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 In Defense of Robert Burns
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 IN DEFENCE OF 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE BLACK 
 
 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 W. DYMOCK, 
 BOOK ARCADE. 
 
 1901, 
 
 428 GEORGE ST., 
 SYDNEY.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 From Skirving'S Portrait.
 
 IN 
 
 DEFENCE OF ROBERT 
 BURNS. 
 
 THE CHARGE OF PLAGIARISM 
 CONFUTED. 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE BLACK. 
 
 I had a wish — I mind its power, 
 A wish that to my latest hour 
 Shall sti-ougly heave my breist— 
 
 That I, for puir auld Scotia's sake, 
 
 Some useful plan or buke could make. 
 Or sing a song- at least. 
 
 From rough burr-thistle, spreading wide 
 Among the bearded bear, 
 
 I turned the weeder-clips aside, 
 An' spared the symbol dear. 
 
 — Burns. 
 
 W. DYMOCK, 
 Book Arcade, 
 Geoege Street, 
 Stpnet, 
 
 1901.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 
 n^HE contents of this pamphlet appeared in the Bulletin on 
 5th and 19th February, 1898, in reply to two articles 
 purporting to be reviews of Henley & Henderson's edition 
 of Burns' works, which had appeared in that journal on 23rd 
 October and 4th December, 1897. The Bulletin's replies to 
 my trenchant criticism were not in my opinion, nor in that 
 of any others qualified to decide, so far as I can learn, equal 
 to the occasion. One, dated March 12th, amounted to this: 
 It is true that we have maligned Burns but then he is dead 
 and reply from him is impossible. But the living ought to 
 be complimentary to one another, especially where literary 
 matters are concerned. If that be impossible, let us talk 
 about the weather and the I^eauty of moonlight among the 
 peaks and gorges of the Blue Mountains. 
 
 This volume only contains as much of the original 
 articles as is now necessary for my purpose, and these have 
 been extended and amplified in several directions. 
 
 With those who say the works of Burns are his best de- 
 fence, [ am in perfect agreement. At the sjime time, one 
 may be pardoned for defending the mighty monument he 
 has raised, to the lasting perpetuation of his own memory 
 and the literature of his country, from the defilements of the 
 nought-respecting pariah dogs of journalism. 
 
 GEORGE BLACK, 
 
 Sydney, 1901. 
 
 .1038929
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 Frontispiece — Eobert Burns, from Skirving's Portrait . 
 
 Chapter I. — On Plagiarism and some Plagiarists . , 5 
 
 Chapter II. — The Conveyings of Shakespeare . . 16 
 
 Chapter III. — Some Bulletin Blunders . . . .25 
 
 Chapter IV. — Burns Compared with His Alleged 
 
 Sources of Inspiration 37 
 
 Chapter V. — The Hodman on the Wall . . .67 
 
 Chapter VI. — The Dead Speak 73 
 
 Chapter VII.— What Say the Living !' . . .82
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 On Plagiarism and some Plagiarists. 
 
 Burns, a Scotch peasant, "with a soul like an 
 feolian harp, in whose strings the vulgar wind as it 
 passed through^ changed itself into articulate melody," 
 may with justice, as a singer, be said to need no 
 defence. Nor does he — from those who know him. 
 With most Australians, however, he is little more 
 than a tradition, while the Bulletin is a living force 
 whose most reckless assertions are usually accepted 
 as gospel truths. It was necessary, therefore, that 
 the sludge should be removed which was locally de- 
 posited on his name and fame by the overflow of 
 that journal. No one intervening, I felt impelled to 
 see what personally could be done. Loath to engage 
 in controversy, it could not longer be evaded. 
 
 ;;: :i: * * 
 
 Condensed, the Bulletin's arguments were these: 
 (1) That Burns, for his own uses, stole the ideas, 
 and even words, of preceding writers ; (2) That his 
 countrymen, or the bulk of them, are wholly unaware 
 of this alleged fact. Quotation will prove the verity 
 
 B
 
 6 ON PLAGIARISM AND SOME PLAGIARISTS. 
 
 of this synopsis. They said : ' Nearly all that is best 
 in the songs of Burns never belonged to Burns at all. 
 . . . Burns, the songster, was an inspired vam- 
 per, mender, tinker, and little more.' The idea pre- 
 sented in the second statement permeated both 
 Bulletin articles, and is most forcibly stated in the 
 following sentence : ' The average Scotchman does 
 not know how good or how bad Burns' verses are, 
 and he does not know how much Burns plagiarised.' 
 All this in conjunction with much vulgar railing at 
 Scotchmen in the aggregate — their lofty notions of 
 Burns, their meanness, their lack of humour, their 
 love of whisky, and so on. 
 
 For the charge that Burns' countrymen were 
 and are misled as to his sources of inspiration — the 
 Scots of his day could not be so misguided. The 
 songs, 184 in number, which he collected, and made 
 printable for Johnson's Musical Museum (of which 
 he was practically the editor), and those, in number 
 90, which he similarly furnished to Thomson's Col- 
 lection of Original Scottish Airs, were in common 
 use at the time. He distinguished between his own 
 compositions and the works he repaired by append- 
 ing his initials to the former and Z to the latter. 
 Had he claimed aught not rightfully his, it is one of 
 the curiosities of literature that he was not exposed 
 by his contemporaries. Had there been grounds for 
 charges, these would have then been made. As half
 
