long no occasion to guess, with wit pointed at
themselves."[86]

{58}

The farther we remove from this scene, the more singular will it seem
to us: details of the exterior aspect of it are already full of
interest.  Most readers recollect Mr. Walker's personal interviews
with Burns as among the best passages of his Narrative: a time will
come when this reminiscence of Sir Walter Scott's, slight though it
is, will also be precious:--

"As for Burns," writes Sir Walter, "I may truly say, _Virgilium vidi
tantum_.[87]  I was a lad of fifteen in 1786-87, when he came first
to Edinburgh, but had sense and feeling enough to be much interested
in his poetry, and would have given the world to know him: but I had
very little acquaintance with any literary people, and still less
with the gentry of the west country, the two sets that he most
frequented.  Mr. Thomas Grierson was at that time a clerk of my
father's.  He knew Burns, and promised to ask him to his lodgings to
dinner; but had no opportunity to keep his word; otherwise I might
have seen more of this distinguished man.  As it was, I saw him one
day at the late venerable Professor Ferguson's,[88] where there were
several gentlemen of literary reputation, among whom I remember the
celebrated Mr. Dugald Stewart.  Of course, we youngsters sat silent,
looked and listened.  The only thing I remember which was remarkable
in Burns's manner, was the effect produced upon him by a print of
Bunbury's,[89] representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his dog
sitting in misery on one side,--on the other, his widow, {59} with a
child in her arms.  These lines were written beneath:--

  'Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain,
  Perhaps that mother wept her soldier slain;
  Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew,
  The big drops mingling with the milk he drew,
  Gave the sad presage of his future years,
  The child of misery baptised in tears.'


"Burns seemed much affected by the print, or rather by the ideas
which it suggested to his mind.  He actually shed tears.  He asked
whose the lines were; and it chanced that nobody but myself
remembered that they occur in a half-forgotten poem of Langhorne's
called by the unpromising title of 'The Justice of Peace.'[90]  I
whispered my information to a friend present; he mentioned it to
Burns, who rewarded me with a look and a word, which, though of mere
civility, I then received and still recollect with very great
pleasure.

"His person was strong and robust; his manners rustic, not clownish;
a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity, which received part of
its effect perhaps from one's knowledge of his extraordinary talents.
His features are represented in Mr. Nasmyth's[91] picture: but to me
it conveys the idea that they are diminished, as if seen in
perspective.  I think his {60} countenance was more massive than it
looks in any of the portraits.  I should have taken the poet, had I
not known what he was, for a very sagacious country farmer of the old
Scotch school, _i.e._, none of your modern agriculturists who keep
laborers for their drudgery, but the _douce gudeman_ who held his own
plough.  There was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all
his lineaments; the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical
character and temperament.  It was large, and of a dark cast, which
glowed (I say literally _glowed_) when he spoke with feeling or
interest.  I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I
have seen the most distinguished men of my time.  His conversation
expressed perfect self-confidence, without the slightest presumption.
Among the men who were the most learned of their time and country, he
expressed himself with perfect firmness, but without the least
intrusive forwardness: and when he differed in opinion, he did not
hesitate to express it firmly, yet at the same time with modesty.  I
do not remember any part of his conversation distinctly enough to be
quoted; nor did I ever see him again, except in the street, where he
did not recognize me, as I could not expect he should.  He was much
caressed in Edinburgh: but (considering what literary emoluments have
been since his day) the efforts made for his relief were extremely
trifling.

"I remember, on this occasion I mention, I thought Burns's
acquaintance with English poetry was rather limited; and also that,
having twenty times the abilities of Allan Ramsay and of Ferguson, he
talked of them with too much humility as his models: there was
doubtless national predilection in his estimate,

{61}

"This is all I can tell you about Burns.  I have only to add, that
his dress corresponded with his manner.  He was like a farmer dressed
in his best to dine with the laird.  I do not speak _in malam
partem_, when I say, I never saw a man in company with his superiors
in station or information more perfectly free from either the reality
or the affectation of embarrassment.  I was told, but did not observe
it, that his address to females was extremely deferential, and always
with a turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged their
attention particularly.  I have heard the late Duchess of Gordon
remark this.--I do not know anything I can add to these recollections
of forty years since."[92]

The conduct of Burns under this dazzling blaze of favor; the calm,
unaffected, manly manner in which he not only bore it, but estimated
its value, has justly been regarded as the best proof that could be
given of his real vigor and integrity of mind.  A little natural
vanity, some touches of hypocritical modesty, some glimmerings of
affectation, at least some fear of being thought affected, we could
have pardoned in almost any man; but no such indication is to be
traced here.  In his unexampled situation the young peasant is not a
moment perplexed; so many strange lights do not confuse him, do not
lead him astray.  Nevertheless, we cannot but perceive that this
winter did him great and lasting injury.  A somewhat clearer
knowledge of men's affairs, scarcely of their characters, it did
afford him; but a sharper feeling of Fortune's unequal arrangements
in their social destiny it also left with him.  He had seen the gay
and gorgeous arena, in which the powerful are born {62} to play their
parts; nay had himself stood in the midst of it; and he felt more
bitterly than ever, that here he was but a looker-on, and had no part
or lot in that splendid game.  From this time a jealous indignant
fear of social degradation takes possession of him; and perverts, so
far as aught could pervert, his private contentment, and his feelings
towards his richer fellows.  It was clear to Burns that he had talent
enough to make a fortune, or a hundred fortunes, could he but have
rightly willed this; it was clear also that he willed something far
different, and therefore could not make one.  Unhappy it was that he
had not power to choose the one, and reject the other; but must halt
forever between two opinions, two objects; making hampered
advancement towards either.  But so is it with many men: we "long for
the merchandise, yet would fain keep the price;" and so stand
chaffering with Fate in vexatious altercation, till the night come,
and our fair is over!

The Edinburgh Learned of that period were in general more noted for
clearness of head than for warmth of heart: with the exception of the
good old Blacklock,[93] whose help was too ineffectual, scarcely one
among them seems to have looked at Burns with any true sympathy, or
indeed much otherwise than as at a highly curious _thing_.  By the
great also he is treated in the customary fashion; entertained at
their {63} tables and dismissed: certain modica of pudding and praise
are, from time to time, gladly exchanged for the fascination of his
presence; which exchange once effected, the bargain is finished, and
each party goes his several way.  At the end of this strange season,
Burns gloomily sums up his gains and losses, and meditates on the
chaotic future.  In money he is somewhat richer; in fame and the show
of happiness, infinitely richer; but in the substance of it, as poor
as ever.  Nay poorer; for his heart is now maddened still more with
the fever of worldly Ambition; and through long years the disease
will rack him with unprofitable sufferings, and weaken his strength
for all true and nobler aims.

What Burns was next to do or to avoid; how a man so circumstanced was
now to guide himself towards his true advantage, might at this point
of time have been a question for the wisest.  It was a question too,
which apparently he was left altogether to answer for himself: of his
learned or rich patrons it had not struck any individual to turn a
thought on this so trivial matter.  Without claiming for Burns the
praise of perfect sagacity, we must say, that his Excise and Farm
scheme does not seem to us a very unreasonable one; that we should be
at a loss, even now, to suggest one decidedly better.  Certain of his
admirers have felt scandalized at his ever resolving to _gauge_; and
would have had him lie at the pool, till the spirit of Patronage
stirred the waters, that so, with one friendly plunge, all his
sorrows might be healed.[94] Unwise counsellors!  They know not the
manner of this spirit; and how, in the lap of most golden dreams, a
man might have happiness, {64} were it not that in the interim he
must die of hunger!  It reflects credit on the manliness and sound
sense of Burns, that he felt so early on what ground he was standing;
and preferred self-help, on the humblest scale, to dependence and
inaction, though with hope of far more splendid possibilities.  But
even these possibilities were not rejected in his scheme: he might
expect, if it chanced that he _had_ any friend, to rise, in no long
period, into something even like opulence and leisure; while again,
if it chanced that he had no friend, he could still live in security;
and for the rest, he "did not intend to borrow honor from any
profession."[95]  We reckon that his plan was honest and
well-calculated: all turned on the execution of it.  Doubtless it
failed; yet not, we believe, from any vice inherent in itself.[96]
Nay, after all, it was no failure of external means, but of internal,
that overtook Burns.  His was no bankruptcy of the purse, {65} but of
the soul; to his last day, he owed no man any thing.[97]

Meanwhile he begins well: with two good and wise actions.  His
donation to his mother, munificent from a man whose income had lately
been seven pounds a-year, was worthy of him, and not more than
worthy.  Generous also, and worthy of him, was the treatment of the
woman whose life's welfare now depended on his pleasure.  A friendly
observer might have hoped serene days for him: his mind is on the
true road to peace with itself: what clearness he still wants will be
given as he proceeds; for the best teacher of duties, that still lie
dim to us, is the Practice of those we see and have at hand.  Had the
"patrons of genius," who could give him nothing, but taken nothing
from him, at least nothing more!  The wounds of his heart would have
healed, vulgar ambition would have died away.  Toil and frugality
would have been welcome, since Virtue dwelt with them; and Poetry
would have shone through them as of old: and in her clear ethereal
light, which was his own by birthright, he might have looked down on
his earthly destiny, and all its obstructions, not with patience
only, but with love.

But the patrons of genius would not have it so.  Picturesque
tourists,[98] all manner of fashionable {66} danglers after
literature, and, far worse, all manner of convivial Mæcenases,[99]
hovered round him in his retreat; and his good as well as his weak
qualities secured them influence over him.  He was flattered by their
notice; and his warm social nature made it impossible for him to
shake them off, and hold on his way apart from them.  These men, as
we believe, were proximately the means of his ruin.  Not that they
meant him any ill; they only meant themselves a little good; if he
suffered harm, let _him_ look to it!  But they wasted his precious
time and his precious talent; they disturbed his composure, broke
down his returning habits of temperance and assiduous contented
exertion.  Their pampering was baneful to him; their cruelty, which
soon followed, was equally baneful.  The old grudge against Fortune's
inequality awoke with new bitterness in their neighborhood; and Burns
had no retreat but to "the Rock of {67} Independence," which is but
an air-castle after all, that looks well at a distance, but will
screen no one from real wind and wet.  Flushed with irregular
excitement, exasperated alternately by contempt of others, and
contempt of himself, Burns was no longer regaining his peace of mind,
but fast losing it forever.  There was a hollowness at the heart of
his life, for his conscience did not now approve what he was doing.

Amid the vapors of unwise enjoyment, of bootless remorse, and angry
discontent with Fate, his true loadstar, a life of Poetry, with
Poverty, nay with Famine if it must be so, was too often altogether
hidden from his eyes.  And yet he sailed a sea, where without some
such loadstar there was no right steering.  Meteors of French
Politics rise before him, but these were not _his_ stars.  An
accident this, which hastened, but did not originate, his worst
distresses.  In the mad contentions of that time, he comes in
collision with certain official Superiors; is wounded by them;
cruelly lacerated, we should say, could a dead mechanical implement,
in any case, be called cruel: and shrinks, in indignant pain, into
deeper self-seclusion, into gloomier moodiness than ever.  His life
has now lost its unity: it is a life of fragments; led with little
aim, beyond the melancholy one of securing its own continuance,--in
fits of wild false joy when such offered, and of black despondency
when they passed away.  His character before the world begins to
suffer: calumny is busy with him; for a miserable man makes more
enemies than friends.  Some faults he has fallen into, and a thousand
misfortunes; but deep criminality is what he stands accused of, and
they that are _not_ without sin cast the first stone at {68} him!
For is he not a well-wisher to the French Revolution, a Jacobin, and
therefore in that one act guilty of all?  These accusations,
political and moral, it has since appeared, were false enough: but
the world hesitated little to credit them.[100]  Nay his convivial
Mæcenases themselves were not the last to do it.  There is reason to
believe that, in his later years, the Dumfries Aristocracy had partly
withdrawn themselves from Burns, as from a tainted person, no longer
worthy of their acquaintance.  That painful class, stationed, in all
provincial cities, behind the outmost breastwork of Gentility, there
to stand siege and do battle against the intrusions of Grocerdom and
Grazierdom, had actually seen dishonor in the society of Burns, and
branded him with their veto; had, as we vulgarly say, _cut_ him!  We
find one passage in this Work of Mr. Lockhart's, which will not out
of our thoughts:--

"A gentleman of that county, whose name I have already more than once
had occasion to refer to, has often told me that he was seldom more
grieved, than when riding into Dumfries one fine summer evening about
this time to attend a county ball, he saw Burns walking alone, on the
shady side of the principal street of the town, while the opposite
side was gay with successive groups of gentlemen and ladies, all
drawn together for the festivities of the night, not one of whom
appeared willing to recognize him.  The horseman dismounted, and
joined Burns, who on his proposing to cross the street said: 'Nay,
nay, my young friend, that's all over now;' and quoted, after a
pause, some verses of Lady Grizzel Baillie's pathetic ballad:--

{69}

  'His bonnet stood ance fu' fair on his brow,
  His auld ane look'd better than mony ane's new;
  But now he lets 't wear ony way it will hing,
  And casts himsell dowie upon the corn-bing.

  'O, were we young as we ance hae been,
  We sud hae been gallopping down on yon green,
  And linking it ower the lily-white lea!
  _And werena my heart light, I wad die_.'

It was little in Burns's character to let his feelings on certain
subjects escape in this fashion.  He, immediately after reciting
these verses, assumed the sprightliness of his most pleasing manner;
and taking his young friend home with him, entertained him very
agreeably till the hour of the ball arrived."[101]

Alas! when we think that Burns now sleeps "where bitter indignation
can no longer lacerate his heart,"[102] and that most of those fair
dames and frizzled gentlemen already lie at his side, where the
breastwork of gentility is quite thrown down,--who would not sigh
over the thin delusions and foolish toys that divide heart from
heart, and make man unmerciful to his brother!

It was not now to be hoped that the genius of Burns would ever reach
maturity, or accomplish aught worthy of itself.  His spirit was
jarred in its melody; not the soft breath of natural feeling, but the
rude hand of Fate, was now sweeping over the strings.  And yet what
harmony was in him, what music even in his discords!  How the wild
tones had a charm for the simplest and the wisest; and all men felt
and knew that here also was one of the Gifted!  "If he {70} entered
an inn at midnight, after all the inmates were in bed, the news of
his arrival circulated from the cellar to the garret; and ere ten
minutes had elapsed, the landlord and all his guests were assembled!"
Some brief pure moments of poetic life were yet appointed him, in the
composition of his Songs.  We can understand how he grasped at this
employment; and how, too, he spurned all other reward for it but what
the labor itself brought him.  For the soul of Burns, though scathed
and marred, was yet living in its full moral strength, though sharply
conscious of its errors and abasement; and here, in his destitution
and degradation, was one act of seeming nobleness and
self-devotedness left even for him to perform.  He felt, too, that
with all the "thoughtless follies" that had "laid him low,"[103] the
world was unjust and cruel to him; and he silently appealed to
another and calmer time.  Not as a hired soldier, but as a patriot,
would he strive for the glory of his country: so he cast from him the
poor sixpence a-day, and served zealously as a volunteer.  Let us not
grudge him this last luxury of his existence; let him not have
appealed to us in vain!  The money was not necessary to him; he
struggled through without it: long since, these guineas would have
been gone, and now the high-mindedness of refusing them will plead
for him in all hearts forever.

We are here arrived at the crisis of Burns's life; for matters had
now taken such a shape with him as could not long continue.  If
improvement was not to be looked for, Nature could only for a limited
time maintain this dark and maddening warfare against the world and
itself.  We are not medically informed {71} whether any continuance
of years was, at this period, probable for Burns; whether his death
is to be looked on as in some sense an accidental event, or only as
the natural consequence of the long series of events that had
preceded.  The latter seems to be the likelier opinion; and yet it is
by no means a certain one.  At all events, as we have said, _some_
change could not be very distant.  Three gates of deliverance, it
seems to us, were open for Burns: clear poetical activity; madness;
or death.  The first, with longer life, was still possible, though
not probable; for physical causes were beginning to be concerned in
it: and yet Burns had an iron resolution; could he but have seen and
felt, that not only his highest glory, but his first duty, and the
true medicine for all his woes, lay here.  The second was still less
probable; for his mind was ever among the clearest and firmest.  So
the milder third gate was opened for him: and he passed, not softly
yet speedily, into that still country, where the hail-storms and
fire-showers do not reach, and the heaviest-laden wayfarer at length
lays down his load!


Contemplating this sad end of Burns, and how he sank unaided by any
real help, uncheered by any wise sympathy, generous minds have
sometimes figured to themselves, with a reproachful sorrow, that much
might have been done for him; that by counsel, true affection and
friendly ministrations, he might have been saved to himself and the
world.  We question whether there is not more tenderness of heart
than soundness of judgment in these suggestions.  It seems dubious to
us whether the richest, wisest, most benevolent individual could have
lent Burns any effectual help.  Counsel, which seldom profits any
one, {72} he did not need; in his understanding, he knew the right
from the wrong, as well perhaps as any man ever did; but the
persuasion, which would have availed him, lies not so much in the
head as in the heart, where no argument or expostulation could have
assisted much to implant it.  As to money again, we do not believe
that this was his essential want; or well see how any private man
could, even presupposing Burns's consent, have bestowed on him an
independent fortune, with much prospect of decisive advantage.  It is
a mortifying truth, that two men, in any rank of society, could
hardly be found virtuous enough to give money, and to take it as a
necessary gift, without injury to the moral entireness of one or
both.  But so stands the fact: Friendship, in the old heroic sense of
that term, no longer exists: except in the cases of kindred or other
legal affinity, it is in reality no longer expected, or recognized as
a virtue among men.  A close observer of manners has pronounced
"Patronage," that is, pecuniary or other economic furtherance, to be
"twice cursed;" cursing him that gives, and him that takes![104]  And
thus, in regard to outward matters also, it has become the rule, as
in regard to inward it always was and must be the rule, that no one
shall look for effectual help to another; but that each shall rest
contented with what help he can afford himself.  Such, we say, is the
principle of modern Honor; naturally enough growing out of that
sentiment of Pride, which we inculcate and encourage as the basis of
our whole social morality.  Many a poet has been poorer than Burns;
but no one was ever prouder: we may question whether, without great
precautions, even a pension {73} from Royalty would not have galled
and encumbered, more than actually assisted him.

Still less, therefore, are we disposed to join with another class of
Burns's admirers, who accuse the higher ranks among us of having
ruined Burns by their selfish neglect of him.  We have already stated
our doubts whether direct pecuniary help, had it been offered, would
have been accepted, or could have proved very effectual.  We shall
readily admit, however, that much was to be done for Burns; that many
a poisoned arrow might have been warded from his bosom; many an
entanglement in his path cut asunder by the hand of the powerful; and
light and heat, shed on him from high places, would have made his
humble atmosphere more genial; and the softest heart then breathing
might have lived and died with some fewer pangs.  Nay, we shall grant
farther, and for Burns it is granting much, that, with all his pride,
he would have thanked, even with exaggerated gratitude, any one who
had cordially befriended him: patronage, unless once cursed, needed
not to have been twice so.  At all events, the poor promotion he
desired in his calling might have been granted: it was his own
scheme, therefore likelier than any other to be of service.  All this
it might have been a luxury, nay it was a duty, for our nobility to
have done.  No part of all this, however, did any of them do; or
apparently attempt, or wish to do: so much is granted against them.
But what then is the amount of their blame?  Simply that they were
men of the world, and walked by the principles of such men; that they
treated Burns, as other nobles and other commoners had done other
poets; as the English did Shakespeare; as King Charles and his
Cavaliers did {74} Butler,[105] as King Philip and his Grandees did
Cervantes.  Do men gather grapes of thorns;[106] or shall we cut down
our thorns for yielding only a _fence_ and haws?  How, indeed, could
the "nobility and gentry of his native land" hold out any help to
this "Scottish Bard, proud of his name and country"?[107]  Were the
nobility and gentry so much as able rightly to help themselves?  Had
they not their game to preserve; their borough interests to
strengthen; dinners, therefore, of various kinds to eat and give?
Were their means more than adequate to all this business, or less
than adequate?  Less than adequate, in general; few of them in
reality were richer than Burns; many of them were poorer; for
sometimes they had to wring their supplies, as with thumbscrews, from
the hard hand; and, in their need of guineas, to forget their duty of
mercy; which Burns was never reduced to do.  Let us pity and forgive
them.  The game they preserved and shot, the dinners they ate and
gave, the borough interests they strengthened, the _little_ Babylons
they severally builded by the glory of their might,[108] are all
melted or melting back into the primeval Chaos, as man's merely
selfish endeavors are fated to do: and here was an action, extending,
in virtue of its worldly influence, we may say, through all time; in
virtue of its moral nature, beyond all time, being immortal as the
Spirit of Goodness itself; this action was offered them to do, and
light was not given {75} them to do it.  Let us pity and forgive
them.  But better than pity, let us go and _do otherwise_.  Human
suffering did not end with the life of Burns; neither was the solemn
mandate, "Love one another, bear one another's burdens,"[109] given
to the rich only, but to all men.  True, we shall find no Burns to
relieve, to assuage by our aid or our pity; but celestial natures,
groaning under the fardels of a weary life, we shall still find; and
that wretchedness which Fate has rendered _voiceless_ and _tuneless_
is not the least wretched, but the most.[110]

Still we do not think that the blame of Burns's failure lies chiefly
with the world.  The world, it seems to us, treated him with more
rather than with less kindness than it usually shows to such men.  It
has ever, we fear, shown but small favor to its Teachers: hunger and
nakedness, perils and revilings, the prison, the cross, the
poison-chalice have, in most times and countries, been the
market-price it has offered for Wisdom, the welcome with which it has
greeted those who have come to enlighten and purify it.  Homer and
Socrates, and the Christian Apostles, belong to old days; but the
world's Martyrology was not completed with these.  Roger Bacon and
Galileo languish in priestly dungeons; Tasso pines in the cell of a
madhouse; Camoens dies begging on the streets of Lisbon.[111]  So
neglected, so "persecuted they the {76} Prophets,"[112] not in Judea
only, but in all places where men have been.  We reckon that every
poet of Burns's order is, or should be, a prophet and teacher to his
age; that he has no right to expect great kindness from it, but
rather is bound to do it great kindness; that Burns, in particular,
experienced fully the usual proportion of the world's goodness; and
that the blame of his failure, as we have said, lies not chiefly with
the world.

Where, then, does it lie?  We are forced to answer: With himself; it
is his inward, not his outward, misfortunes that bring him to the
dust.  Seldom, indeed, is it otherwise; seldom is a life morally
wrecked but the grand cause lies in some internal mal-arrangement,
some want less of good fortune than of good guidance.  Nature
fashions no creature without implanting in it the strength needful
for its action and duration; least of all does she so neglect her
masterpiece and darling, the poetic soul.  Neither can we believe
that it is in the power of _any_ external circumstances utterly to
ruin the mind of a man; nay, if proper wisdom be given him, even so
much as to affect its essential health and beauty.  The sternest
sum-total of all worldly misfortunes is Death; nothing more _can_ lie
in the cup of human woe: yet many men, in all ages, have triumphed
over Death, and led it captive;[113] converting its physical victory
into a moral victory for themselves, into a seal and immortal
consecration for all that their past life had achieved.  What has
been done, may be done again: nay it is but the degree and not the
kind of such heroism that differs in different seasons; for without
{77} some portion of this spirit, not of boisterous daring, but of
silent fearlessness, of Self-denial in all its forms, no good man, in
any scene or time, has ever attained to be good.[114]

We have already stated the error of Burns; and mourned over it,
rather than blamed it.  It was the want of unity in his purposes, of
consistency in his aims; the hapless attempt to mingle in friendly
union the common spirit of the world with the spirit of poetry, which
is of a far different and altogether irreconcilable nature.  Burns
was nothing wholly, and Burns could be nothing, no man formed as he
was can be anything, by halves.  The heart, not of a mere
hot-blooded, popular Verse-monger, or poetical _Restaurateur_,[115]
but of a true Poet and Singer, worthy of the old religious heroic
times, had been given him: and he fell in an age, not of heroism and
religion, but of scepticism, selfishness, and triviality, when true
Nobleness was little understood, and its place supplied by a hollow,
dissocial, altogether barren and unfruitful principle of Pride.  The
influences of that age, his open, kind, susceptible nature, to say
nothing of his highly untoward situation, made it more than usually
difficult for him to cast aside, or rightly subordinate; the better
spirit that was within him ever sternly demanded its rights, its
supremacy: he spent his life in endeavoring to reconcile these two;
and lost it, as he must lose it, without reconciling them.

{78}

Burns was born poor; and born also to continue poor, for he would not
endeavor to be otherwise: this it had been well could he have once
for all admitted, and considered as finally settled.  He was poor,
truly; but hundreds even of his own class and order of minds have
been poorer, yet have suffered nothing deadly from it: nay his own
Father had a far sorer battle with ungrateful destiny than his was;
and he did not yield to it, but died courageously warring, and to all
moral intents prevailing, against it.  True, Burns had little means,
had even little time for poetry, his only real pursuit and vocation;
but so much the more precious was what little he had.  In all these
external respects his case was hard; but very far from the hardest.
Poverty, incessant drudgery and much worse evils, it has often been
the lot of Poets and wise men to strive with, and their glory to
conquer.  Locke was banished as a traitor; and wrote his "Essay on
the Human Understanding" sheltering himself in a Dutch garret.  Was
Milton rich or at his ease when he composed "Paradise Lost"?  Not
only low, but fallen from a height; not only poor, but impoverished;
in darkness and with dangers compassed round, he sang his immortal
song, and found fit audience, though few.[116]  Did not Cervantes
finish his work, a maimed soldier and in prison?  Nay, was not the
"Araucana,"[117] which Spain acknowledges as its Epic, written
without even the aid of paper; on {79} scraps of leather, as the
stout fighter and voyager snatched any moment from that wild warfare?

And what, then, had these men, which Burns wanted?  Two things; both
which, it seems to us, are indispensable for such men.  They had a
true, religious principle of morals; and a single, not a double aim
in their activity.  They were not self-seekers and self-worshippers;
but seekers and worshippers of something far better than Self.  Not
personal enjoyment was their object; but a high, heroic idea of
Religion, of Patriotism, of heavenly Wisdom, in one or the other
form, ever hovered before them; in which cause they neither shrank
from suffering, nor called on the earth to witness it as something
wonderful; but patiently endured, counting it blessedness enough so
to spend and be spent.  Thus the "golden-calf of Self-love," however
curiously carved, was not their Deity; but the Invisible Goodness,
which alone is man's reasonable service.  This feeling was as a
celestial fountain, whose streams refreshed into gladness and beauty
all the provinces of their otherwise too desolate existence.  In a
word, they willed one thing, to which all other things were
subordinated and made subservient; and therefore they accomplished
it.  The wedge will rend rocks; but its edge must be sharp and
single: if it be double, the wedge is bruised in pieces and will rend
nothing.

Part of this superiority these men owed to their age; in which
heroism and devotedness were still practised, or at least not yet
disbelieved in; but much of it likewise they owed to themselves.
With {80} Burns, again, it was different.  His morality, in most of
its practical points, is that of a mere worldly man; enjoyment, in a
finer or coarser shape, is the only thing he longs and strives for.
A noble instinct sometimes raises him above this; but an instinct
only, and acting only for moments.  He has no Religion; in the
shallow age, where his days were cast, Religion was not discriminated
from the New and Old Light _forms_ of Religion; and was, with these,
becoming obsolete in the minds of men.  His heart, indeed, is alive
with a trembling adoration, but there is no temple in his
understanding.  He lives in darkness and in the shadow of doubt.  His
religion, at best, is an anxious wish; like that of Rabelais, "a
great Perhaps."

He loved Poetry warmly, and in his heart; could he but have loved it
purely, and with his whole undivided heart, it had been well.  For
Poetry, as Burns could have followed it, is but another form of
Wisdom, of Religion: is itself Wisdom and Religion.  But this also
was denied him.  His poetry is a stray vagrant gleam, which will not
be extinguished within him, yet rises not to be the true light of his
path, but is often a wildfire that misleads him.  It was not
necessary for Burns to be rich, to be, or to seem, "independent;" but
it _was_ necessary for him to be at one with his own heart; to place
what was highest in his nature highest also in his life; "to seek
within himself for that consistency and sequence, which external
events would forever refuse him."  He was born a poet; poetry was the
celestial element of his being, and should have been the soul of his
whole endeavors.  Lifted into that serene ether, whither he had wings
given him to mount, he would have needed {81} no other elevation:
poverty, neglect, and all evil, save the desecration of himself and
his Art, were a small matter to him; the pride and the passions of
the world lay far beneath his feet; and he looked down alike on noble
and slave, on prince and beggar, and all that wore the stamp of man,
with clear recognition, with brotherly affection, with sympathy, with
pity.  Nay, we question whether for his culture as a Poet poverty and
much suffering for a season were not absolutely advantageous.  Great
men, in looking back over their lives, have testified to that effect.
"I would not for much," says Jean Paul, "that I had been born
richer."  And yet Paul's birth was poor enough; for, in another
place, he adds: "The prisoner's allowance is bread and water; and I
had often only the latter."[118]  But the gold that is refined in the
hottest furnace comes out the purest; or, as he has himself expressed
it, "the canary-bird sings sweeter the longer it has been trained in
a darkened cage."

