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Burns liked a glass almost as well as a lass, and at Mauchline, where he carried on a farm with his brother Gilbert, after their father's death, he began to seek a questionable relief from the pressure of daily toil and unkind fates, in the convivialities of the tavern. There, among the wits of the Mauchline Club, farmers' sons, shepherds from the uplands, and the smugglers who swarmed over the west coast, he would discuss politics and farming, recite his verses, and join in the singing and ranting, while

Bousin o'er the nappy

And gettin' fou and unco happy.

To these experiences we owe not only those excellent drinking songs, John Barleycorn and Willie Brewed a Peck o' Maut, but the headlong fun of Tam O'Shanter, the visions, grotesquely terrible, of Death and Dr. Hornbook, and the dramatic humor of the Jolly Beggars. Cowper had celebrated "the cup which cheers but not inebriates." Burns sang the praises of Scotch Drink. Cowper was a stranger to Burns's high animal spirits, and his robust enjoyment of life. He had affections, but no passions. At Mauchline, Burns, whose irregularities did not escape the censure of the kirk, became involved, through his friendship with Gavin Hamilton, in the controversy between the Old Light and New Light clergy. His Holy Fair, Holy Tulzie, Twa Herds, Holy Willie's Prayer, and Address to the Unco Gude, are satires against bigotry and hypocrisy. But in spite of the rollicking profanity of his language, and the violence of his rebound against the austere religion of Scotland, Burns was at bottom deeply impressible by religious ideas, as may be seen from his Prayer under the Pressure of Violent Anguish, and Prayer in Prospect of Death.

His farm turned out a failure, and he was on the eve of sailing for Jamaica, when the favor with which his volume of poems was received stayed his departure, and turned his steps to Edinburgh. There the peasant poet was lionized

for a winter season by the learned and polite society of the Scotch capital, with results in the end not altogether favorable to Burns's best interests. For when society finally turned the cold shoulder on him he had to go back to farming again, carrying with him a bitter sense of injustice and neglect. He leased a farm at Ellisland, in 1788, and some friends procured his appointment as exciseman for his district. But poverty, disappointment, irregular habits, and broken health clouded his last years, and brought him to an untimely death at the age of thirty-seven. He continued, however, to pour forth songs of unequaled sweetness and force. "The man sank," said Coleridge, "but the poet was bright to the last." Burns is the best of British song-writers. His songs are singable; they are not merely lyrical poems. They were meant to be sung, and they are sung. They were mostly set to old Scottish airs, and sometimes they were built up from ancient fragments of anonymous popular poetry, a chorus, or stanza, or even a single line. Such are, for example, Auld Lang Syne, My Heart's in the Highlands, and Landlady, Count the Lawin. Burns had a great, warm heart. His sins were sins of passion, and sprang from the same generous soil that nourished his impulsive virtues. His elementary qualities as a poet were sincerity, a healthy openness to all impressions of the beautiful, and a sympathy which embraced men, animals, and the dumb objects of nature. His tenderness toward flowers and the brute creation may be read in his lines To a Mountain Daisy, To a Mouse, and The Auld Farmer's New Year's Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare Maggie. Next after love and good fellowship, patriotism is the most frequent motive of his song. Of his national anthem, Scots wha hae wi Wallace bled, Carlyle said: "So long as there is warm blood in the heart of Scotchman, or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war ode."

Burns's politics were a singular mixture of sentimental

Toryism with practical democracy. A romantic glamour was thrown over the fortunes of the exiled Stuarts, and to have been "out" in '45 with the Young Pretender was a popular thing in parts of Scotland. To this purely poetic loyalty may be attributed such Jacobite ballads of Burns as Over the Water to Charlie. But his sober convictions were on the side of liberty and human brotherhood, and are expressed in The Twa Dogs, the First Epistle to Davie, and A Man's a Man for a' that. His sympathy with the Revolution led him to send four pieces of ordnance, taken from a captured smuggler, as a present to the French Convention, a piece of bravado which got him into difficulties with his superiors in the excise. The poetry which Burns wrote, not in dialect, but in the classical English, is in the stilted manner of his century, and his prose correspondence betrays his lack of culture by its constant lapse into rhetorical affectation and fine writing.

1. James Thomson. The Castle of Indolence.

2. The Poems of Thomas Gray.

3. William Collins. Odes.

4. The Six Chief Lives from Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Edited by Matthew Arnold. Macmillan, 1878.

5. Boswell's Life of Johnson [abridged]. Henry Holt & Co., 1878.

6. Samuel Richardson.

Clarissa Harlowe.

7. Henry Fielding. Tom Jones.

8. Tobias Smollett.

9. Lawrence Sterne.

Humphrey Clinker.

Tristram Shandy.

10. Oliver Goldsmith. Vicar of Wakefield and Deserted Village.

11. William Cowper. The Task and John Gilpin. (Globe Edition.) London: Macmillan & Co., 1879.

12. The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns. (Globe Edition.) London: Macmillan & Co., 1884.

CHAPTER VII.

FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH OF SCOTT.

1789-1832.

THE burst of creative activity at the opening of the 19th century has but one parallel in English literary history, namely, the somewhat similar flowering out of the national genius in the time of Elizabeth and the first two Stuart kings. The later age gave birth to no supreme poets, like Shakspere and Milton. It produced no Hamlet and no Paradise Lost; but it offers a greater number of important writers, a higher average of excellence, and a wider range and variety of literary work than any preceding era. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats are all great names; while Southey, Landor, Moore, Lamb, and De Quincey would be noteworthy figures at any period, and deserve a fuller mention than can be here accorded them. But in so crowded a generation, selection becomes increasingly needful, and in the present chapter, accordingly, the emphasis will be laid upon the first-named group as not only the most important, but the most representative of the various tendencies of their time.

The conditions of literary work in this century have been almost unduly stimulating. The rapid advance in population, wealth, education, and the means of communication has vastly increased the number of readers. Every one who has any thing to say can say it in print, and is sure of some sort of a hearing. A special feature of the time is the multiplication of periodicals. The great London dailies, like the Times and the Morning Post, which were started during the

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