 ON PLAGIARISM AND SOME PLAGIARISTS. 7 
 
 of Burns' work was published posthumously and one- 
 third of it without his commands, it is not surprising 
 that some verses, mostly inferior, have been im- 
 properly issued behind his name by catch-penny pub- 
 lishers of little- regarded and now almost obsolete 
 editions. This is true of almost every voluminous 
 bygone poet. But the ancients had no misconcep- 
 tions regarding Burns. It is a fact, historically re- 
 corded, that the plough-boys and maid-servants of 
 his day went without clothing they needed badly in 
 order to procure his works. As for the alleged ignor- 
 ance of the moderns — I know personally that the 
 average Scotch man and lad, of from 25 to 35 years 
 ago, knew just exactly what was Burns and what was 
 not. The Kilmarnock, McCreery and Creech, Currie, 
 Cunningham, Stewart, Chambers, Aldine, and Nim- 
 mo editions, with explanatory notes, and 150 others 
 almost as reliable, with the letters to Johnson and 
 Thomson, were open to them. Many hundred editions 
 of Burns have been published in Great Britain, be- 
 sides those of American issue, and at least two-thirds 
 of these contain copious notes. I refuse to believe 
 that the Scot of to-day, with his wider education, is 
 more ignorant of his country's literature than was 
 his father 30 years back. 
 
 :;: * :■: * 
 
 As for the plagiarism : If " the average Scotch 
 man does not know how much Burns plagiarised," 
 it is simply because Burns was not a plagiarist. The 
 Scots' song, like the Scots' ballad, was the product
 
 8 ON PLAGIARISM AND SOME PLAGIARISTS. 
 
 of no one man's hand ; nay, of no one generation ; 
 nay, of no one century. It travelled from mouth to 
 mouth, from heart to heart, from age to age ; losing 
 somewhat at times, but on the whole gaining flavor 
 with years and much journeying. Its users had no 
 fear of being dubbed plagiarists, and they culled the 
 fittest ideas and images as they traversed the 
 hedgerows of poesy, caring not whence the root. 
 Burns, by his genius, saved this mass of folk lore, 
 drifting idly to and fro, from the oblivion which at 
 length would have overtaken it. He took the rude 
 or impure songs of his day — the namelessness of 
 whose authors he bewailed — and the fragmentary 
 snatches which floated from mouth to mouth at fair 
 and market, and made them a part of literature, 
 saved them from certain annihilation. Many hun- 
 dreds of songs, some by his contemporaries, put 
 into print by his endeavors, owe little or nothing to 
 his hand, and have rarely been published with his 
 works, or credited to him, save by the ignorant — 
 among whom may be classed the Bulletin. Let the 
 fair-minded read his correspondence and doubt, if 
 they can, that his desire was to enrich Scots litera- 
 ture by saving many fine songs from oblivion and 
 by developing or polishing the many floating frag- 
 ments which lived chiefly in the memory of a passing 
 generation, rather than to augment his reputation 
 by association with these musical collections. This 
 is made the more evident if it be remembered that the 
 poet indignantly refused remuneration for his priceless
 
 ON PLAGIARISM AND SOME PLAGIARISTS, 9 
 
 work. He also rescued from certain destruction 
 many of the tunes without words composed or 
 circulated by the wandering ministrels of his time, 
 and immortalised them by wedding thereto appro- 
 priate language. Of intent, he hid nought. He 
 acknowledged the sources of a phrase, aline, a title, a 
 chorus, a stanza, a tune, on which he had built up a 
 complete structure of song. To me, the finest trait 
 in his character is the unselfish enthusiasm he gave 
 to this work. His countrymen know what he did — 
 without fee or reward, at the cost of health and 
 prosperity — for Scottish song literature, and are 
 grateful. In moments of exhilaration, some may 
 have styled him the greatest poet thaD ever lived — I 
 have heard similar Australian estimates of Gordon — 
 but that provides no excuse for the persistence of the 
 Bulletin s attempts to depose him wholly from their 
 hearts. Burns is not so easily to be set aside : those 
 who best know him can most easily despise and dis- 
 regard the littleness which joys to think that Henley 
 is the promulgator of a damaging doctrine concern- 
 ing the dead poet. But Henley has no illusions on 
 the subject. He declares that Burns has made " a 
 notable and lasting contribution to literature." 
 
 Let me recapitulate: Burns' reputation, accord- 
 ing to acknowledged authorities, is mainly based on 
 his Poems and his Satires. They assert, nevertheless, 
 that he lifts his head, high as the tuneful morning 
 stars, among the world's* song-writers, on the footing
 
 10 ON PLAGIARISM AND SOME PLAGIARISTS. 
 
 of lyrics indisputably his. Here the worm that 
 bores into reputations gets a chance. Burns, purely 
 for love of country, allied to love of song, and never 
 for love of lucre, endeavored to enrich her min- 
 strelsy by collecting for publication the old ballads 
 that ran like fire along the country-side at merry- 
 making times. Some, wedded to beautiful airs, were 
 unprintable ; these he re-wrote. Others, word-per- 
 fect, were twined with poor melodies ; for these he 
 found fresh music. In other cases, a felicitous 
 phrase, line, or verse was embedded in a mass of 
 vulgar verbiage. Burns liberated the gem, polished 
 it, and set it in a circlet of equally-rare jewels. He 
 did more — in every case he forwarded copies of the 
 originals with his versions to the publishers. Since 
 his day, unscrupulous men have traded on his name, 
 and published editions which contained songs he 
 never wrote and never claimed. This caused a con- 
 fusion which was increased by the fact that Hogg, 
 Cunningham, Stenhouse, Buchan, Hamilton, and 
 others were so regardless of Burns' reputation as 
 to forge ' originals ' to songs that were undeniably 
 his. By the way, instead of taking away from 
 Burns, Henley has actually restored to him songs 
 which were wrested from him by these forgeries. 
 For instance. It was a'for our Rightful King — 
 written by Burns for the Musical Miiseiun. It was 
 unsigned, and Sir Walter Scott gave it a Jacobite 
 parentage, which it enjoyed until Henley made clear 
 Burns' claim to its fatherhood. How many more
 
