We do not say that Burns should have made | department. True, we have songs enough much more of this tradition; we rather think "by persons of quality;" we have tawdry, that, for strictly poetical purposes, not much hollow, wine-bred, madrigals; many a rhymed was to be made of it. Neither are we blind to "speech" in the flowing and watery vein of the deep, varied, genial power displayed in Ossorius the Portugal Bishop, rich in sonorwhat he has actually accomplished; but we ous words, and, for moral, dashed perhaps find far more "Shakspearian" qualities, as with some tint of a sentimental sensuality; these of Tam o' Shanter have been fondly named, all which many persons cease not from en in many of his other pieces; nay, we incline deavouring to sing: though for most part, to believe, that this latter might have been we fear, the music is but from the throat out-1 written, all but quite as well, by a man who, ward, or at best from some region far enough in place of genius, had only possessed talent. short of the Soul; not in which, but in a certain Perhaps we may venture to say, that the inane Limbo of the Fancy, or even in some i most strictly poetical of all his "poems" is vaporous debatable land on the outside of the one, which does not appear in Currie's Edi- Nervous System, most of such madrigals and tion; but has been often printed before and rhymed speeches seem to have originated. since, under the humble title of The Jolly Beg- With the Songs of Burns we must not name gars. The subject truly is among the lowest these things. Independently of the clear, manly, in nature; but it only the more shows our heartfelt sentiment that ever pervades his poet's gift in raising it into the domain of Art. poetry, his Songs are honest in another point To our minds, this piece seems thoroughly of view: in form, as well as in spirit. They compacted; melted together, refined; and do not affect to be set to music, but they actually poured forth in one flood of true liquid har- and in themselves are music; they have remony. It is light, airy, and soft of movement; ceived their life, and fashioned themselves yet sharp and precise in its details; every face together, in the medium of Harmony, as is a portrait: that raucle carlin, that wee Apollo, Venus rose from the bosom of the sea. The that Son of Mars, are Scottish, yet ideal; the story, the feeling, is not detailed, but suggested; scene is at once a dream, and the very Rag- not said, or spouted, in rhetorical completeness castle of "Poosie-Nansie." Farther, it seems and coherence; but sung, in fitful gushes, in in a considerable degree complete, a real self-glowing hints, in fantastic breaks, in warblings supporting Whole, which is the highest merit in a poem. The blanket of the night is drawn asunder for a moment; in full, ruddy, and flaming light, these rough tatterdemalions are seen in their boisterous revel; for the strong pulse of 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 cal-truth of sentiment, and inward meaning. The lets" are hawking, begging, cheating; and some other night, in new combinations, they will wring from Fate another hour of wassail and good cheer. 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, in the Beggar's Bush, as other critics have already remarked, there is nothing which, in real poetic vigour, equals this Cantata; nothing, as we think, which comes within many degrees of it. 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 Shakspeare 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, presup poses in general a corresponding force and 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 slyest mirth; and yet he is sweet and soft, "sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet, and soft as their parting tear!" If we farther 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 for Mary in Heaven; But by far the most finished, complete, and from the glad kind greeting of Auld Langsyne, truly inspired pieces of Burns are, without dis-or the comic archness of Duncan Gray, to the pute, to be found among his Songs. It is here that, although through a small aperture, his light shines with the least obstruction; in its highest beauty, and pure sunny clearness. The reason may be, that Song is a brief and simple species of composition: and requires nothing so much for its perfection as genuine poetic feeling, genuine music of heart. 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 fire-eyed fury of Scots, wha hae wi Wallace bled, he has found a tone and words for 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 aphorism is true, shall we account this a small influence. "Let me make the songs of a people," said he," and you shail 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 the ends of the earth | Montesquieu and Mably that guided Robertspeak a British language. In hut and hall, as the heart unfolds itself in the joy and wo of existence, the name, the voice of that joy and that wo, 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 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 homefeeling; 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 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 Thomas Boston was writing, with the noblest intent, but alike in defiance of grammar and philosophy, his Fourfold State of Man. 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; how ever, it was only obscured, not obliterated. Lord Kames made nearly the first attempt, and a tolerably clumsy one, 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 son in his political speculations; Quesnay's lamp that kindled the lamp of Adam Smith. Hume was too rich a man to borrow; and perhaps he reached on the French more than he was acted on by them: but neither had he aught to do with Scotland; Edinburgh, equally with La Flèche, 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 wellordered, 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 Rent," to the "Natural History of Religion, are thrashed and sifted with the same mechanical impartiality! 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, 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, humours, 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. 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," 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 floodgates shut in eternal rest." It seemed to him, as if he could do so little for his country, and 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 laboured there! In his most toilsome journeyings, this object never quits him; it is the little happy-valley of his careworn heart. In the gloom of his own BURNS. affliction, he eagerly searches after some lonely with the world, on the comparatively insignifi- -a wish, (I mind its power,) The rough bur Thistle spreading wide 1 turn'd my weeding-clips aside, And spared the symbol dear. 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 colours: 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, honour, 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 labour, but showered on him by But to leave the mere literary character of the beneficence of Destiny. Thus, like a young Burns, which has already detained us too long, man, he cannot steady himself for any fixed or we cannot but think that the Life he willed, systematic pursuit, but swerves to and fro, and was fated to lead among his fellow-men, between passionate hope, and remorseful disis both more interesting and instructive than appointment: rushing onwards with a deep any of his written works. These Poems are but tempestuous force, he surmounts or breaks like little rhymed fragments scattered here and asunder many a barrier; travels, nay, advances there in the grand unrhymed Romance of his far, but advancing only under uncertain guidearthly existence; and it is only when inter-ance, is ever and anon turned from his path: calated 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, porticoes, firm masses of building, stand completed; the rest more or less clearly indicated; with many a far-stretching 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 endeavours, 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 judg ment, 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. 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 report. 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 14 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 favour. 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 develope 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, therefore, 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 resiHitherto his life had been poor and toildence at Irvine, so early as in his twenty-third year. worn; but otherwise not ungenial, and, with all its distresses, by no means unhappy. In his 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, open minded 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 de- beset us at all stages of life, and are always scending far in society to seek. Unfortunately, such_indifferent company, that it seems hard he was very poor; had he been even a little we should, at any stage, be forced and fated richer, almost ever so little, the whole might not only to meet, but to yield to them; and even nave issued far otherwise. Mighty events turn serve for a term in their leprous armada. We on a straw; the crossing of a brook decides hope it is not so. Clear we are, at all events, the conquest of the world. Had this William it cannot be the training one receives in this Burns's small seven acres of nursery ground service, but only our determining to desert anywise prospered, the boy Robert had been from it, that fits us for true manly Action. We sent to school; had struggled forward, as so become men, not after we have been dissipated, many weaker men do, to some university; and disappointed in the chase of false pleasure; come forth not as a rustic wonder, but as a but after we have ascertained, in any way, regular well-trained intellectual workman, and what impassable barriers hem us in through changed the whole course of British Literature, this life; how mad it is to hope for content-for it lay in him to have done this! But ment to our infinite soul from the gifts of this the nursery did not prosper; poverty sank his extremely finite world! that a man must be whole family below the help of even our cheap sufficient for himself; and that "for suffering school-system: Burns remained a hard-worked and enduring there is no remedy but striving plough-boy, and British literature took its own and doing." Manhood begins when we have course. Nevertheless, even in this rugged in any way made truce with Necessity; begins, scene, there is much to nourish him. If he at all events, when we have surrendered to drudges, it is with his brother, and for his Necessity, as the most part only do; but begins father and mother, whom he loves, and would joyfully and hopefully only when we have lain shield from want. Wisdom is not ban- reconciled ourselves to Necessity; and thus, in ished from their poor hearth, nor the balm of reality, triumphed over it, and felt that in natural feeling: the solemn words, Let us wor- Necessity we are free. Surely, such lessons ship God, are heard