and in the sensibility of his heart; and these will be found to infuse the living principle into all the works of genius which seem destined to immortality. His sensibility had an uncommon range. He was alive to every species of emotion. He is one of the few poets that can be men-, tioned who have at once excelled in humour, in tenderness, and in sublimity; a praise unknown to the ancients, and which, in modern times, is only due to Ariosto, to Shakespeare, and perhaps to Voltaire. To compare the writings of the Scottish peasant with the works of these giants in literature might appear presumptuous; yet it may be asserted that he has displayed the foot of Hercules. How near he might have approached them by proper culture, with lengthened years, and under happier auspices, it is not for us to calculate. But while we run over the melancholy story of his life it is impossible not to heave a sigh at the asperity of his fortune; and as we survey the records of his mind it is easy to see that out of such materials have been reared the fairest and most durable of the monuments of genius.

By DAVID IRVING, LL.D.

1804.

BURNS was possessed of a versatility and strength of genius which might have conducted him to eminence in any department of science or literature. His senses were acute; his affections warm and generous; his imagination was vivid and excursive; his judgment prompt and penetrating. His poetry is the effusion of a vigorous and susceptible mind powerfully affected by the objects of its. contemplation. The external beauties of nature, the pleasures and disappointments of love, the characteristics of the peasant's fate, the ridiculous features of hypocrisy and superstition, furnish the principal subjects on which he has exercised his bold and original talents. Most of the occasions which awakened his poetical powers were not fictitious but real; and his sentiments and language are generally those of a man who obeys the strong impulses of unsophisticated feeling. Although he laboured under the disadvantages of a very imperfect education, yet some circumstances of his very early life were not altogether unfavourable to the nurture of a poetical genius. The peculiarity of his fate tended to impress every sentiment more deeply on his mind, and to familiarise him with the habits of profound meditation. The lessons which his father taught him were those of piety, virtue, and independence; lessons which are scarcely of less importance to the poet than to the man. His early years were, indeed, consumed in depressing toil; but even while the young peasant followed the plough, his intellectual eye was fixed on immortality.

Many of his poems were composed during the hours when he was actually engaged in manual labour: his native energy was unsubdued by illiberal toil, by perpetual mortification, and by his total seclusion from that intercourse which is most calculated to fan the sparks of generous emulation. "This kind of life," says Burns, "the cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing moil of a galley-slave, brought me to my sixteenth year; a little before which period I first committed the sin of rhyme." Love, he informs us, was the original source of his poetry: "I never had the least thought or inclination of turning poet till I got once heartily in love; and then rhyme and song were in a manner the spontaneous language of my heart."

His principal models of composition were Ramsay and Fergusson. In his letter to Dr. Moore he remarks that he had nearly abandoned poetry, when in his twentythird year, having become acquainted with the works of Fergusson, he "strung anew his wildly-sounding lyre with emulating vigour." Of classical learning he was totally destitute; and it is not apparent that he was much indebted to his knowledge of the French language. With the best English writers he was, however, sufficiently conversant: he read them with avidity, and for the most part with wonderful discernment. Nor was he altogether unacquainted with science: he had at least studied Euclid, Locke, and Smith; he read and understood Mr. Alison's Essays on the Principles of Taste.

The most beautiful of his poems are professedly written in the Scottish dialect: but in general they are not deeply tinctured with provincial idioms; many of the stanzas are almost purely English. His verses, though not very polished or melodious, are commonly distinguished by an air of originality which atones for every deficiency. His rhymes are often imperfect, and his expression indelicate; he passes from ease to negligence and from simplicity to coarseness. But these peculiarities we may ascribe to his early habits of association.

The poems of Burns, though most remarkable for the

quality of humour, exhibit various proofs of his imagination, and the soundness of his understanding enabled him to attain a variety of excellence which can only be traced in the production of original genius. Some of his subjects are sufficiently mean; but he never fails to illumine them with brilliant flashes of intellect. His flights, however, are sudden and irregular; the strong impulses of his mind were not sufficiently chastened and directed by the wholesome discipline of the schools. His compositions, however, beautiful in detached parts, are very often defective in their general plan.

The most exquisite of his serious poems is The Cotter's Saturday Night. The character and incidents which the poet here describes in so interesting a manner are such as his father's cottage presented to his observation; they are such as may everywhere be found among the virtuous and intelligent peasantry of Scotland. "I recollect once he told me," says Professor Stewart, "when I was admiring a distant prospect in one of our morning walks, that the sight of so many smoking cottages gave a pleasure to his mind, which none could understand who had not witnessed, like himself, the happiness and the worth which they contained." With such impressions as these upon his mind, he has succeeded in delineating a charming picture of rural innocence and felicity. The incidents are well selected, the character skilfully distinguished, and the whole composition is remarkable for the propriety and sensibility which it displays. To transcribe every beautiful passage which the poem contains would be to transcribe almost every stanza; the following may be selected on account of its moral as well as its poetical effect:

But hark! a rap comes gently to the door.
Jenny, wha kens the meaning o' the same,
Tells how a neebor lad cam' o'er the moor,
To do some errands, and convoy her hame.
The wily mother sees the conscious flame

Sparkle in Jenny's e'e, and flush her cheek;
Wi' heart-struck, anxious care, inquires his name,
While Jenny hafflins is afraid to speak;

Weel pleas'd the mother hears it's nae wild, worthless rake.

Wi' kindly welcome, Jenny brings him ben;
A strappin' youth; he takes the mother's eye;
Blythe Jenny sees the visit's no ill ta'en;

The father cracks of horses, pleughs, and kye.
The youngster's artless heart o'erflows wi' joy,

But blate and laithfu', scarce can weel behave;
The mother, wi' a woman's wiles, can spy

What makes the youth sae bashfu' an' sae grave;
Weel-pleased to think her bairn's respected like the lave.

O happy love! where love like this is found!
O heart-felt raptures! bliss beyond compare!
I've paced much this weary, mortal round,

And sage experience bids me this declare-
If Heaven a draught of heavenly pleasure spare,
One cordial in this melancholy vale,

'Tis when a youthful, loving, modest pair,

In other's arms breathe out the tender tale,
Beneath the milk-white thorn that scents the ev'ning gale.

Is there, in human form, that bears a heart-
A wretch! a villain! lost to love and truth!
That can, with studied, sly, ensnaring art,
Betray sweet Jenny's unsuspecting youth?
Curse on his perjur'd arts! dissembling smooth!
Are honour, virtue, conscience, all exil'd?

Is there no pity, no relenting ruth,

Points to the parents fondling o'er their child?
Then paints the ruin'd maid, and their distraction wild!

The stanzas To a Mountain Daisy on turning one down with the plough have always been acknowledged as beautiful and interesting. His address To a Mouse, on turning her up in her nest with the plough, evinces the fertility of his genius and the unbounded benevolence of his heart. These two poems derive additional interest from the attitude in which the writer is himself presented to our view; we behold him engaged in the labour of the field, and moving in his humble sphere with all the dignity of honest independence and conscious genius. The exordium of his very poetical production entitled The Vision is also rendered interesting by the same circumstances; it exhibits Burns in the retirement of his homely cottage: