had always the start of his judgment, and would
lead him to the indulgence of raillery uniformly
acute, but often unaccompanied with the least
desire to wound. The suppression of an arch
and full-pointed bon-mot, from a dread of of-
fending its object, the sage of Zurich very pro-
perly classes as a virtue only to be sought for in
the Calendar of Saints ; if so, Burns must not
be too severely dealt with for being rather defi-
cient in it. He paid for his mischievous wit
as dearly as any one could do. ' 'Twas no ex-
travagant arithmetic,' to say of him, as was
said of Yorick, that e for every ten jokes he
got an hundred enemies ;' but much allowance
will be made by a candid mind for the splenetic
warmth of a spirit whom c distress had spited
with the world,' and which, unbounded in its
intellectual sallies and pursuits, continually ex-
perienced the curbs imposed by the wayward-
ness of his fortune. The vivacity of his wishes
and temper was indeed checked by almost ha-
bitual disappointments, which sat heavy on a
heart that acknowledged the ruling passion of
independence, without having ever been placed
beyond the grasp of penury. His soul was

never



256 THE LIFE OF

never languid or inactive, and his genius was ex-
tinguished only with the last spark of retreat-
ing life. His passions rendered him, according
as they disclosed themselves in affection or an-
tipathy, an object of enthusiastic attachment,
or of decided enmity ; for he possessed none of
that negative insipidity of character, whose love
might be regarded with indifference, or whose
resentment could be considered with contempt.
In this, it should seem, the temper of his asso-
ciates took the tincture from his own ; for he
acknowledged in the universe but two classes
of objects, those of adoration the most fervent,
or of aversion the most uncontrolable ; and it
has been frequently a reproach to him, that,
unsusceptible of indifference, often hating where
he ought only to have despised, he alternately
opened his heart and poured forth the treasures
of his understanding to such as were incapable of
appreciating the homage ; and elevated to the
privileges of an adversary, some who were un-
qualified in all respects for the honour of a con-
test so distinguished.

" It is said that the celebrated Dr. Johnson
professed to * love a good hater,' a temperament
that would have singularly adapted him to che-
rish a prepossession in favour of our bard, who
perhaps fell but little short even of the surly
Doctor in this qualification, as long as the dis-
position



ROBERT BURNS. 257

position to ill-will continued ; but the warmth
of his passions was fortunately corrected by their
versatility. He was seldom, indeed never, im-
placable in his resentments, and sometimes, it
has been alleged, not inviolably faithful in his
engagements of friendship. Much indeed has
been said about his inconstancy and caprice;
but I am inclined to believe, that they originated
less in a levity of sentiment, than from an ex-
treme impetuosity of feeling, which rendered
him prompt to take umbrage ; and his sensations
of pique, where he fancied he had discovered
the traces of neglect, scorn, or unkindness, took
their measure of asperity from the overflowings
of the opposite sentiment which preceded them,
and which seldom failed to regain its ascendency
in his bosom on the return of calmer reflection.
He was candid and manly in the avowal of his
errors, and his avowal was a reparation. His na-
tive Jierte never forsaking him for a moment, the
value of a frank acknowledgment was enhanced
tenfold towards a generous mind, from its never
being attended with servility. His mind, or-
ganized only for the stronger and more acute
operations of the passions, was impracticable to
the efforts of superciliousness that would have
depressed it into humility, and equally superior
to the encroachments of venal suggestions that
might have led him into the mazes of hypo-
crisy.

VOL. I. S " It



25$ THE LIFE OF

" It has been observed, that he was far from
averse to the incense of flattery, and could re-
ceive it tempered with less delicacy than might
have been expected, as he seldom transgressed
extravagantly in that way himself; where he
paid a compliment, it might indeed claim the
power of intoxication, as approbation from him
was always an honest tribute from the warmth
and sincerity of his heart. It has been some-
times represented by those who it should seem
had a view to depreciate, though they could not
hope wholly to obscure that native brilliancy,
which the powers of this extraordinary man had
invariably bestowed on every thing that came
from his lips or pen, that the history of the Ayr-
shire ploughboy was an ingenious fiction, fabri-
cated for the purposes of obtaining the interests
of the great, and enhancing the merits of what
in reality required no foil. The Cotter's Satur-
day Night, Tarn O'Shanter, and the Mountain
Daisy, besides a number of later productions,
where the maturity of his genius will be readily
traced, and which will be given to the public as
soon as his friends have collected and arranged
them, speak sufficiently for themselves ; and had
they fallen from a hand more dignified in the
ranks of society than that of a peasant, they had
perhaps bestowed as unusual a grace there, as
even in the humbler shade of rustic inspiration
from whence they really sprung,

"To



ROBERT BURNS. 259

" To the obscure scene of Burns's education,
and to the laborious, though honourable station
of rural industry, in which his parentage en-
rolled him, almost every inhabitant of the south
of Scotland can give testimony. His only sur-
viving brother, Gilbert Burns, now guides the
ploughshare of his forefathers in Ayrshire, at a
farm near Mauchline j* and our poet's eldest
son (a lad of nine years of age, whose early dis-
positions already prove him to be in some mea-
sure the inheritor of his father's talents as well
as indigence), has been destined by his family
to the humble employments of the loom.f

" That Burns had received no classical edu-
cation, and was acquainted with the Greek and
Roman authors only through the medium of
translations, is a fact of which all who were in
the habits of conversing with him might readily
be convinced. I have indeed seldom observed
him to be at a loss in conversation, unless where
the dead languages and their writers have been
the subjects of discussion. When I have press-
ed him to tell me, why he never applied him-

S 2 self



* This very respectable and very superior man is now
removed to Dumfries-shire. He rents lands on the estate
of Closeburn, and is a tenant of the venerable Dr. Mon-
teith. (1800.) E.

f This destination is now altered. (1800.) E.



260 THE LIFE OF

self to acquire the Latin, in particular, a lan-
guage which his happy memory would have so
soon enabled him to be master of, he used only
to reply with a smile, that he had already learnt
all the Latin he desired to know, and that was,
omnia vincit amor ; a sentence, that from his
writings and most favourite pursuits, it should
undoubtedly seem that he was most thoroughly
versed in j but I really believe his classic erudi-
tion extended little, if any, further.

<f The penchant Burns had uniformly acknow-
ledged for the festive pleasures of the table, and
towards the fairer and softer objects of nature's
creation, has been the rallying point from
whence the attacks of his censors have been uni-
formly directed 5 and to these, it must be con-
fessed, he shewed himself no stoic. His poetical
pieces blend with alternate happiness of descrip-
tion, the frolic spirit of the flowing bowl, or melt
the heart to the tender and impassioned senti-
ments in which beauty always taught him to
pour forth his own. But who would wish to re-
prove the feelings he has consecrated with such
lively touches of nature ? And where is the
rugged moralist who will persuade us so far to
" chill the genial current of the soul," as to re-
gret that Ovid ever celebrated his Corinna, or
that Anacreon sung beneath his vine?

" I will



ROBERT BURNS. 261

'* I will not however undertake to be the apo-
logist of the irregularities even of a man of ge-
nius, though I believe it is as certain that genius
never was free from irregularities, as that their
absolution may in great measure be justly claim-
ed, since it is perfectly evident that the world
had continued very stationary in its intellectual
acquirements, had it never given birth to any
but men of plain sense. Evenness of conduct,
and a due regard to the decorums of the world,
have been so rarely seen to move hand in hand
with genius, that some have gone as far as to say,
though there I cannot wholly acquiesce, that
they are even incompatible ; besides, the frailties
that cast their shade over the splendour of supe-
rior merit, are more conspicuously glaring than
where they are the attendants of mere mediocrity.
It is only on the gem we are disturbed to see the
dust j the pebble may be soiled, and we never re-
gard it. The eccentric intuitions of genius too
often yield the soul to the wild effervescence
of desires, always unbounded, and sometimes
equally dangerous to the repose of others as fatal
to its own. No wonder then if virtue herself be
sometimes lost in the blaze of kindling animation,
or that the calm monitions of reason are not in-
variably found sufficient to fetter an imagination,
which scorns the narrow limits and restrictions
that would chain it to the level of ordinary minds.
The child of nature, the child of sensibility, un-
schooled



