and John Logan, the eloquent minister of Leith. It was in such a literature of song, preceding and surrounding him, that Burns was reared and grew insensibly from a partaker in its treasures into a mastery of it as his own inherited possession. Burns, acting naturally and daringly on the accepted processes of former Scottish poetry, took his own wherever he found it with a confidence and a justification unparalleled save in the not altogether dissimilar case of Shakespeare's own lyrics. This is particularly true of the relations of Burns to Robert Fergusson, the precocious and unhappy young Edinburgh poet who died in a mad-house in 1774, when only twenty-four years of age. Burns erected a monument to the memory of Fergusson, and never ceased to admire him and to acknowledge his poetical indebtedness to him. Burns thus becomes in Scotland the crown of a long series of influences and the artistic form-giver of many an old song which his genius in transformation has made his own. For this reason the poet is constantly less successful when literary influences rather than those of tradition move him, or those dependent on his exquisite sensibilities or his own admirable powers of observation.

To return to the life of the poet, it has been in fashion not so long since to expatiate on Burns the country roué and carousing exciseman; and a fellow poet, alas, has made it his business to make the most of these delinquencies.1 Were the discussion of these matters needful, much might be said on the character of the age of Burns 1 See Henley, Burns, Life, Genius, Achievement, 1898.

somewhat to mitigate the inevitable harshness of any verdict against him, and more were we willing to ply our own contemporary vagary that seeks to justify the destruction sometimes wrought in the path of genius by the theory of "the overman." But why should we pass on aberrations of conduct which Burns shared with hundreds of his weak fellow-mortals who were not possessed of a tithe of his genius? The experiences of Burns with the lasses of Ayrshire indubitably heightened the glow of passion in many a fine lyric; and it was the good cheer that he loved that cost the poet his life. As a matter of fact, neither the conduct of Burns (which was often far from admirable), nor his politics, nor his other opinions need in any serious wise concern us. It is the poet, here, of the many sides of that poet, his compelling power over words and phrases, his minute and vivid sense of reality in detail, his mastery of the weapons of scorn and indignation, it is specifically the lyrist that interests us and holds our admiring attention. And as a lyrist Burns is supreme. Poignancy and sincerity of passion, music swift and infinitely varied, the rule of a sure artistic taste, and that unerring certainty of touch in which we recognize how inferior is the thought of the wisest man, if he be not a poet, to the instant flash of the poet's intuitionall these things in their perfection are qualities of the lyrical poetry of Burns. And he was as happy in the possession of them all as he was fortunate in having, by virtue of his birth, a medium for the expression of his poetry, unhackneyed by the daily barter of literary

usage, and a mastery over verse and stanza that constantly wrought new wonders out of material trite and old. Burns reached a clarity and simplicity of diction in the lyric unmatched by any one before his time save Shakespeare; and he also attained to that choicest gift of the greatest poets, the power to give to elemental and universal ideas a form of crystalline and lasting beauty.

From our point of view of the lyric, none of the lesser poets of the last of the century need hold us, whatever his individual claim on the high seas of general poetry. The inspiration of Burns begot a lesser inspiration in several lesser poets: Joanna Baillie, with her Fugitive Verses, 1790, more memorable for her few songs than for her portentous Plays of the Passions; and Lady Nairne, although her poetry, with that of Hogg and Tannahill, comes rather later, with the influences of the romantic outburst likewise upon them. Erasmus Darwin, with his Botanic Garden, last and most preposterously logical of the followers of Pope; William Hayley, puzzled friend and benefactor of Blake, as wretched a poet as he appears to have been an estimable man; Samuel Rogers, who aimed in his Pleasures of Memory, as in his later pleasing versified guide book, Italy, no higher than prose and reached no higher: in none of these is there the slightest suspicion of the lyric. And still less could we expect to find song in the Rolliads, the Baviads, and Mæviads, in which, as in the earlier Diaboliads, contemporary small satirists in forgotten diatribes chid lesser men than themselves. Hannah More, "the most powerful versificatrix in the

language" as Dr. Johnson called her, yields little that is lyrical; and the verses of Mrs. Mary Robinson, the Prince of Wales's "Perdita," who styled herself "the English Sappho," yield, of their kind, too much. Another poetess, Anna Lætitia Barbauld, in a long life of literary diligence, reached deserved repute for a single beautiful poem, beginning, "Life! we've been long together"; though that, too, came later. With Blake, Chatterton, and Burns in mind, and likewise with the respectable unlyrical people noticed above, it might almost be said that the lyric by 1795 had fallen into the hands of women and children, ploughmen and mad folk. But the day was at hand, and the lyric was shortly to come to its own. In this very year, 1795, Walter Savage Landor issued the first of his volumes of poetry; in the next, Coleridge appeared for the first time as an author in company with Charles Lamb; while 1798 is the ever memorable year of the publication by Wordsworth and Coleridge of Lyrical Ballads. But all of this belongs to the next chapter.

CHAPTER VI

THE LYRIC AND THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL

HERE are words that are like palm-worn coins; we believe them to be precious metal, but we know neither their sometime weight nor to what sovereigns they once owed allegiance: they have become mere counters. Such a word is "romanticism," with some half dozen like, classical, psychological, renaissance movement, and they deserve no less than banishment from our lips and from our books, could we know how to get on without them. As to romanticism, which is our concern, to attempt a new definition here would be mere pedantry; to assume that the term is likely to mean sufficiently nearly the same thing to any two minds to make exact a joint conclusion, would be an assumption hazardous at the least. And yet obviously there is a difference between the trim and definite urban world of Pope, between nature as excellently described by Thomson, or man set nakedly forth by Crabbe and the transfigured world of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley; and somewhere within the broad and undefined superficies that marks the difference, the element in literature, as in art, called romanticism, finds its place. A well-known critic has called this change the renaissance of wonder," and indubitably wonder at

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