A man like Burns might have divided his hours between poetry and
virtuous industry; industry which all true feeling sanctions, nay
prescribes, and which has a beauty, for that cause, beyond the pomp
of thrones: but to divide his hours between poetry and rich men's
banquets was an ill-starred and inauspicious attempt.  How could he
be at ease at such banquets?  What had he to do there, mingling his
music {82} with the coarse roar of altogether earthly voices;
brightening the thick smoke of intoxication with fire lent him from
heaven?  Was it his aim to enjoy life!  To-morrow he must go drudge
as an Exciseman!  We wonder not that Burns became moody, indignant,
and at times an offender against certain rules of society; but rather
that he did not grow utterly frantic, and run _amuck_ against them
all.  How could a man, so falsely placed, by his own or others'
fault, ever know contentment or peaceable diligence for an hour?
What he did, under such perverse guidance, and what he forbore to do,
alike fill us with astonishment at the natural strength and worth of
his character.

Doubtless there was a remedy for this perverseness; but not in
others; only in himself; least of all in simple increase of wealth
and worldly "respectability."  We hope we have now heard enough about
the efficacy of wealth for poetry, and to make poets happy.  Nay,
have we not seen another instance of it in these very days?  Byron, a
man of an endowment considerably less ethereal than that of Burns, is
born in the rank not of a Scottish ploughman, but of an English peer:
the highest worldly honors, the fairest worldly career, are his by
inheritance; the richest harvest of fame he soon reaps, in another
province, by his own hand.  And what does all this avail him?  Is he
happy, is he good, is he true?  Alas, he has a poet's soul, and
strives towards the Infinite and the Eternal; and soon feels that all
this is but mounting to the housetop to reach the stars!  Like Burns,
he is only a proud man; might, like him, have "purchased a
pocket-copy of Milton to study the character of Satan;" for Satan is
also Byron's grand exemplar, the hero of his poetry, and {83} the
model apparently of his conduct.[119]  As in Burns's case too, the
celestial element will not mingle with the clay of earth; both poet
and man of the world he must not be; vulgar Ambition will not live
kindly with poetic Adoration; he _cannot_ serve God and Mammon.
Byron, like Burns, is not happy; nay he is the most wretched of all
men.  His life is falsely arranged: the fire that is in him is not a
strong, still, central fire, warming into beauty the products of a
world; but it is the mad fire of a volcano; and now--we look sadly
into the ashes of a crater, which ere long will fill itself with snow!

Byron and Burns were sent forth as missionaries to their generation,
to teach it a higher Doctrine, a purer Truth; they had a message to
deliver, which left them no rest till it was accomplished; in dim
throes of pain, this divine behest lay smouldering within them; for
they knew not what it meant, and felt it only in mysterious
anticipation, and they had to die without articulately uttering it.
They are in the camp of the Unconverted; yet not as high messengers
of rigorous though benignant truth, but as soft flattering singers,
and in pleasant fellowship will they live there: they are first
adulated, then persecuted; they accomplish little for others; they
find no peace for themselves, but only death and the peace of the
grave.  We confess, it is not without a certain mournful awe that we
view the fate of these noble {84} souls, so richly gifted, yet ruined
to so little purpose with all their gifts.  It seems to us there is a
stern moral taught in this piece of history,--_twice_ told us in our
own time!  Surely to men of like genius, if there be any such, it
carries with it a lesson of deep impressive significance.  Surely it
would become such a man, furnished for the highest of all
enterprises, that of being the Poet of his Age, to consider well what
it is that he attempts, and in what spirit he attempts it.  For the
words of Milton are true in all times, and were never truer than in
this: "He who would write heroic poems must make his whole life a
heroic poem."[120]  If he cannot first so make his life, then let him
hasten from this arena; for neither its lofty glories, nor its
fearful perils, are fit for him.  Let him dwindle into a modish
balladmonger; let him worship and besing the idols of the time, and
the time will not fail to reward him.  If, indeed, he can endure to
live in that capacity!  Byron and Burns could not live as
idol-priests, but the fire of their own hearts consumed them; and
better it was for them that they could not.  For it is not in the
favor of the great or of the small, but in a life of truth, and in
the inexpugnable citadel of his own soul, that a Byron's or a Burns's
strength must lie.  Let the great stand aloof from him, or know how
to reverence him.  Beautiful is the union of wealth with favor {85}
and furtherance for literature; like the costliest flower-jar
enclosing the loveliest amaranth.  Yet let not the relation be
mistaken.  A true poet is not one whom they can hire by money or
flattery to be a minister of their pleasures; their writer of
occasional verses, their purveyor of table-wit; he cannot be their
menial, he cannot even be their partisan.  At the peril of both
parties, let no such union be attempted!  Will a Courser of the Sun
work softly in the harness of a Dray-horse?  His hoofs are of fire,
and his path is through the heavens, bringing light to all lands;
will he lumber on mud highways, dragging ale for earthly appetites
from door to door?

But we must stop short in these considerations, which would lead us
to boundless lengths.  We had something to say on the public moral
character of Burns; but this also we must forbear.  We are far from
regarding him as guilty before the world, as guiltier than the
average; nay from doubting that he is less guilty than one of ten
thousand.  Tried at a tribunal far more rigid than that where the
_Plebiscita_ of common civic reputations are pronounced, he has
seemed to us even there less worthy of blame than of pity and wonder.
But the world is habitually unjust in its judgments of such men;
unjust on many grounds, of which this one may be stated as the
substance: It decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes; and not
positively but negatively, less on what is done right, than on what
is or is not done wrong.  Not the few inches of deflection from the
mathematical orbit, which are so easily measured, but the _ratio_ of
these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real aberration.  This
orbit may be a planet's, its diameter the breadth of the solar
system; or it may be a {86} city hippodrome; nay the circle of a
ginhorse, its diameter a score of feet or paces.  But the inches of
deflection only are measured: and it is assumed that the diameter of
the ginhorse, and that of the planet, will yield the same ratio when
compared with them!  Here lies the root of many a blind, cruel
condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, Rousseaus, which one never listens
to with approval.  Granted, the ship comes into harbor with shrouds
and tackle damaged; the pilot is blameworthy; he has not been
all-wise and all-powerful: but to know _how_ blameworthy, tell us
first whether his voyage has been round the Globe, or only to
Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs.[121]

With our readers in general, with men of right feeling anywhere, we
are not required to plead for Burns.  In pitying admiration he lies
enshrined in all our hearts, in a far nobler mausoleum than that one
of marble; neither will his Works, even as they are, pass away from
the memory of men.  While the Shakespeares and Miltons roll on like
mighty rivers through the country of Thought, bearing fleets of
traffickers and assiduous pearl-fishers on their waves; this little
Valclusa[122] Fountain will also arrest our eye: for this also is of
Nature's own and most cunning workmanship, bursts from the depths of
the earth, with a full gushing current, into the light of day; and
often will the traveller turn aside to drink of its clear waters, and
muse among its rocks and pines.



[1] The text followed is that of Carlyle's latest authorized form.
Important variations from the form as printed in the _Edinburgh
Review_ are pointed out.

[2] Samuel Butler (1612-1680).  _Hudibras_ was one of Carlyle's
favorite books.

[3] "In 1813 a public meeting was held in Dumfries; a subscription
was opened, and, contributions flowing in rapidly from all quarters,
a costly mausoleum was at length erected on the most elevated site
which the churchyard presented.  Thither the remains of the poet were
solemnly transferred on the 5th of June, 1815."--Lockhart, chap. ix.

Carlyle used _brave_ ironically in the sense of _beautiful_,
_splendid_.  Lockhart says mildly: "The structure is perhaps more
gaudy than might have been wished."

[4] The name of the _Mill Vennel_ in Dumfries, where Burns lived from
May, 1793, until his death, was changed to _Burns Street_.

[5] The five _Lives_ of Burns referred to by Carlyle are probably
those mentioned by Lockhart, by Walker, Currie, Heron, Irving, and
Peterkin.  In reality the number was still larger.

[6] To understand these references, read any good sketch of
Shakespeare's life.

[7] "_The Caledonian Hunt_, an association of the principal of the
nobility and gentry of Scotland, extended their patronage to our
bard.  He repaid the notice by a dedication of the enlarged and
improved [_the first Edinburgh_] edition of his poems."--Currie's
_Life of Burns_.

[8] In Scotland _writer_ is used loosely of law agents, solicitors,
attorneys, and the like, and sometimes even of their principal
clerks.  Burns alludes to the _Ayr writers_ in _The Brigs of Ayr_.

[9] _The Edinburgh Review_ owed much of its success to Archibald
Constable, its first printer.  Constable rose to be one of the chief
publishers of his time, and is especially famous for his connection
with Scott, but became bankrupt in 1826.  _Constable's Miscellany of
Original and Selected Publications in Literature, Science, and the
Arts_ has a pathetic interest as being the poor fulfilment of a
scheme that he had formed, before his failure, of a series of cheap
volumes that should sell, he told Scott, "not by thousands or tens of
thousands, but by hundreds of thousands--aye, by millions."

[10] Author of _Notes on a Journey in America, from the Coast of
Virginia to the Territory of Illinois_.  (London, 1818.)

[11] Carlyle's judgment on Lockhart's work seems to have improved
with reflection.  In a letter to his brother, June 10, 1828, he
writes: "Lockhart had written a kind of _Life of Burns_, and men in
general were making another uproar about Burns; it is this Book (a
trivial enough one) which I am to _pretend_ reviewing."

[12] The apologetic expressions in the early part of this essay may,
as Mr. H. W. Boynton well suggests in his excellent edition, be
relics of Jeffrey's editing.

[13] Carlyle is always extreme in his judgments, and here is unjustly
contemptuous of men whom, as the quotation from Scott below (p. 60)
will show, Burns always regarded as his models, and whom he often
directly and openly imitated.  Ramsay has been admired by men as
different as Pope and Leigh Hunt; and Stevenson, whose estimate of
these men in his essay on _Some Aspects of Robert Burns_ it would be
well to read, places the "poor lad Fergusson" even higher than Ramsay.

[14] Here Carlyle touches on the source of his own power,--the maxim
that the pleasure of criticism deprives us of that of vivid
appreciation does not apply to him.

[15] The _Tragic Fragment_ printed in Burns's works was written when
he was only nineteen.  And in 1790 Burns told friends that he was
preparing to write a play on a subject drawn from Scottish history.

[16] Though Carlyle never changed his opinion of a true poet, his
later writings show a very different estimate of the value of
conquerors to the world.  After his removal to London, he writes but
little on literature, and is usually full of scorn for the profession
of letters.  He tends to idealize mere strength of will and brute
force of character, if accompanied by sincerity.  He praises the
power of silent action; and his favorite heroes are men of deeds,
like Cromwell and Frederick.

[17] See _To a Mountain Daisy_ and _To a Mouse_.  Cranreuch=hoar
frost.

[18] This passage is suggested by a prose entry in Burns's
_Common-Place Book_ (April, 1784), which serves as introduction to
the poem _Winter_.  The words in italics are from Psalm 104.

[19] The figure is a favorite one with Burns; see, for example, the
passage quoted below, page 30.  The present quotation may be from
Richter (compare p. 81), in whom, according to Mr. Boynton, the
figure is also frequent.

[20] "Ut ridentibus arrident, ita flentibus adflent
     Humani voltus; si vis me flere, dolendum est
     Primum ipsi tibi."
                                        --_Ars Poetica_, 101-103.

"As men's faces laugh with those that laugh, so they weep with those
that weep; if thou wouldst have me weep, thou must first feel grief
thyself."

[21] Sincerity is the test by which Carlyle judges all men; praise of
it is one of the keynotes of his writings.  Unfortunately he often
confounds it with mere brute force of character and fixity of purpose.

[22] "How perpetually he [Burns] was alive to the dread of being
looked down on as a man, even by those who most zealously applauded
the works of his genius, might perhaps be traced through the whole
sequence of his letters.  When writing to men of high station, at
least, he preserves, in every instance, the attitude of
self-defence."--Lockhart, chap. v.

[23] Scott, Byron, Moore, Southey, and Cooper are the most obvious
objects of this attack; but they had a host of imitators.  Carlyle,
because of his intense moral earnestness, had no sympathy with
literature written only to give amusement, regardless of truth to
life.  As usual, his view, though stimulating, is one-sided.  Many of
the most justly famous books, notably the _Arabian Nights_, are great
by the pure charm of incident and invention.

[24] "A printing-house in London, which was noted in the eighteenth
century for the publication of trashy sentimental novels."--_Century
Dictionary of Names_.

[25] A famous gaming club-house in London.

[26] The reference is to Macaulay, essay on Milton.

[27] The two poems, _Halloween_ and _The Holy Fair_, must be read to
understand the references.  Any encyclopædia will explain the Council
of Trent and the Roman Jubilee.

[28] Carlyle had little interest in the fine arts for their own sake;
perhaps he was attracted to Retzsch by his illustrations of Schiller
and Goethe.

[29] The passage beginning here, and extending through the quotation
on page 27, is not found in the _Edinburgh Review_.

[30] _Bock'd_, vomited.

[31] _Fabulosus_ Hydaspes!  [Note by Carlyle] see _Horace_: Odes, I.
22.

[32] Thaws that melt the snow in spots.

[33] Rolls.

[34] Spate, torrent.

[35] Muddy splashes.

[36] From _The Brigs of Ayr_.  It is the fall of the new brig that is
prophesied: a strange slip on Carlyle's part.

[37] See _Iliad_, xviii. and xxii.  Pope's translation may be bought
for a few cents; and is still in many ways the best.

[38] A name for a blacksmith, shortened to _Burnewin_, in _Scotch
Drink_.

[39] These lines are incorrectly quoted from an Irish song altered by
Burns, _Open the Door to Me, oh!_  They should read:

  "The wan Moon is setting behind the white wave,
    And Time is setting with me, oh:
  False friends, false love, farewell!  for mair
    I'll ne'er trouble them nor thee, oh."

[40] _To William Simpson_.  _Wat_, wet.

[41] Dugald Stewart, professor of moral philosophy in the University
of Edinburgh, in a letter published in the _Life of Burns_, by Dr.
James Currie.

[42] In this sentence, as printed in the _Edinburgh Review_, we have
certainly a trace of Jeffrey's editing (cf. above, p. 7).  There, by
the change of _weak-eyed maudlin_ into _extreme_, and of _random_
into _pervading_, the sneer is converted into a compliment.
Elsewhere Carlyle says of Keats: "The kind of man he was gets ever
more horrible to me.  Force of hunger for pleasure of every kind, and
want of all other force....  Such a structure of soul, it would once
have been very evident, was a chosen 'Vessel of Hell.'" (Nichol:
_Life of Carlyle_, chap. v.)  Such is the absurd result to which
Carlyle is led by his view of the necessity of a moral aim in all
literature.

[43] Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, January 1, 1789.  The passage is also
quoted in Lockhart, chap. viii.

[44] Struggle.

[45] _A Winter Night_.

[46] _Ibid_.

[47] _Address to the Deil_.

[48] The quotation is from _Tristram Shandy_, vol. iii. chap. xi.  In
the _Edinburgh Review_ it is preceded by the sentence: "He did not
know, probably, that Sterne had been beforehand with him."  As a
matter of fact, Burns was well acquainted with Sterne; and it is
perhaps for that reason that Carlyle omitted the line when this essay
was reprinted, even though he thereby made a very abrupt transition.

[49] The two following paragraphs, including the quotation from
Burns, were not in the essay as printed in the _Edinburgh Preview_.

[50] "Facit indignatio versum."--_Juvenal_, I. 79.

[51] Dr. Johnson said of his friend Dr. Bathurst: "Dear Bathurst was
a man to my very heart's content; he hated a fool, and he hated a
rogue, and he hated a Whig.  He was a very good hater."--Piozzi's
_Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson_.  Carlyle himself, in his scornful
epigrams at men and institutions that seemed to him false and
insincere, is a near approach to a "good hater."

[52] Cf. _Paradise Lost_, I. 63.

[53] _Ode, Sacred to the Memory of Mrs. Oswald_.

[54] The authority for this account is a letter from Mr. Syme,
printed in Currie's _Life_.  Burns himself sent _Scots wha hae wi'
Wallace bled_ to Thomson September 1, 1793, in company with a letter,
in which he says that the song was composed on an evening walk the
day before.

[55] See Virgil, _Æneid_, viii. 185-279.

[56] The reference is to Milton's _Il Penseroso_.  The struggle of
fate and man's free will is the central idea of the typical Greek
tragedies.

[57] _Tristram Shandy_ was one of Carlyle's favorite books: Sterne
probably appealed to him by his humor and kindliness.  Cf. p. 33,
above.

[58] Both Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) and Johann Karl August Musäus
(1735-1787) worked with materials drawn from popular legend.  But
Musäus, in his most famous work, _Volksmärchen der Deutschen_
(_German Folk-Tales_), could not keep from introducing his own
satirical tone.  Thus the book lacks the simplicity of genuine
folk-lore.  Remember that Carlyle had already published translations
from both these men.

[59] Fearless crone.

[60] The scene of _The Jolly Beggars_ was an actual tavern in
Mauchline, kept by a Mrs. Gibson, called "Poosie-Nansie."

[61] David Teniers, the Younger (1610-1690).

[62] By John Gay (1685-1732).

[63] By John Fletcher (1579-1625).

[64] In particular, Lockhart, chap. ix.

[65] Jeronymo Osorio (1506-1580), called "the Cicero of Portugal:"
"Men began to hunt more after words than matter; more after the
choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the
sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and
illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the
weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of
invention, or depth of judgment.  Then grew the flowing and watery
vein of Osorius the Portugal bishop, to be in price."--Bacon: _Of the
Advancement of Learning_, I. iv. 2.

[66] Andrew Fletcher, of Saltoun (1655-1716), in his _Account of a
Conversation concerning a Right Regulation of Governments for the
Common Good of Mankind_, says: "I knew a very wise man" who "believed
if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who
should make the laws of a nation."

[67] Richard Glover (1712-1785) was once famous for his epic
_Leonidas_.  There is an account of him, with specimens of his work,
in Ward's _English Poets_.  Nothing can better illustrate Carlyle's
lack of a judicial habit of mind than his coupling Glover's name with
Gray's.  Read once more the _Elegy written in a Country Churchyard_,
and form your own idea of the correctness of Carlyle's opinion.

[68] Apparently Carlyle's memory was treacherous, like that of
ordinary mortals: man and work are both given incorrectly here.
_Human Nature in its Fourfold State_, by Thomas Boston (1677-1732),
is still a classic of the Calvinistic theology.

[69] The names are all readily found in any cyclopædia; except
possibly that of Charles Batteux (1713-1780), who, as might be
inferred from the text, was a French literary critic of the same
school as Boileau.

[70] At one time Hume's residence in France, where he composed his
_Treatise on Human Nature_.

[71] Chapter xi. of Book I. of Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_ has
the title _Of the Rent of Land_.  _The Natural History of Religion_
is by Hume.

[72] In spite of the example of Burns, the publisher of _Waverley_
hesitated for some time to accept the manuscript, on account of the
Scotch dialect interwoven in it.  Now, on the contrary, a local
dialect seems a commendation to a work of fiction.

[73] Burns, in his autobiographical letter to Dr. Moore (August 2,
1787), says, in reference to _The History of Sir William Wallace_,
one of his first books: "The story of Wallace poured a Scotch
prejudice in my veins, which will boil along there till the
flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest."  The reader will by this
time have noticed Carlyle's carelessness about small points.

[74] This may refer to Burns's poetical epistles to David Sillar and
John Lapraik, obscure poets of his own time; or, more probably, to
his erecting a memorial, at his own expense, over the neglected grave
of Fergusson.

[75] _Answer to Verses addressed to the Poet by the Guidwife of
Wauchope House_.

[76] Burns himself says of his early days, in his autobiographical
letter to Dr. Moore: "The great misfortune of my life was never to
have an aim."

[77] Perhaps Carlyle is misled in his estimate of Burns by his own
high conception of the vocation of the man of letters.  The
profession of literature is hardly older than our own century; Dr.
Johnson is really the first example of it.  For a man, unsupported by
a patron, to make poetry his means of subsistence, was almost unknown
in the eighteenth century.  Burns was too proud to depend on a
patron, and his refusal to accept money for his contributions to
Johnson's _Museum_ and Thomson's _Scottish Airs_ was only in accord
with the ideas of his time; besides, he feared that such a proceeding
would injure his spontaneity.  To receive pay for a volume of poems,
originally written without reference to publication, was quite a
different matter.

Carlyle, in his lecture on _The Hero as Man of Letters_, in _Heroes
and Hero-Worship_, develops his own point of view more fully.

[78] Burns himself says of his father: "I have met with few who
understood Men, their manners and their ways, equal to him."

[79] These words seem like a prophecy of Carlyle's own career, which
was just beginning when this essay was written.

[80] See _The Cotter's Saturday Night_.

[81] Wordsworth: _Resolution and Independence_ (1807 edition).  Our
editions read: "Following his plough, along the mountain side."  The
reference in the poem is to Burns.

[82] Apparently the "best evidence" is conflicting.  Burns, in his
autobiographical letter to Dr. Moore, says of himself as a boy: "I
was, perhaps, the most ungainly, awkward being in the parish."  And
Murdock, Burns's schoolmaster, in a letter printed in Currie's _Life_
and reproduced in Lockhart's, says: "Robert's ear was remarkably
dull, and his voice untamable....  Robert's countenance was generally
grave and expressive of a serious, contemplative, and thoughtful
mind."

[83a] The phrases are drawn from Burns's letter to Dr. Moore.

[83b] The phrases are drawn from Burns's letter to Dr. Moore.

[84] _Farewell Song to the Banks of Ayr_.  The last line should
read:--

  Farewell, the bonie banks of Ayr.

[85] Shakespeare, Richard II. iv. 1.  Carlyle was a man of enormous
reading, and no one can hope to recognize _all_ his allusions.  But
the two books to which he, like most of the great writers of modern
England, refers most frequently, are within the reach of every one:
they are the Bible and Shakespeare.

[86] Lockhart, chap. v.

[87] Ovid, _Tristia_, IV. x. 51.

[88] Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), professor of philosophy at Edinburgh
University.  He was succeeded by Dugald Stewart.

[89] Henry William Bunbury (1750-1811) was an amateur artist and
caricaturist of some note.

[90] The poem may be found in Chalmers's _British Poets_, vol. xvi.,
under the title _The Country Justice_.  There the second line reads:
"Perhaps that parent mourn'd her soldier slain."  John Langhorne
(1735-1779) and his brother William made the translation of
Plutarch's _Lives_ which, in spite of its dreary style, is still the
one in general use.

[91] Alexander Nasmyth (1758-1840) painted in 1787 a bust portrait of
Burns, which is the likeness most commonly reproduced.

[92] Quoted in Lockhart, chap. v.

[93] Lockhart gives in a foot-note (at end of chap. iv.) the
following quotation from a letter of Dr. Johnson to Mrs. Thrale,
August 17, 1773:--

"This morning I saw at breakfast Dr. Blacklock, the blind poet, who
does not remember to have seen light, and is read to by a poor
scholar in Latin, Greek, and French.  He was originally a poor
scholar himself.  I looked on him with reverence."

[94] Cf. John v. 1-9.

[95] Words of Burns quoted in Lockhart, chap. vii.

[96] "If Burns had much of a farmer's skill, he had little of a
farmer's prudence and economy.  I once inquired of James Corrie, a
sagacious old farmer, whose ground marched with Elliesland, the cause
of the poet's failure.  'Faith,' said he, 'how could he miss but
fail, when his servants ate the bread as fast as it was baked?  I
don't mean figuratively, I mean literally.  Consider a little.  At
that time close economy was necessary to have enabled a man to clear
twenty pounds a year by Elliesland.  Now Burns's own handywork was
out of the question; he neither ploughed, nor sowed, nor reaped, at
least like a hard-working farmer; and then he had a bevy of servants
from Ayrshire.  The lasses did nothing but bake bread, and the lads
sat by the fireside, and ate it warm, with ale.  Waste of time and
consumption of food would soon reach to twenty pounds a
year.'"--(Letter to Lockhart from Allan Cunningham, quoted in
Lockhart's _Life_, chap, vii.)

[97] In reality Burns occasionally borrowed money; but at his death
he left only a few small debts.

[98] There is one little sketch by certain "English gentlemen" of
this class, which, though adopted in Currie's narrative, and since
then repeated in most others, we have all along felt an invincible
disposition to regard as imaginary: "On a rock that projected into
the stream, they saw a man employed in angling, of a singular
appearance.  He had a cap made of fox-skin on his head, a loose
greatcoat fixed round him by a belt, from which depended an enormous
Highland broad-sword.  It was Burns."  Now, we rather think, it was
_not_ Burns.  For, to say nothing of the foxskin cap, the loose and
quite Hibernian watchcoat with the belt, what are we to make of this
"enormous Highland broad-sword" depending from him?  More especially,
as there is no word of parish constables on the outlook to see
whether, as Dennis phrases it, he had an eye to his own midriff or
that of the public!  Burns, of all men, had the least need, and the
least tendency, to seek for distinction, either in his own eyes or
those of others, by such poor mummeries.--[Carlyle's note.]

Carlyle thinks this petty vanity inconsistent with Burns's wise
self-control at Edinburgh.  But we cannot reason thus in the case of
a man with so variable a temperament, and the anecdote is fairly well
authenticated.

[99] Mæcenas was the great literary patron of the Augustan age of
Rome.  Virgil addressed to him his _Georgics_, and Horace honors his
name repeatedly.

[100] Lockhart (chap. viii.) devotes much time to confuting them.

[101] Lockhart, chap. viii.

[102] _Ubi sœva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit_.
Swift's Epitaph.  [Carlyle's note.]

[103] _A Bard's Epitaph_.

[104] The parody is from _The Merchant of Venice_, iv. 1.

[105] Cf. page 1, above.

[106] Cf. Matthew vii. 16.

[107] An echo from Burns's dedication to the first Edinburgh edition
of his poems.  Cf. page 3, above.

[108] Cf. Daniel iv. 30.

[109] The first half of this precept occurs eight times in the New
Testament; the second only in Galatians vi. 2.

[110] This cry of indignation at the absorption of men in the cares
of this world, and their indifference to higher things, occurs
repeatedly in Carlyle.

[111] Every reader should have a clear idea, not necessarily of the
details in the lives of these men, but of the general significance of
each in the history of the world.

[112] Matthew v. 12; and compare Luke vi. 23.

[113] There is an allusion to Ephesians iv. 8.

[114] This moral is worked out with wonderful power in _Sartor
Resartus_.

[115] The word means simply _restorer_; but Carlyle uses it to denote
a man who uses his literary talent merely to give amusement, not to
inculcate truth.  Here again is a veiled sneer at Byron and Scott.

[116] See _Paradise Lost_, vii. 24-31.

[117] The _Araucana_ is the best of a score of epics written in the
reign of Philip II. of Spain in imitation of the Italian poets
Ariosto and Tasso.  Its author, Alonso de Ercilla y Zuniga
(1533-1595), writes of the Spanish campaigns against the Indians of
Arauco, in which he himself took part.  The early part of the poem
was written in the field, in the manner that Carlyle describes.  The
_Araucana_ is now little read; and its author is no way comparable to
the great epic poets of Italy and England.

[118] Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825) is one of Carlyle's
favorite authors, and one of those who influenced him most.  He is
the subject of Carlyle's first essay in the _Edinburgh Review_
(1827), and is treated again in another and a greater essay in the
_Foreign Review_ (1830).  These two papers by Carlyle remain among
the best accounts of Richter accessible in English.

[119] "I have bought a pocket Milton, which I carry perpetually about
me, in order to study the sentiments, the dauntless magnanimity, the
intrepid unyielding independence, the desperate daring, and noble
defiance of hardship in that great personage--Satan."--Letter of
Burns, quoted in Lockhart, chap. vi.

Bitter epigrams like this on Byron become a characteristic of
Carlyle's style in his later writings.

[120] Milton's real words are: "I was confirmed in this opinion, that
he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in
laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem; that is, a
composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things; not
presuming to sing high praises of heroic men, or famous cities,
unless he has in himself the experience and the practice of all that
which is praiseworthy."--_Apology for Smectymnuus_.

[121] Shipping ports in southern England.  Carlyle is writing from
the point of view of a Scotchman.

[122] _Vaucluse_ (_Valclusa_ in Italian) is a town in southeast
France where the great Italian poet Petrarch (1304-1374) lived for
some time, and where he did much of his best work.  Its fountain is
celebrated in his poems.





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