the mouse whose home he had ruined, in things like Duncan Gray, Tam Glen, Whistle and I'll come to you my Lad, Auld Lang Syne (this list might be made much longer),-here we have the genuine Burns, of whom the real estimate must be high indeed. Not a classic, nor with the excellent σTоvdaιóτns of the great classics, nor with a verse rising to a criticism of life and a virtue like theirs; but a poet with thorough truth of substance and an answering truth of style, giving us a poetry sound to the core. We all of us have a leaning towards the pathetic, and may be inclined perhaps to prize Burns most for his touches of piercing, sometimes almost intolerable, pathos; for verse like

'We twa hae paidl't i' the burn

From mornin' sun till dine;

But seas between us braid hae roar'd
Sin auld lang syne . . .'

where he is as lovely as he is sound. But perhaps it is by the perfection of soundness of his lighter and archer masterpieces that he is poetically most

wholesome for us. For the votary misled by a personal estimate of Shelley, as so many of us

have been, are, and will be, of that beautiful spirit building his many-coloured haze of words and images

'Pinnacled dim in the intense inane '

no contact can be wholesomer than the contact with Burns at his archest and soundest. Side by side with the

'On the brink of the night and the morning
My coursers are wont to respire,

But the Earth has just whispered a warning
That their flight must be swifter than fire . . .'

of Prometheus Unbound, how salutary, how very salutary, to place this from Tam Glen

'My minnie does constantly deave me
And bids me beware o' young men ;
They flatter, she says, to deceive me;

But wha can think sae o' Tam Glen?'

But we enter on burning ground as we approach the poetry of times so near to us-poetry like that of Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth of which the

estimates are so often not only personal, but personal with passion. For my purpose, it is enough to have taken the single case of Burns, the first poet we come to of whose work the estimate formed is evidently apt to be personal, and to have suggested how we may proceed, using the poetry of the great classics as a sort of touchstone, to correct this estimate, as we had previously corrected by the same means the historic estimate where we met with it. A collection like the present, with its succession of celebrated names and celebrated poems, offers a good opportunity to us for resolutely endeavouring to make our estimates of poetry real. I have sought to point out a method which will help us in making them so, and to exhibit it in use so far as to put any one who likes in a way of applying it for himself.

At any rate the end to which the method and the estimate are designed to lead, and from leading to which, if they do lead to it, they get their whole value,―the benefit of being able clearly to feel and deeply to enjoy the best, the truly classic, in

poetry, is an end, let me say it once more at parting, of supreme importance. We are often

told that an era is opening in which we are to see multitudes of a common sort of readers, and masses of a common sort of literature; that such readers do not want and could not relish anything better than such literature, and that to provide it is becoming a vast and profitable industry. Even if good literature entirely lost currency with the world, it would still be abundantly worth while to continue to enjoy it by oneself. But it never will lose currency with the world, in spite of momentary appearances; it never will lose supremacy. Currency and supremacy are insured to it, not indeed by the world's deliberate and conscious choice, but by something far deeper,-by the instinct of selfpreservation in humanity.

II

MILTON 1

THE most eloquent voice of our century uttered, shortly before leaving the world, a warning cry against 'the Anglo-Saxon contagion.' The tendencies and aims, the view of life and the social economy of the ever-multiplying and spreading Anglo-Saxon race, would be found congenial, this prophet feared, by all the prose, all the vulgarity amongst mankind, and would invade and overpower all nations. The true ideal would be lost, a general sterility of mind and heart would set in.

The prophet had in view, no doubt, in the warning thus given, us and our colonies, but the

1 An address delivered in St. Margaret's Church, Westminster, on the 13th of February 1888, at the unveiling of a Memmorial Window presented by Mr. George W. Childs of Philadelphia.