there from a "priest-like as this last, which, in one shape or other, is father;" if threatenings of unjust men throw the grand lesson for every mortal man, are mother and children into tears, these are tears better learned from the lips of a devout mother, not of grief only, but of holiest affection; every in the looks and actions of a devout father, heart in that humble group feels itself the while the heart is yet soft and pliant, than in closer knit to every other; in their hard war- collision with the sharp adamant of Fate, atfare they are there together, a "little band of tracting us to shipwreck us, when the heart is brethren." Neither are such tears, and the grown hard, and may be broken before it will deep beauty that dwells in them, their only become contrite! Had Burns continued to portion. Light visits the hearts as it does the learn this, as he was already learning it, in his eyes of all living: there is a force, too, in this father's cottage, he would have learned it fully, vouth, that enables him to trample on misfor-which he never did,-and been saved many a tune; nay, to bind it under his feet to make him sport. For a bold, warm, buoyant humour 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 cloudcities around him; the curtain of Existence is slowly rising, in many-coloured splendour 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, 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 free-minded 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 conjurors than these men to exorcise. We do not say that such an inBehind his plough, upon the mountain side! tellect as his could have escaped similar louts, We know, from the best evidence, that up to at some period of his history; or even that he this date, Burns was happy; nay, that he was could, at a later period, have come through the gayest, brightest, most fantastic, fascinating them altogether victorious and unharmed: but being to be found in the world; more so even it seems peculiarly unfortunate that this time, than he ever afterwards appeared. But now, above all others, should have been fixed for the at this early age, he quits the paternal roof; encounter. For now, with principles assailed goes forth into looser, louder, more exciting by evil example from without, by "passions society; and becomes initiated in those dissi-raging like demons" from within, he had little pations, 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 need of skeptical 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 BURNS. peasant, as few corrupted worldlings can even without indicating the smallest willingness to conceive, is destroyed in the eyes of men; and be ranked among those professional ministers his only refuge consists in trying to disbelieve of excitement, who are content to be paid in his guiltiness, and is but a refuge of lies. The money and smiles for doing what the spectators blackest desperation now gathers over him, and auditors would be ashamed of doing in broken only by the red lightnings of remorse. their own persons, even if they had the power The whole fabric of his life is blasted asunder; of doing it; and last, and probably worst of all, for now not only his character, but his per- who was known to be in the habit of enlivensonal liberty, is to be lost; men and Fortune ing societies which they would have scorned are leagued for his hurt; "hungry Ruin has to approach, still more frequently than their him in the wind." He sees no escape but the own, with eloquence no less magnificent; with saddest of all: exile from his loved country, to wit, in all likelihood still more daring; often a country in every sense inhospitable and ab-enough as the superiors whom he fronted horrent to him. While the "gloomy night is without alarm might have guessed from the gathering fast," in mental storm and solitude, beginning, and had, ere long, no occasion to as well as in physical, he sings his wild fare-guess, with wit pointed at themselves."-p. 131. well to Scotland: Farewell, my friends, farewell my foes! Light breaks suddenly in on him in floods; "It needs no effort of imagination," says he, "to conceive what the sensations of an isolated set of scholars (almost all either clergymen or professors) must have been, in the presence of The farther we remove from this scene, the "As for Burns," writes Sir Walter, "I may "Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain, Perhaps that mother wept her soldier slain : this big-boned, black-browed, brawhy 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; "Burns seemed much affected by the print, hardly deigned to flatter them by exhibiting He asked even an occasional symptom of being flattered or rather by the ideas which it suggested to his by their notice; by turns calmly measured mind. He actually shed tears. himself against the most cultivated understand whose the lines were, and it chanced that noings of his time in discussion; overpowered body but myself remembered that they occur the bon mots of the most celebrated convivialists in a half-forgotten poem of Langhorne's, called by broad floods of merriment, impregnated by the unpromising title of "The Justice of with all the burning life of genius; astounded Peace." I whispered my information to a bosoms habitually enveloped in the thrice-piled friend present, he mentioned it to Burns, who folds of social reserve, by compelling them to rewarded me with a look and a word, which, tremble,-nay, to tremble visibly,-beneath the though of mere civility, I then received and fearless touch of natural pathos; and all this still recollect with very great pleasure. |