 ON PLAGIARISM AND SOME PLAGIARISTS. 11 
 
 of these so-called Burns' ' originals ' are forged ? 
 Had Australia possessed an unwritten song-literature, 
 how highly would the poet have been extolled who 
 played towards it the part of a Burns, and rescued 
 it from extinction. But how does the Bulletin re- 
 ward Burns for this great mass of laborious and 
 gratuitous service to Scots', nay, to universal litera- 
 ture ? He is treated like a detected thief ; he is 
 denied originality ; he has done little, says Red 
 Page, but milk other men's cows into his own 
 bucket. But the reviewer's bucket contained no milk ; 
 it was full, to overflowing, with gall. Otherwise, a 
 dead man would not be styled a thief, because he 
 posthumously had an occasional rogue for publisher. 
 So far as I know, Shakespeare has not been accused 
 of theft because Marlowe's beautiful Come live with 
 me and be my Love is at times bound with his 
 
 works, 
 
 ^-. =:: =;: * 
 
 The narrowness of vision, which views Burns 
 through the spectacles of to-day rather than through 
 the media of his own time, is surprising. His in- 
 fluence on succeeding literature is forgotten ; the fact 
 that millions have re-echoed his sentiments is not 
 recognised. He is ' very commonplace,' says the 
 Bulletin — attempting to evade the commonplace by 
 being inaccurate, eccentric, and grotesque. But was 
 he commonplace in his day and generation ? Would 
 many of his opinions be commonplace, had he never 
 lived •? Was he not, so far from being commonplace,
 
 12 ON PL A GIA RISM A ND SOME PL A GL4 RISTS. 
 
 on the contrary, in Britain the pioneer of outspoken 
 thought and simplicity of style ? As a matter of 
 most notorious fact did he not revolutionise English 
 literature, and banish the artificial in thought and 
 language into the limbo of forgetfulness ? A hun- 
 dred years or more ahead of his time, when the 
 Bulletin catches him up, he becomes 'commonplace!' 
 That journal then babbles out : ' His homely verse 
 suits homely minds.' His subjects were certainly 
 homely : Domestic Joys and Sorrows ; the Beauties 
 of Nature ; the Wrongs of Mankind ; Peace 
 and War ; Politics and Religion ; Love and 
 Hate ; Life and Death. What else, good Monsieur 
 Frangipani, is there to write about? He is homely 
 in the company of those who have always had first 
 place in the hearts of the people. To them, it mat- 
 ters little how they may be regarded by cold-blooded 
 cynics of the nil admirari school ! Let these things 
 be remembered : Robert Burns, for love, put new 
 words to many blackguard Scotch, Highland, and 
 Irish songs, or scraps of songs, in order to preserve 
 what was loveable in them, and made full acknow- 
 ledgement of indebtedness, where it existed. William 
 Shakespeare, for personal profit, in order to fill his 
 own coffers, without thought of service to letters, 
 took the o'er-long rambling plays of his day and 
 pruned them into proportion, and made no acknow- 
 ledgment of his obligation to those who went before. 
 Not one Englishman in 10,000 is aware of it, but no 
 one heaves bricks at Shakespeare's tomb and calls
 
 ON PLAGIARISM AND SOME PLAGIARISTS. 13 
 
 him ' filcher' in order to disabuse the ' average' En- 
 glishman of the idea that Shakespeare is the greatest 
 poet that ever breathed. Shakespeare kept his own 
 counsel as to his founts of inspiration — he is a god ; 
 Burns, who owned up, and whose so-called plagiarism 
 is not a circumstance to that of the Bard of Avon, is 
 a common literary thief ! Further — Shakespeare is 
 not accused of plagiarism because of acts done by his 
 publishers ; nor because of alterations, sometimes 
 for the better, made by his many editors ; nor 
 because of emendations read into him by various 
 actors, and afterwards generally adopted — such for 
 instance as Colley Gibber's " Off with his head ! So 
 much for Buckingham!" Nor because six inferior 
 plays have been fathered on him — to wit : The 
 Arraignment of Paris ; The Birth of Merlin ; Edward 
 III. ; The Fair Emma ; The Merry Devil of Edmon- 
 ton ; and Macedorus — which were written by George 
 Peek and others. Nor is he accused of theft because 
 Titus Andronicus — written by Marlowe almost for a 
 •certainty — is usually bound up with his works. 
 
 Let me strengthen my disproof of the assertion 
 that Burns was commonplace by placing in contrast 
 to the peevish maunderings of the literary homun- 
 ■culus, who has attacked him, the weighty opinions 
 of the great French critic — Taine. He hailed 
 Burns as the founder of a new literary spirit ; the 
 foremost banner-bearer in the modern revolution of
 
 14 ON PLAGIARISM AND SOME PLAGIARISTS- 
 
 letters. In his History of English Literature, he 
 says : — 
 
 " At last there started up an unfortunate plough- 
 man (Burns) rebelling against the world, and in 
 love ; with all the yearnings, lusts, greatness, and 
 irrationality of modern genius. Now and then, 
 driving his plough, he lighted on genuine verses — 
 verses such as Heine and Alfred de Musset have 
 made in our own days. In those few words, combined 
 after a new fasJiion, there was a revolution. Two Jiim- 
 dred new verses sufficed. The liuman mind turned on 
 its hintjes, and so did. civil society. . . , With Burns 
 rises a new ideal ; old narrow moralities are to give 
 place to the wide sympathy of the modern man who 
 loves the beautiful whenever it meets him. . . . This 
 originality and divinimj instinct exist in his style as in his 
 ideas. The speciality of the age in which we live, and 
 tvhich he inaugurated, is to blot out rigid distinctions of 
 class, catechism, and style; academic, moral, or social 
 conventions are falliiiy away, and we claim in society 
 dominion for individual merit, in morality for inborn 
 generosity, in literature fur genuine feeling. Burns 
 was the first to enter on this track, aud lie often pursues 
 it to the end. . . . For the first time man spoke as 
 men speak, or rather as they think, without pre- 
 meditation ; indifferent to rules, content to exhibit 
 his feeling as it came to him, and as he felt it. At 
 last, after so many years, we escape from measured 
 declamation, we hear a man's voice ! better, we for- 
 get the voice in the emotion which it expresses, we
 
 ON PL A GIA RISM A ND SOME FLAG I A RISTS. 15 
 
 feel this emotion reflected in ourselves, we enter 
 into relations with a soul. Then form seems to fade 
 away and disappear — this is the great feature of 
 modern poetry. Burns has reached it seven or 
 eight times. . . . A sad life is most often the life of 
 men in advance of their age ; it is not ivholesowe to ijo too 
 quick. Burns was so much in advance that it took 
 fortij i/ears to catcit Jiini.^' 
 
 (i^#%*^
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The Conveyings of Shakespeare. 
 
 The Bulletin has made many very reckless asser- 
 tions, but none to exceed one that occurred in an 
 attempt at reply to me. Its slap-dash audacity is 
 remarkable, even when its source is remembered 
 Ked Page — the plush-breeched flunkey of letters- 
 then said : ' So far as their borrowings are con- 
 cerned, Burns, for the most part, gilded refined gold ; 
 Shakespeare made gold out of lead.' 
 
 Such ravings might convince the credulous or 
 delude the ignorant ; they cannot impose upon those 
 accustomed to weigh words. In Burns, the use of 
 ' a lyrical idea, that is a rhythm, a burden, a drift,' 
 already utilised, constitutes ravishing, filching, clean- 
 stealing, and a gilding of refined gold. Shakespeare 
 gets different treatment. When he lifts, as he does 
 almost without exception, his Plot, Situations, Char- 
 acters, Colors, and Atmosphere, from the Gone- 
 Before, he does not filch ! Oh, no ; he only turns lead 
 into gold. The unprejudiced, those qualified to
 
 THE CONVEYINGS OF SHAKESPEARE. 17 
 
 judge, will agree with me that such plentiful machi- 
 nery is at least as valuable as "a lyric idea," and 
 that the plays of a dramatist thus equipped by his 
 predecessors, are more than half -written. But the 
 alchemy which enabled Shakespeare to turn lead into 
 gold, did not end with his borrowing of crucibles 
 for the melting, and moulds for the shaping of his 
 precious ores. What shall be said of Sir Know- All 
 with his prate about Shakespeare's transmutation of 
 the base into the royal metal, if it be shown that the 
 dramatist not only stole his apparatus, but also two- 
 thirds of the golden coins he professedly minted. 
 Unfortunately for me, Boswell's Shakespeare, with 
 Edmund Malone's notes, is not accessible ; nor yet 
 the appendix to the Shakespeare Society's reprint of 
 the 1802 edition, wherein the Sources of Shakes- 
 peare are very fully set out. But let me quote 
 Emerson : — • 
 
 Shakespeare esteemed the mass of old plays waste stock, 
 in which any experiment might be freely tried. . . . He 
 owed debts in all directions, and was able to use whatever 
 he found. The amount of his indebtedness may be inferred 
 from Malone's laborious computations in regard to the First, 
 Second and Third parts of Henry VI., in which, says he, 
 ' out of ()04-3 lines, 1771 were written by some author pre- 
 ceding Shakespeare; 2373 by him, on the foundations laid 
 by his predecessors, and 1889 were entirely his own,' Ma- 
 lone's preceding investigations hardly leave a single drama 
 of Shakespeare's absolute invention. 
 
 What of the lead now ? Aye, and what of the 
 
 gold ? Go to, thou vain man, and learn, again from 
 
 Emerson, that : — 
 
 Great men are more distinguished by range and extent 
 than by originality. If we recjuire in them the originality
 
 18 THE CONVEYINGS OF SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 which consists inweaving, like a spider, their web from their 
 own bowels ; or in finding clay and making bricks, and 
 biiilding the house ; no great men are original. The greatest 
 genms is the most indebted man. . . . Thought is the 
 property of him who can entertain it. 
 
 Or from E. J. Benson, who, recently writing in 
 the Nineteenth Century, said : — 
 
 The truth seems to be that unintelligent theft is plagi- 
 arism j critical theft is not inconsistent with the truest 
 originality. 
 
 That was Emerson's apology for Shakespeare. 
 It may serve in a lesser degree for Ben Jonson, who 
 paraphrased To Celia and Drink to Me from the 
 Epistles of Philostratus ; for Herrick, who also bor- 
 rowed from that Ancient ; for Chaucer, whose obli- 
 gations to Ovid, to Petrarch, to Boccaccio and to the 
 French are obvious; also for Milton, whose Comus 
 is largely indebted to The Faithful Shepherdess of 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, whose II Penseroso owed 
 much to the Address to Melancholy in Francis Beau- 
 mont's Passionate Madman, whose conception of 
 Satan is apparently derived from Marino's Sospetto 
 ■ d' Herode, and who also borrowed from Browne ; it 
 may also serve as an apology for every other English 
 writer of eminence — including Tennyson, whose ob- 
 ligations to the classics are obvious. For who shall 
 estimate what any modern owes to the past ? Litera- 
 ture is a mass of stored impressions. The man 
 whose impressions are all self-gathered is half 
 informed. The wise glean experience side by side
 
 THE CONVEYINGS OF SHAKESPEARE. 19 
 
 with their study of the stores of the sages. Your 
 hermit is the only original — when he can't read. 
 
 Concerning this matter of Shakespeare's plagiar- 
 ism, Taine, after pointing out that at the age of 33 
 he bought a house, two barns, and two gardens, 
 and went on accumulating, very pointedly says : 
 " A man attains only to easy circumstances by his 
 own labour ; if he gains wealth it is by making others 
 labor for him." In another place he Avrites : 
 " Shakespeare set his wits to the touchinci-up of plays 
 with so much activity that Greene called him ' an 
 upstart crow beautified with our feathers.' " 
 
 * ;;: -Jf * 
 
 Hazlitt remarked that Homer appears the most 
 original of Avriters, probably for the reason that we 
 can trace literature no further, and yet it is said that 
 in the Iliad he employed all the folk legends of his 
 day. The sources of Shakespeare's borrowings are, 
 however, well-known. He was so far from trans- 
 muting lead into gold that some of his literary 
 commandeering is so clumsily done that his plays 
 teem with absurdities of the most glowing character. 
 Lions roar in French forests ; English rustics dis- 
 port themselves in Norman and Italian fields ; 
 Bohemia boasts of a sea coast ; and Southern Italy 
 has acquired an English winter — all because he 
 stole widely and often used ignorantly. Here let it 
 be remembered that Shakespeare (1564-1616) took 
 the plot and incidents of The Taming of The Shrew
 
 20 THE CONVEY I NGS OF SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 (1596) from The Taming of a Shrew (1594), and 
 some of the circumstances from George Gascoigne's 
 translation of Ariosto's comedy The Supposes, 
 published in 1566. Romeo and Juliet (1596) is 
 more original, but, copied by one Italian writer from 
 another, and thence transplanted into a French tale 
 by Pierre Boisteau, it found its way into English in 
 1562 by means of Arthur Brooke's lengthy poem, 
 The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet. 
 King John (1596-8) was founded on a drama called 
 The Troublesome Raigne of King John, and this 
 is said to have been founded on a much older play. 
 All's Well That Ends Well (1598) came to 
 Shakespeare from Boccaccio through a novel in 
 Painter's Palace of Pleasure, named Giletta of 
 Narbona (1566), and partly from an anonymous 
 drama (1590). The plot of As You Like It 
 (1599) and some incidents were taken from Lodge's 
 Rosalynd. The central incident of Much Ado 
 About Nothing (1600) appears to have travelled to 
 Shakespeare from Ariosto's Ginevra and Orlando 
 Furioso, through the novels of Bandello, thence to 
 Belief orest's Cent Histoires Tragiques (1583), of 
 which an English translation gave the Swan of Avon 
 his cue. Hamlet sprang originally from a Scandi- 
 navian tradition into the chronicles of Saxo Gram- 
 maticus (120-4), thence it was drawn for the plot of 
 a novel by Belleforost in the latter half of the six- 
 teenth century, thence it was translated into English 
 under the title of the Ilistorie of Hamblett, and was
 
 THE CONVEYINGS OF SHAKESPEARE. 21 
 
 at a later date dramatised by one whom Malone 
 styles Thomas Kyd. 
 
 On this deeply-laid, ancient foundation, Shakes- 
 peare built up his "wonderful tragedy. Henry V. 
 was also based by Shakespeare on the plot and 
 incidents of an older play. Twelfth Night resembles 
 the thirtieth story in the second part of Bandello's 
 novels, but Shakespeare apparently took the plot 
 and some of the incidents from the Historie of 
 Apolonius and Sylla in Eich's Farewell to Military 
 Profession. The materials for Troilus and Cressida 
 were drawn from Caxton's Recuyel of the Histories 
 of Troy, and from Chaucer's Troilus and Cresseide, 
 and much of his classic lore, where correct, has been 
 gleaned from Chapman's translation of the Iliad. 
 The plot and principal characters in Measure for 
 Measure were lifted holus-bolus from George Whet- 
 stone's Promos and Cassandra. For Othello, 
 Shakespeare took the plot and incidents from the 7th 
 novel of the 3rd decade of Cinthio's Hecatommithi, 
 whence, it is said by Dunlop, tlie characters of Des- 
 demona, lago, and Cassia ircri' taken irith scarcely a 
 shade of difference — which act of appropriation does 
 not seem to be precisely described by the Bidletin's 
 phrase concerning the turning of borrowed lead into 
 gold. Shakespeare's King Lear (1605) was con- 
 structed mainly of materials found in a play styled 
 The True Chronicle of King Leare' and his Three 
 Daughters — entered at Stationer's Hall in 1594 — 
 and in an old ballad written on the same subject,
 
 22 THE CONVEYINGS OF SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 while Augustine Skottowe asserts that the characters 
 of Gloster and Edgar were taken from the tale of the 
 Paphlagonian King in Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. 
 The song of the witches around the cauldron in 
 Macheth was transplanted bodily from the incan- 
 tations of Thos. Middleton's (1570-1627) Witch, from 
 which play Shakespeare is said to have borrowed the 
 supernatural machinery, some incidents, and even 
 speeches. Doubtless he used them more effectively 
 than did his talented contemporary, but he 
 appears to have filched largely all the same. 
 The plot, incidents, and some of the principal 
 speeches in Coriolanus were cribbed by Shakespeare 
 from Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch, 
 which supplied the two principal incidents for Julius 
 Caesar, and several situations for Henry V., Henry 
 VI., and Henry VIII., also for the latter the charac- 
 ter of Wolsey. In other respects these historical 
 plays, like King John, are very largely furbishments 
 of much older plays current in Shakespeare's day, as 
 the variations of style go to prove. Timon of Athens 
 (1610) was a mosaic from Painter's Palace of Plea- 
 sures (1566), an anonymous drama (1590), North's 
 translation of Plutarch, and a translation of Lucian. 
 Pericles, Prince of Tyre — originally named after 
 Pyrocles, the hero of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia — 
 was dug out of Gower's romance. The Comedy of 
 Errors borrowed its plot from a translation of Plautus' 
 Manfechmi — Shakespeare went frequently to Plautus 
 for ideas ! In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare
 
 THE CONVEY IN GS OF SHAKESPEARE. 23 
 
 was indebted to Plutarch. The AYiuter's Tale is 
 taken, Avith some alterations, from Eobert Greene's 
 Dorastus and Fa^vnia. The style and method of 
 Shakespeare's historical plays, especially Eichard III., 
 according to Swinburne, are modelled without doubt 
 on the Edward II. of Christopher Marlowe, but fail 
 ta reach " the highest height of the earlier master." 
 Swinburne evidently does not believe that Shakes- 
 peare invariably " made gold out of lead !" And so 
 on through the Shakesperean gallery. Can it be 
 wondered that Nathan Dole, a contemporary of his, 
 spake concerning " Such high-handed rapine as 
 Shakespeare displayed toward the predecessors Avhom 
 he robbed to glorify." If a concrete example of 
 Shakespeare's filching be asked for, contrast the fol- 
 lowing lines from Marlowe's Lust's Dominion : — 
 *' The cold hand of death hath thrust his icy fingers 
 in my breast," with those from Shakespeare's King 
 John : — " And none of you will bid the winter come 
 to thrust his icy fingers in my maw." This is what 
 the Bulletin s half-read reviewer styles '■ turning lead 
 into gold." None but he, dishonestly intent on 
 finding exoneration somehow from the false position 
 in which his ignorance, bigotry, and lack of fairness 
 placed him, will be likely to imagine that Shakespeare 
 mined for lead only in the writings of Boccaccio, 
 Plutarch, Sidney, Marlowe, Middleton, Greene; 
 Chaucer, Ariosto, Bandello, Cinthio, and others — his 
 predecessors or contemporaries. But the man, who, 
 dying in his thirty-seventh year, had ere then revived
 
 24 THE CONVEYINGS OF SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 a literature already moribund and resurrected a lan- 
 guage which considered as literature was practically 
 entombed, is his own best defender. It can never be 
 forgotten that Burns, the precursor of Cowper, 
 Crabbe, and Wordsworth, and the avowed inspirer of 
 the latter, burst the bonds of his time by abandoning 
 the false and artificial and returning to the natural 
 and the true. And it might also be remembered that tho' 
 Shakespeare, ere entering on his thirty-seventh year, 
 had written some remarliable plays, that nevertheless 
 the bulk of his work up to that time had been weak, 
 vulgar, crude, hasty — and " in the jigging veins of 
 rhyming mother wits" — as compared with the even 
 excellence of his later years, and that had he then 
 died his greater glories would have perished, as do 
 frost-nipped buds ere opening. But let it also be 
 remembered that what Henley said of Burns is also 
 true of Shakespeare — " Being a great artist, he de- 
 rived from a numerous ancestry." 
 
 '^^
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Some Bulletin Blunders. 
 
 Someone has wisely said: — "Every writer, 
 great or small, unless he can clearly or definitely 
 remember, or absolutely and entirely forget, all that 
 he has ever read, must sometimes use the phrases 
 and ideas of other people." Feeling that this is 
 true, and believing in addition that literature, written 
 and unwritten, is a common possession, I make no 
 attack on those who have borrowed to better and 
 owned up. I simply expose some noted appropria- 
 tors who made no acknowledgement, in order to 
 show how unjustly Burns, who did acknowledge, 
 has been treated by the bigoted, half -read, and im- 
 perfectly understanding. I think it is Hazlitt who 
 speaks Avith enthusiasm of the art which is quick in 
 ■admiration and ready in imitation, and yet so 
 strong in its own instincts that it reconstructs and 
 rearranges into harmony with its own thoughts every 
 fragment which it borrows. Herein the song-writ- 
 ing methods of Burns are closely described, and
 
 26 SOME BULLETIN BLUNDERS. 
 
 surely he was the most honest and open avower of 
 literary obligation who ever lived. Continuing this 
 line of thought, I might quote what 8ir Frederick 
 Bridge said recently of Handel, " who freely adopted 
 and borrowed the music of other composers and held 
 his tongue as to Avhence it came." For instance, 
 the middle movement of The Hallelujah Chorus is 
 taken from an Italian love souq'. For Israel in 
 Egypt he lifted nine numbers, including some of the 
 principal choruses, from a Magnificat by Erba — a 
 Milanese composer — it is supposed, and found other 
 materials elsewhere. The Conductor of the Koyal 
 Choral Society of London sees nothing discreditable 
 in these and kindred circumstances, for Handel 
 touched nought which was not thereby adorned. 
 At the same time it was also said by Mr. A. J. Balfour 
 that if Jlandel borrowed without acknowledge- 
 ment, the act was not one of plagiarism — "on the 
 contrary, Handel discovered the possibilities of a 
 distinctly inferior work, and out of inferior material 
 he made a star. Out of poor matter he produces 
 what is of the first order ; out of decaying matter he 
 produces new, and by virtue of this he is a crea- 
 tor." How much less than Handel is Burns to 
 be considered a plagiarist ? How equally a creator ? 
 Acknowledging frankly his obligations, he re-created 
 that which was on the verge of extinction, and turned 
 base coin into medals of genius, fresh from his own 
 mint, clear cut by his handiwork. He was inspired 
 by the work of his predecessors, enthused by them —
 
 SOME BULLETIN BLUNDERS. 27 
 
 does that make him a robher ? Said Dean Swift : 
 " I humbly conceive that though I light my candle 
 at my neighooiu-'s fire, that does not make the wick, 
 the wax, or the flame less my own." Let me drive 
 that home by a quotation from Mark Twain : — " No 
 man produces an idea out of his own head. You 
 cannot grow an idea — it first comes from the outside. 
 Why Adam could not even invent the idea of modesty ' 
 he went naked until he learned from the outside that 
 to be naked was immodest. I have a sense of mo- 
 desty, altho' Adam haan't. But I inherited it ; I 
 did not invent it." The Bulletin's reviewer appears to 
 have been heir to nobody, to have inherited nothing — ■ 
 and most certainly neither sense, modesty, nor charity. 
 He read into Burns all that he desired to see there, 
 and then proceeded to slander him with all the 
 malignance of a crabbed and contracted soul, worm- 
 eaten with conceit of self. Before I proceed to wipe 
 away his fly-specks from the pages of Burns by cate- 
 gorical disproof, let me deal with some incidental 
 slanders. 
 
 The Bulletin critic's knowledge of Burns, outside 
 of what he cribbed from Hazlitt, appears to have 
 been derived solely from Henley, who is usually but 
 not always accurate. But his knowledge of Henley 
 was superficial ; there is nothing in literature and 
 little in Henley to warrant this malignant accusa- 
 tion : — "Burns' friends and relations, with intent ti.o 
 heighten his reputation, deliberately destroyed many 
 of the old ballads from which he borroAved." 
 
 These evil suspicionings of a jaundiced mind
 
 28 SOME BULLETIN BLUNDERS. 
 
 could be used to tarnish the fame of any poet who 
 
 ever breathed. Mrs. Burns actually disclaimed for 
 
 her husband the authorship of many songs ; his 
 
 brother, Gilbert, disowned the following : — As I 
 
 was a Wandering ; The Winter it is Past ; A 
 
 Bottle and a Friend ; The Battle of Sheriff- Muir, 
 
 and other poems. But it is not for me to disprove 
 
 such calumnious charges — the onus of proof rests 
 
 with the slanderer. If idly made, we know how to 
 
 estimate the circulator. Thus I challenged on two 
 
 occasions, the Red Page, who, having first shut me 
 
 out from further reply, then produced his authority : 
 
 " In our Notes to individual songs, we have done our best 
 to trace his — Burns's — connexion with the past. This is now 
 the more difficult because (1) much of the material he collected 
 (including the origins of the publication known |as The Merry 
 Muses and a good deal else) has been destroyed — by his rela- 
 tions, or by Currie, or by later owners — in the interests partly 
 of Scottish morals, partly of that cheap decorous chromo- 
 lithograph (as it were) which bids fair to supplant the true 
 Burns — ardent, impulsive, generous ; but hypochondriacal, 
 passionate, imperfect— in the minds of his countrymen. . . 
 . ." — Henley and Henderson's 'Burns,' vol. iii., page 296. 
 
 This, an indefinite statement, was garbled by 
 the Bulletin into a direct charge. Henley did not 
 know for certain, had no reason to suspect that any 
 MS. verses which ever came into Burns' hands, or 
 ever met his eye, had ever been destroyed by any one 
 before or after his death. But he was cursed with 
 the disease he diagnoses in others — a desire to account 
 for everything somehow. Therefore, if Burns' rela- 
 tions did not destroy certain MS., Dr. Currie did, 
 and if Currie did not, some unknown persons must 
 have performed the horrid act of destruction. And
 
 SOME BULLETIN BLUXDERS. 29 
 
 yet, I daresay in some quarters Henley is considered 
 a man, and this is looked on as criticism. The 
 poison-germs from Henley's sla,nder-laden breath 
 found congenial soil in the Bulletin's critic. There 
 they developed largely ; there were no " ors" or 
 ^' buts" about him — "Burns' friends and relations, 
 with intent to heighten his reputation, deliberately 
 destroyed many of the old ballads from which he 
 borrowed." And this person then complains that 
 Henley did not go far enough in his denunciation of 
 Burns, and goes himself so far beyond Henley that 
 he need fear no one making that complaint of him. 
 But these high-minded gentlemen — whose con- 
 •cern for their own skins induces them to libel the 
 dead rather than the living — know little of Burns. 
 The Merry Muses of Caledonia, as Henley knows 
 and avers, was a collection of bawdy Scotch songs 
 made by Burns. It included several of his own com- 
 positions, among these latter being possibly a parody 
 of John Anderson My Jo. Indeed it is stated that 
 its second edition was wholly an effort of Burns' 
 imagination. And so it may well be that many of 
 his songs were written in two veins, and that the 
 purer versions were not mere paraphases of the im- 
 pure but coeval with them. Holograph copies of The 
 Merry Muses were sent by the poet to several friends, 
 and one of them, after his death, came into the hands 
 of a printer, who secretly circulated it. This is a 
 matter of common literary notoriety. Copies were 
 seen and commented on, by Dr. George Gilfillan,
 
 30 . SOME BULLETIN BLUNDERS. 
 
 Robert White, of Newcastle, J. G. Lockhart, and 
 others. An MS. copy, whether complete or not I do 
 not know, passed from the hands of Robert Cleghorn, 
 a farmer, and Burns' friend, into the possession of 
 John Allen, of Holland Hovise, who, in 1813, lent it 
 to Byron. On the authority of Lockhart, the songs, 
 or some of them, were circulating in the London 
 manuscript market in 1828. Therefore, if The Merry 
 Muses, whether in print or manuscript, has utterly 
 disappeared, one need not be very charitable to sup- 
 pose that it was rather through the common misad- 
 ventures to which the flimsiness and combustibility 
 of paper render it subject, than by the agency of the 
 long-dead Burns' jealous friends. But then there 
 are creatures which, like maggots, can only exist in a 
 corruption of their own creation. Addison has 
 mildly styled them " the lice which lurk in the locks 
 of literature." 
 
 It is too late in the day to attempt the destruc- 
 tion of Burns' reputation. His strength, his direct- 
 ness, his vividness, his easy certainty, his divination, 
 passion, wit, pathos, and lightness of touch have not 
 only made him the greatest poet and satirist of his 
 country ; they have also raised him to a place of 
 high honor among the few great song-writers of the 
 world. Even Henley styles him : ' The most exqui- 
 site artist in folk-song the world has ever seen,' — 
 and again : ' No such artist in folk-song has ever 
 
 o
 
 SOME BULLETIN BLUNDERS. 
 
 worked in literature. . . Under his band a patch- 
 Avork of catch-words became a living song.' Of bis 
 laurels, the carping of an obscure unknown cannot^ 
 rob him^here or elsewhere. ' He is secure,' says 
 Henlej, ' even outside the Vernacular, of the fame of 
 an unique artist.' But Henley is not always so fair. 
 We have just seen that he is not above the manu- 
 facture of statements ; he is more than hypercritical 
 when he attempts to prove Burns' indebtedness in 
 twenty instances to the Herd MS. collection — a 
 collection which possibly the poet never saw, and 
 probably never heard of ; and of which his mode of 
 life made a close study impossible. But despite these 
 injustices— perhaps merely the ebullitions of a not 
 wholly-controlled eccentricity — Henley genuinely ad- 
 mires Burns. His charge is that at times: " Burns 
 did but pass the folk-song of his country through the 
 mint of his mind, and reproduced it stamped with 
 his image, and lettered with his superscription." In 
 short, that Burns originated even when he remem- 
 bered. 
 
 But the Bulletin people show no such com- 
 punction about rough-handling the artist who, 
 according to Taine, revolutionised the world's poetic 
 thought. No half-measures for them. They only ap- 
 plaud Henley when he is hypercritical or unjust. 
 Forinstance, when they imagine that Henley accused 
 Burns of borrowing a measure from Fergusson. 
 This, the poet is usually supposed to have done when 
 first launching forth on callow pinions into the high
 
 32 SOME BULLETIN BLUNDERS. 
 
 atmosphere of poesy. But to his prototype — cut off 
 before he fully flowered — the Ayrshire peasant is as 
 the sun to a farthing zushlight. Henley's strongest 
 indictment is that Burns lacked the power to origi- 
 nate a new vein of thought {n'di' Taine) a new rhythm. 
 Has Tennyson done either ? Wordsworth ? Byron ? 
 — who borrowed his ottaca riiini from Italy, and the 
 verse of Ariosto. Milton ? Can it be said that there 
 is one poet of the Victorian era, except, perhaps, 
 BroAvning and Whitman, against whom the same 
 charges could not be more forcibly laid ? Most mea- 
 sures, if not all, are in common use ; they are no 
 man's copyright. Is there a poet, alive or dead, 
 whose measures were all original '? Burns borrowed 
 his measures ! So— and who did the man that he 
 borrowed from, borrow from ? The reply is easy : 
 In the Atlienaeum, some years ago, Ferdinand Freili- 
 grath, as does Henley, traced Burns' six-hne-stave, 
 built on two rhymes, from Fergusson to Ramsay, to 
 whom it came through the black-letter broadsides 
 from Alexander Scott and Sir Richard Maitland. 
 Thence it was traced, past Montgomerie (of quator- 
 2ain note), to the low Latin of the monkish hymnal. 
 But its first out-bubbling spring, so far as the auth- 
 orities know, was in the r'uiia coju-e of the Eleventh 
 Century troubadour. And the Omniscience of the 
 Red Page, who so kindly assists struggling authors 
 for a cash consideration, snaps its inky fingers and 
 joys to think that Burns stole the self-same-strain 
 from Fergusson— Seven Centuries Later ! As a matter
 
 SOME BULLETIN BLUNDERS. 
 
 of fact Burns' very earliest verses were written in 
 this stanza ere be had met Fergusson's poems, and 
 it is said that his first model was King James' 
 Christis Kirke on the Grene. 
 
 I have been much awed by the keen moral sus- 
 ceptibility which causes the Bulletin to shed inky 
 tears over the ethical bluntness which permits a Scotch 
 poet to use in combination any two words similarly 
 conjoined — before or since. Should this become the 
 vogue, the Scot who wishes to remark that the sun 
 rose will be compelled to find a new language to do 
 it in, or he will be nailed as a plagiarist, and damned 
 in a chorus of inconsequential snarls from the Bulle- 
 tin — while its cover keeps on. Its struggle to convict 
 Burns of plagiarism — a satire on its own methods — 
 reminds me of another critic — that pillar of the kirk, 
 Bowie Haggart in Auld Licht Idylls. Said he, 
 without hesitation : " I am of opoenion that the works 
 of Burns is of an immoral tendency. I have not 
 read them mysel', but such is my opeenion." 
 
 Sir Walter Scott declared that " the opening 
 lines of Ae Fond Kiss were worth a thousand rom- 
 ances." Of them, Mrs. Johnstone said : " These four 
 lines form in themselves a complete romance — ^the 
 very alpha and omega of feeling, and contain the 
 essence of an existence of pain and pleasure distilled
 
 34 SOME BULLETIN BLUNDERS. 
 
 into one burning drop." It is not wonderful there- 
 fore that the Purple Flunkey should be found quoting 
 with glee this extraordinary statement from Henley's 
 pen: — "The germ of ' