gether a few verses and half-verses gathered from several of them : I hae sworn by the heavens to my Mary, O plight me your faith, my Mary, We hae plighted our troth, my Mary, And cursed be the cause that shall part us! 1 Such. Here's a health to ane I lo'e dear, Here's a health to ane I lo'e dear; Thou art sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet, Although thou maun 2 never be mine, Although even hope is denied, 'Tis sweeter for thee despairing Than aught in the world beside, Jessy! Ae fond kiss, and then we sever; Had we never loved sae kindly, Had we never loved sae blindly, Never met, or never parted, We had ne'er been broken-hearted. 2 Must. 3 One. Fare thee weel, thou first and fairest ! Ae fond kiss, and then we sever; In all, indeed, that he has written best, Burns may be said to have given us himself,-the passion or sentiment which swayed or possessed him at the moment,-almost as much as in his songs. In him the poet was the same as the man. He could describe with admirable fidelity and force incidents, scenes, manners, characters, or whatever else, which had fallen within his experience or observation; but he had little proper dramatic imagination, or power of going out of himself into other natures, and, as it were, losing his personality in the creations of his fancy. His blood was too hot, his pulse beat too tumultuously, for that; at least he was during his short life too much the sport both of his own passions and of many other stormy influences to acquire such power of intellectual self-command and self-suppression. What he might have attained to if a longer earthly existence had been granted to him-or a less tempestuous one— who shall say? Both when his genius first blazed out upon the world, and when its light was quenched by death, it seemed as if he had been born or designed to do much more than he had done. Having written what he wrote before his twenty-seventh year, he had doubtless much more additional poetry in him than he gave forth between that date and his death at the age of thirty-seven-poetry which might now have been the world's for ever if that age had been worthy of such a gift of heaven as its glorious poet-if it had not treated him rather like an untameable howling hyena, that required to be caged and chained, if not absolutely suffocated at once, than as a spirit of divinest song. Never surely did men so put a bushel upon the light, first to hide and at last to extinguish it. As it is, however, the influence of the poetry of Burns upon the popular mind of Scotland must have been immense. And we believe it has been all for good-enlarging, elevating, and refining the national heart, as well as awakening it. The tendency of some things, both in the character of the people and in their peculiar institutions, required such a check or counteraction as was supplied by this frank, generous, reckless poetry, springing so singularly out of the ironbound Calvinistic Presbyterianism of the country, like the flowing water from the rock in Horeb. What would not such a poet as Burns be worth to the people of the United States of America, if he were to arise among them at this moment? It would be as good as another Declaration of Independence. Nay, what would not such a popular poetry as his be worth in any country to any people? There is no people whom it would not help to sustain in whatever nobleness of character belonged to them, if it did not more ennoble them. For, whatever there may be to be disapproved of in the licence or indecorum of some things that Burns has written, there is at least nothing meansouled in his poetry, any more than there was in the man. It is never for a moment even vulgar or low in expression or manner: it is wonderful how a native delicacy of taste and elevation of spirit in the poet have sustained him here, with a dialect so soiled by illiterate lips, and often the most perilous subject. Burns, the peasant, is perhaps the only modern writer of Scotch (not excepting even Sir Walter Scott) who has written it uniformly like a gentleman. Not that his language is not sometimes strong or bold enough, and even, on two or three occasions coarse; but these momentary outbreaks of a wild levity have never anything in them that can be called base or creeping. On the other hand, some of the most tremulously passionate of his pieces are models of refinement of style. And such as is the poetry of Burns was his life. Even his faults of character and errors of conduct were those of a high nature; and on the whole were more really estimable, as well as more loveable, than the virtues of most other people. Misled he often was, as he has himself said in one of the pieces we have transcribed above "Misled by fancy's meteor-ray, But yet the light that led astray REMAINING LITERATURE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. The remaining literature of the closing portion of the eighteenth century may be very summarily dismissed. This was an age of popular song in England, as well as in Scotland: while Burns was in the last years of his life enriching Thomson's Collection of Original Scottish Airs, and Johnson's Musical Museum with words for the old melodies of his country that have become a part of the being of every Scotsman, Charles Dibdin, like another Tyrtaeus, was putting new patriotism into every English heart by his inspiriting strains-some of the best of which Tyrtaeus never matched. Dibdin, who, besides his songs, wrote many pieces for the stage, survived till 1814, when he died about the age of seventy. In prose literature, although there was book-making enough, not much that has proved enduring was done in England during the last decade and a half of the eighteenth century, at least if we except a few works produced by one or two of the great writers of the preceding time who have been already noticed-such, for instance, as the three last volumes of Gibbon's History, published in 1788, and Burke's Reflections and other writings, chiefly on the subject of the French Revolution, which appeared between 1790 and his death in 1797. We may also mention here the publication in 1798, in five volumes 4to., of the first collected edition of the Works of Horace Walpole, comprising, along with other novelties, a volume of his always lively and entertaining and often brilliant Letters, the portion of his writings upon which his fame is probably destined chiefly to rest. His Memoirs of the Last Ten Years of the Reign of George II., in two quarto volumes, were not given to the world till 1822; and their continuation, his Memoirs of the Reign of George III., only appeared in 1844-5. In the Drama, with activity enough among a crowd of writers, very little was produced in this period that retains its place in our literature. Mrs. Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Thomas Morton, John O'Keefe, Charles Dibdin, and George Colman the Younger (already mentioned), Francis Reynolds, and Joseph George Holman were the principal writers who supplied the theatres with new pieces; and Holcroft's Road to Ruin (1792), |