Burns in Edinburgh. 291 to Edinburgh and issue a second edition of his poems. To Edinburgh accordingly he went, and the admiration of his powers, which had been excited in the breasts of many there by the perusal of his poems, suffered no abatement when their author appeared on the scene. He comported himself like a man conscious of his own talents; in no way overawed by the crowd of scholars and professors with whom he was brought into contact. "He manifested," as Lockhart says, "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; hardly deigned to flatter them by exhibiting even an occasional symptom of being flattered by their notice; by turns calmly measured himself against the most cultivated understandings of his time in discussion, overpowered the bon-mots of the most celebrated convivialists by broad floods of merriment, impregnated with all the burning life of genius; astounded bosoms habitually enveloped in the thrice-piled folds of social reserve by compelling them to tremble-nay, to tremble visibly -beneath the fearless touch of natural pathos." Subscriptions to the second edition of the poems poured in liberally, and by its publication in 1787 the poet realised a sum which to him must have appeared an almost inexhaustible treasury of wealth. Out of the money thus earned, Burns generously advanced £200 to help his brother Gilbert, then struggling to maintain himself and other members of the family at Mossgiel. With the remainder he stocked a farm for himself at Ellisland, about six miles from Dumfries; and being now in a more prosperous worldly condition, was able, in 1788, to marry his old sweetheart, Jean Armour. Soon after he obtained, through the kindness of a friend, a position in the Excise, with a salary of £50 a year at first, but afterwards increased to £70. The duties of his office led him into many temptations to indulge in those convivial pleasures to which by nature he was only too prone to yield. He neglected his farm, and in 1792 was obliged to give it up altogether and remove to Dumfries. His hopes of promotion in the Excise were blasted by his habit of freely speaking his mind regarding dignities, and by his ardent sympathy with the French Revolution and advanced liberal opinions generally; for, like most of his class then and now, Burns was a thorough Radical in politics. His last important work in literature was a hundred songs, which he contributed gratuitously to his friend Thompson's "Melodies of Scotland," published in 1792. The closing years of Burns's life were clouded with sorrow and suffering, partly the results of his own misconduct, partly of causes over which he had no control. His brief and troubled career came to a close in 1796. Burns may be best contemplated under two aspects. First, there is Robert Burns the Scotch ploughman, with the faults and the virtues belonging to his class; honest, manly, vigorous, but lacking in self-restraint; an easy prey to his passions; not altogether superior to that sort of cant which consists in endeavouring to compensate for one's most serious and oftenrepeated errors by loud declarations of the goodness of one's heart however faulty one's life may be; and fond to excess of every kind of rough fun, practical jokes, and conviviality. Next, there is Robert Burns the poet, with a heart full of love and reverence for all created beings; tender towards the "ourie cattle" and the "silly sheep; " so full of charity that he can breathe an expression of hope even for "Auld Nickie Ben" himself; so full of sympathy with all sides of human nature, that he is equally at home in depicting the decent "Cottar's Saturday Night" and the wild revelry of the vagabond "Jolly Beggars;" skilled alike to cause his readers to laugh and to weep-now producing merriment, not unmingled with a sort of astonishment and awe, by the strange adventure of "Tam o'Shanter," now irresistibly touching our more tender feelings by the simple and affecting pathos of such verses as those "To Mary in Heaven." Not that Burns kept his poems altogether pure from the defilements with which, from his character as a man and from his position in society, we should expect to find them occasionally stained; with sorrow it must be said he did not always refrain from touching with the orient gold of his genius the bestial side of man. But when all the circumstances of his birth and career are considered, he would be a foolish and purblind critic who should condemn Burns too severely for his occasional transgressions against decorum and good taste. His work is fragmentary—as a rule, mere snatches of song thrown off at idle moments when the impulse seized him; but how full of variety it is, how rich is the evidence it affords of great intellectual resource and versatility! Many other poets have excelled Burns in depicting particular emotions, but how few there are who like him have attained equal mastery in the expression of various states of feeling! Whether writing songs of love or lyrics of war, whether serious or humorous, he is equally at home, and uniformly displays that almost infallible mark of a good poet, the power of so choosing the rhythm and words of his verse. as to be an echo to the sense. He never attempted a large continuous work, and we can form but little conception how he would have succeeded in the enterprise if he had attempted it. The probability is that he did wisely in confining himself to lyrics and occasional pieces. Taking quantity and quality. both into account, he may be unhesitatingly pronounced the greatest song-writer in the language. A less important figure in the history of poetry than Cowper or Burns, yet neither an unimportant nor an insignificant one, is George Crabbe, "Nature's sternest painter, yet the best," as Byron with considerable truth described him. During his long life, extending from 1754 to 1832, he witnessed many fluctuations of literary taste, and was acquainted with great writers belonging to two widely different eras. Befriended in his youth by Burke and Lord Chancellor Thurlow, he lived to win the applause of Jeffrey, and Christopher North, and Sir Walter Scott; and he whose early works had the honour of being read, and admired, and corrected by Johnson and Fox, found his fame so far undimmed, even amidst the bright constellation of poetic stars which shone in the beginning of the present century, as to receive in 1819 the sum of £3000 for his "Tales of the Hall" and the copyright of his other poems. Crabbe's chief works besides the "Tales of the Hall" are the "Village" (1783), the "Parish Register" (1807), the "Borough " (1810), and "Tales in Verse" (1812). Of a matter-of-fact imagination, with a passion for details, closely adhering to facts, and never throwing any poetical glamour over his tales and descriptions of vice, and poverty, and misery, Crabbe in his main features is thoroughly original. He "handles life so as to take the bloom off it," describing with a hard, resolute pen, idealising nothing; but, on the contrary, often omitting all that casts a veil over meanness and deformity." It is this firm adherence to relentless truth that constitutes at once his weakness and his strength. He never shuts his eyes to plain facts; and although in his youth he had had bitter experience of poverty, and might therefore have been more disposed to sympathise with poor people than with the wealthier classes, he perceived quite clearly that vice, and meanness, and evil passions might have their abode as well in the breast of Hodge the labourer, toiling hard to earn a scanty pittance, as in the breast of Squire Hazeldean, brought up in the lap of wealth and luxury. But his range of vision was narrow; he had little sympathy with the idyllic aspects of life; he lacked humour and genial sympathy; and in his pathos often by too forcible expression overstepped the limits of literary art. The main characteristics of his writings are well indicated by Mr. W. C. Roscoe. "The common feature throughout all his works which gives this author his hold upon his readers is his singular insight into the minute working of character, his wondrous familiarity with so vast a number of various dispositions, and the unerring fidelity with which he traces their operations and discerns their attitudes under every sort of circumstance. It would be difficult in the whole range of literature to point to more than two or three who have rivalled him in this respect. Chaucer is one; and a curious and not uninteresting comparison might be instituted between the two, though the old poet far surpasses the modern one in love of beauty, liveliness of fancy, and breadth of genius. . . . One 1 "Poems and Essays," vol. ii. p. 220. William Wordsworth.. 295 great source of his strength is, that he dared to be true to himself, and to work with unhesitating confidence in his own peculiar vein. This originality is not only great, but always genuine. A never-failing charm lies in the clear simplicity and truthfulness of nature which shines through all his writings. Nothing false or meretricious ever came from his pen ; and if his works want order and beauty, neither they nor his life are destitute of the higher harmony which springs from a character naturally single and undeteriorated by false aims and broken purposes." Modern as Cowper, Burns, and Crabbe are in their poetic tendencies, they do not affect us in the same way as the poets who occupy the rest of this chapter. It cannot be said of them, as of Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, and the others, that they are still active factors in our literature, influencing profoundly the poets of the age we live in. We may begin our survey with the group called the Lake School, of which the most prominent members were Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. The nickname "Lake School," given them because Wordsworth and Southey most of their lives, and Coleridge for a time, lived in the Lake district, is not an appropriate one, for Wordsworth's best poems are different in character from Coleridge's, and Southey, either as regards genius or in mode of literary treatment, cannot be ranked with the two others. But they were intimate friends, endeared by family relationships and by mutual sympathy and admiration, and it is therefore convenient in many respects to treat of them together. Of this group, the first, both in point of time and in point of genius, was William Wordsworth. He was born at Cockermouth in 1770, the son of an attorney who superintended part of the Lowther estate in Cumberland. Exposed from his youth to the influence of sublime and ennobling scenery, Wordsworth spent a happy childhood, not manifesting any extraordinary precocity of genius, but even from his earliest years imbued with that deep love of Nature which was afterwards to bear such magnificent fruit. In 1783 his father died, leaving £5000 in the hands of Sir James |