262 THE LIFE OF

schooled in the rigid precepts of philosophy, too
often unable to control the passions which proved
a source of frequent errors and misfortunes to
him, Burns made his own artless apology in lan-
guage more impressive than all the argumenta-
tory vindications in the world could do, in one
of his own poems, where he delineates the gra-
dual expansion of his mind to the lessons of the
" tutelary muse," who concludes an address to
her pupil, almost unique for simplicity and beau-
tiful poetry, with these lines ;

" I saw thy pulse's madd'ning play
Wild send thee pleasure's devious way ;
Misled by Fancy's meteor ray,

By passion driven ;
But yet the light that led astray,
Was light from heaven !"*

s< I have already transgressed beyond the
bounds I had proposed to myself, on first com-
mitting this sketch to paper, which compre-
hends what at least I have been led to deem the
leading features of Burns's mind and character:
a literary critique I do not aim at; mine is
wholly fulfilled, if in these pages I have been
able to delineate any of those strong traits that

distinguished

* Vide the Vision Duan 2d.



ROBERT BURNS. 263

distinguished him, of those talents which raised
him from the plough, where he passed the bleak
morning of his life, weaving his rude wreaths of
poesy with the wild field-flowers that sprang
around his cottage, to that enviable eminence
of literary fame, where Scotland will long che-
rish his memory with delight and gratitude ; and
proudly remember, that beneath her cold sky a
genius was ripened, without care or culture,
that would have done honour to climes more fa-
vourable to those luxuriances that warmth of
colouring and fancy in which he so eminently
excelled,

" From several paragraphs I have noticed in
the public prints, ever since the idea of sending
this sketch to some one of them was formed,
I find private animosities have not yet sub-
sided, and that envy has not yet exhausted all
her shafts. I still trust, however, that honest
fame will be permanently affixed to Burns's cha-
racter, which I think it will be found he has
merited by the candid and impartial among his
countrymen. And where a recollection of the
imprudences that sullied his brighter qualifica-
tions interpose, let the imperfection of all hu-
man excellence be remembered at the same time,
leaving those inconsistencies, which alternately
exalted his nature into the seraph, and sunk it
again into the man, to the tribunal which alone

can



264 THE LIFE OF

can investigate the labyrinths of the human
heart

' Where they alike in trembling hope repose,
The bosom of his father and his God.'

" Gray's Elegy.

" Jnnandale, Aug. 7, 1796."



AFTER this account of the life and personal
character of Burns, it may be expected that
some inquiry should be made into his literary
merits. It will not however be necessary to
enter very minutely into this investigation. If
fiction be, as some suppose, the soul of poetry,
no one had ever less pretensions to the name of
poet than Burns. Though he has displayed
great powers of imagination, yet the subjects
on which he has written, are seldom, if ever
imaginary; his poems, as well as his letters, may
be considered as the effusions of his sensibility,
and the transcript of his own musings on the
real incidents of his humble life. If we add,
that they also contain most happy delineations
of the characters, manners, and scenery that
presented themselves to his observation, we shall
include almost all the subjects of his muse. His
writings may therefore be regarded as affording
a great part of the data on which our account
of his personal character has been founded ; and

most



ROBERT BURNS. 265

most of the observations we have applied to the
man, are applicable, with little variation, to
the poet.

The impression of his birth, and of his ori-
ginal station in life, was not more evident on his
form and manners, than on his poetical produc-
tions. The incidents which form the subjects
of his poems, though some of them highly inter-
esting, and susceptible of poetical imagery, are
incidents in the life of a peasant who takes no
pains to disguise the lowliness of his condition,
or to throw into shade the circumstances attend-
ing it, which more feeble or more artificial
minds would have endeavoured to conceal. The
same rudeness and inattention appears in the
formation of his rhymes, which are frequently
incorrect, while the measure in which many of
the poems are written has little of the pomp or
harmony of modern versification, and is indeed
to an English ear, strange and uncouth. The
greater part of his earlier poems are written in
the dialect of his country, which is obscure, if
not unintelligible to Englishmen, and which,
though it still adheres more or less to the speech
of almost every Scotchman, all the polite and
the ambitious are now endeavouring to banish
from their tongues as well as their writings. The
use of it in composition naturally therefore calls
up ideas of vulgarity in the mind. These sin-
gularities



'266 THE LIFE OF

gularities are increased by the character of the
poet, who delights to express himself with a sim-
plicity that approaches to nakedness, and with an
unmeasured energy that often alarms delicacy,
and sometimes offends taste. Hence, in ap-
proaching him, the first impression is perhaps
repulsive : there is an air of coarseness about
him, which is difficultly reconciled with our
established notions of poetical excellence.

As the reader however becomes better ac-
quainted with the poet, the effects of his pecu-
liarities lessen. He perceives in his poems, even
on the lowest subjects, expressions of sentiment,
and delineations of manners, which are highly
interesting. The scenery he describes is evi-
dently taken from real life ^ the characters he
introduces, and the incidents he relates, have
the impression of nature and truth. His hu-
mour, though wild and unbridled, is irresistibly
amusing, and is sometimes heightened in its ef-
fects by the introduction of emotions of ten-
derness, with which genuine humour so happily
unites. Nor is this the extent of his power.
The reader, as he examines farther, discovers
that the poet is not confined to the descriptive,
the humorous, or the pathetic: he is found, as
occasion offers, to rise with ease into the terri-
ble and the sublime. Every where he appears
devoid of artifice, performing what he attempts

with



ROBERT BURNS. 26?

with little apparent effort; and impressing on
the offspring of his fancy the stamp of his under-
standing. The reader, capable of forming a just
estimate of poetical talents, discovers in these
circumstances marks of uncommon genius, and
is willing to investigate more minutely its nature
and its claims to originality. This last point we
shall examine first.

That Burns had not the advantages of a clas-
sical education, or of any degree of acquaint-
ance with the Greek or Roman writers in their
original dress, has appeared in the history of his
life. He acquired indeed some knowledge of
the French language, but it does not appear
that he was ever much conversant in French li-
terature, nor is there any evidence of his having
derived any of his poetical stores from that
source. With the English classics he became
well acquainted in the course of his life, and the
effects of this acquaintance are observable in
his latter productions; but the character and
style of his poetry were formed very early, and
the model which he followed, in as far as he can
be said to have had one, is to be sought for in
the works of the poets who have written in the
Scottish dialect in the works of such of them
more especially, as are familiar to the peasant^
of Scotland. Some observations on these may
form a proper introduction to a more particular

examination



268 THE LIFE OF

examination of the poetry of Burns. The stu-
dies of the Editor in this direction are indeed
very recent and very imperfect. It would have
been imprudent for him to have entered on this
subject at all, but for the kindness of Mr. Ram-
say of Ochtertyre, whose assistance he is proud
to acknowledge, and to whom the reader must
ascribe whatever is of any value in the following
imperfect sketch of literary compositions in the
Scottish idiom.

It is a circumstance not a little curious, and
which does not seem to be satisfactorily explain-
ed, that in the thirteenth century, the language
of the two British nations, if at all different,
differed only in dialect, the Gaelic in the one,
like the Welch and Armoric in the other, being
confined to the mountainous districts.* The
English under the Edwards, and the Scots under
Wallace and Bruce, spoke the same language.
We may observe also, that in Scotland the his-
tory of poetry ascends to a period nearly as re-
mote as in England. Barbour, and Blind Harry,
James the First, Dunbar, Douglas, and Lindsay,
who lived in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and six-
teenth centuries, were coeval with the fathers
of poetry in England ; and in the opinion of Mr.

Wharton,

* Historical Essay on Scottish Song, p. 9.0, by Mr.
Ritson.



ROBERT BURNS. 269

Wharton, not inferior to them in genius or in
composition. Though the language of the two
countries gradually deviated from each other
during this period, yet the difference on the
whole was not considerable ; not perhaps greater
than between the different dialects of the differ-
ent parts of England in our own time.

At the death of James the Fifth, in 1542,
the language of Scotland was in a flourishing
condition, wanting only writers in prose equal
to those in verse. Two circumstances, propi-
tious on the whole, operated to prevent this.
The first was the passion of the Scots for com-
position in Latin ; and the second, the accession
of James the Sixth to the English throne. It
may easily be imagined, that if Buchanan had
devoted his admirable talents, even in part, to
the cultivation of his native tongue, as was
done by the revivers of letters in Italy, he would
have left compositions in that language which
might have incited other men of genius to have
followed his example,* and given duration to
the language itself. The union of the two
crowns in the person of James, overthrew all
reasonable expectation of this kind. That mo-
narch, seated on the English throne, would no

longer

* e. g. The Authors of the Delicia Poetarum Scoto*
rum, 8$c.



270 THE LIFE OF

longer suffer himself to be addressed in the rude
dialect in which the Scottish clergy had so often
insulted his dignity. He encouraged Latin or
English only, both of which he prided himself
on writing with purity, though he himself never
could acquire the English pronunciation, but
spoke with a Scottish idiom and intonation to
the last. Scotsmen of talents declined writing
in their native language, which they knew was
not acceptable to their learned and pedantic mo-
narch, and at a time when national prejudice
and enmity prevailed to a great degree, they
disdained to study the niceties of the English
tongue, though of so much easier acquisition
than a dead language. Lord Stirling and Drum-
mond of Hawthornden, the only Scotsmen who
wrote poetry in those times, were exceptions.
They studied the language of England, anckcom-
posed in it with precision and elegance. They
Were however the last of their countrymen who
deserved to be considered as poets in that cen-
tury. The muses of Scotland sunk into silence,
and did not again raise their voices for a period
of eighty years.

To what causes are we to attribute this ex-
treme depression among a people comparatively
learned, enterprising, and ingenious ? Shall we
impute it to the fanaticism of the covenanters,
or to the tyranny of the house of Stuart after

their



ROBERT BURNS. 271

their restoration to the throne ? Doubtless these
causes operated, but they seem unequal to ac-
count for the effect. In England, similar dis-
tractions and oppression took place, yet poetry
flourished there in a remarkable degree. During
this period, Cowley, and Waller, and Dryden
sung, and Milton raised his strain of un-
paralleled grandeur. To the causes already
mentioned, another must be added, in account-
ing for the torpor of Scottish literature the
want of a proper vehicle for men of genius to
employ. The civil wars had frightened away
the Latin muses, and no standard had been
established of the Scottish tongue, which was
deviating still farther from the pure English
idiom.

The revival of literature in Scotland may be
dated from the establishment of the union, or
rather from the extinction of the rebellion in
1715. The nations being finally incorporated,
it was clearly seen that their tongues must in
the end incorporate also ; or rather indeed that
the Scottish language must degenerate into a
provincial idiom, to be avoided by those who
would aim at distinction in letters, or rise to
eminence in the united legislature.

Soon after this, a band of men of genius
appeared, who studied the English classics, and

imitated



272 THE LIFE OF

imitated their beauties, in the same manner as
they studied the classics of Greece and Rome.
They had admirable models of composition
lately presented to them by the writers of the
reign of Queen Anne ; particularly in the pe-
riodical papers published by Steele, Addison,
and their associated friends, which circulated
widely through Scotland, and diffused every
where a taste for purity of style and sentiment,
and for critical disquisition. At length, the
Scottish writers succeeded in English composi-
tion, and an union was formed of the literary
talents, as well as of the legislatures of the two
nations. On this occasion the poets took the
lead. While Henry Home,* Dr. Wallace, and
their learned associates, were only laying in
their intellectual stores, and studying to clear
themselves of their Scottish idioms, Thomson,
Mallet, and Hamilton of Bangour, had made
their appearance before the public, and been
enrolled on the list of English poets. The
writers in prose followed a numerous and
powerful band, and poured their ample stores in-
to the general stream of British literature. Scot-
land possessed her four universities before the
accession of James to the English throne. Im-
mediately before the union, she acquired her
parochial schools. These establishments com-
bining

* Lord Kaims.



ROBERT BURNS. 273

bining happily together, made the elements of
knowledge of easy acquisition, and presented a
direct path, by which the ardent student might
be carried along into the recesses of science or
learning. As civil broils ceased, and faction
and prejudice gradually died away, a wider field
was opened to literary ambition, and the influ-
ence of the Scottish institutions for instruction,
on the productions of the press, became more
and more apparent.

It seems indeed probable, that the establish-