has put it: “He cared little for the lofty dreams of fraternity and social regeneration, but he believed in equality of opportunity, and in revolt whenever the weakness of the oppressor might render it feasible. Both by nature and condition he was an insurgent". Burns' Satires have little importance in a history of Romantic poetry, except in so far as they express trenchantly the attitude of revolt and manifest a profound knowledge of human nature, thus stressing the personal element. The best are "Death and Doctor Hornbrook", the "Address the "Address to the Unco' Guid", and "Holy Willie's Prayer". Burns keenly observed. and clearly uttered his conceptions of, men and manners; often with much humour not only in the Satires but in the main body of his work. Like Crabbe, he does not idealise the life of the poor and the lowly; he does not make an Arcadia of homely scenes, yet he renders them graphically and picturesquely. Burns and Blake stand out as the greatest English Romantic poets of the Eighteenth Century, and the former has exercised a stronger immediate influence than the latter, and a Nineteenth-Century influence approximately equal to that of the poet-painter. Burns exalted the personal element and sang it in its various phases; he made passion not rhetorical and meretricious but lyrical and poignantly genuine he invested all he touched with a fragrant spontaneity and a glowing sincerity: he narrated graphically, and treated Nature vividly. Moreover, he crowned the Scottish verse of his century with an aureole of lyric splendour and caused later pocts of his own country to strive to produce similar great works; but Tannahill, Cunningham, Hogg, Motherwell, and the others have worthily rivalled him only at isolated points. Burn's significance for Scotland has been eloquently established by John Nichol, himself a Scotchman, in the following terms "There is the vehemence of battle, the wail of woe, the march of veterans "red-wat-shod", the smiles of meeting, the tears of parting friends, the gurgle of brown burns, the roar of the wind through pines, the rustle of barley rigs, the thunder on the hill-all Scotland is in his verse. Let who will make her laws, Burns has made the songs, which her emigrants recall "by the long wash of Australasian seas", in which maidens are wooed, by which mothers lull their infants, which return "through open casements unto dying ears"-they are the links, the watchwords, the masonic symbols of the Scots race." The Scottish Poets, then, had an ample continuance in the Romantic movement of the Nineteenth Century, and the author of the Waverley novels, though he wrote in verse little that was so typically Scottish as the poetry of Robert Burns, worthily succeeded to the poet that he so admired. The Eighteenthcentury Scottish poets gradually widened their range of themes and strengthened their technique; and the three outstanding figures were Ramsay, Fergusson, and Burns. Their evolution is clearer than of the Thomson school and as decided as that of the Lyrical Writers. The Scottish poets have, indeed, a greater importance for Eighteenth-century Romanticism than that possessed by the Mournful Group, and a importance, though much less obtrusive than, yet probably equal-during this period-to, that of the Mediaevalists. The very fact that they were Scottish and not English poets makes it difficult adequately to point just what was their influence on Early English Romanticism. CHAPTER 4. THE MOURNFUL GROUP. The Mournful is the smallest and least important group among those making up Eighteenth-century Romantic poetry. Its chief productions cover approximately thirty years-1721 to 1751, and bring in only five poets, two of whom did better work in other than mournful poetry. Yet the influence exereised by Young's "Night Thoughts" and Gray's "Elegy" was considerable in English literature, while these poems, along with Blair's "Grave", powerfully influenced French Romanticism both Young and Blair have always, since their translation into French, been more highly thought of in France than in England, though of course the "Night Thoughts" met with a tremendous success in the land of the author, and that success lasted until the close of the century. The Mournful Group commenced its activities in December 1721, when Pope issued a selection of his friend Parnell's poetry. The outstanding poem was the "Night Piece on Death", which reflected the influence of Milton's "Il Penseroso"; the Miltonic element of melancholy recurred in all the other typical verse of the group. As the Nature school began with and often closely followed Thomson (who was thus more a pioneer than Parnell), so the Mournful Group drew its original inspiration from Milton and had recourse, among its 1742-1751 members, rather to the great epic poet than to Parnell, though the latter certainly meant a good deal to Young, Blair and Thomas Warton. During the years 1742-4 appeared Young's "Night Thoughts"; and in 1743 Blair's "Grave", which probably owed nothing to the longer work. Young's was the most philosophic, as Warton's was the most vivid and Gray's the most artistic of the poems written by this group; Blair's piece, however, was perhaps the most compact. But the most attractive lyrically of the mournful poems were the "Night-Piece on Death", Warton's "Pleasures of Melancholy (it was Akenside's "Picasures of Imagination” thalt started the "Pleasures" nomenclature in English verse), and the "Elegy": the second of these was published in 1747, the third four years later. The "Melancholy" was fresh, delightful, imaginative, while the "Elegy" summed-up and improved-on the previous efforts in this genre and, by its perfect technique and mature thought, made any further similar essays unlikely or, at any rate, probably imitative; the last word had been said, and capping a last word generally brings something feeble or, at best, artificial. Thomas Parnell (1679-October 1718), an M.A. of Dublin, and a friend of Swift and Pope, had his poems selected and published by the latter at the close of 1721. His "Hymn to Contentment" and "My days have been so wondrous free" appeared in 1713 (December) in Steele's "Poetical Miscellanies", as several others figured elsewhere but his best work was for the first time given to the public by Pope. : The song, "My days have been so wondrous free", is significant as having been published a few months after the Countess of Winchelsea's "Miscellany Poems", which may have influenced it. This song, though classical in theme, heralds Romanticism by its setting and its intimate appeal to Nature; it begins : My days have been so wondrous free, The little birds that fly With careless ease from tree to tree, Ask gliding waters, if a tear Of mine increas'd their stream? The tendency to en jambement calls for notice the poem was issued in the days when end-stopped lines were required by convention. On the other hand, we find in the third stanza, which voices a passionate appeal to Nature, the well-worn term, "swains". "Anacreontic when spring came on with fresh delight" shows a curious mixture, for while two-thirds of the poem are wholly classical, the opening stanzas, despite the phrases "war mer suns salute the plain" and "new recruits of genial heat", are Romantic and breathe a genuine love of Nature, as in the verses: 'Twas then, in yonder piny grove, That Nature went to meet with love. Green was her robe, and green her wreath, Raised on a bank where daisies grew, She finds the boy she went to find. "A Fairy Tale, in the ancient English style" announced from afar the mediaevalism that was to occupy so large a place in the English Romantic poetry of the years 1760-1780. Of "The Hermit", the "Hymn to Contentment", and the "Night-Piece on Death", G.A. Aitken was one of the earliest to note that "they illustrate Parnell's familiarity with Milton, but in [the two latter] the elder poet is followed in the form of the verse as well as in turns of thought. The very spirit of "Il Penseroso" has been caught, and the matter is often worthy of the model. In their turn, too, these poems influenced Young and Blair, Goldsmith, Gray, and Collins. There is nothing like them in the writings of Parnell's contemporaries". One accordingly turns to "The Hermit" expecting to find something very significant for Romanticism-and finds almost nothing to begin with, the piece is in heroic couplets; a quiet observation of Nature appears here and there (especially in the second stanza), but that is all. "A Night-Piece on Death", however, definitely fathers the group of poems on lugubrious subjects and constitues an important early contribution to the new movement. Stanza two offers a body of verse utterly at variance with the literary dicta of the Popean school (yet Pope by editing Parnell adds another confirmation to the theory that even he had affinities with Romanticism) and presents a Romantic landscape and a theme of melancholy gloom : How deep yon azure dyes the sky, While through their ranks in silver pride |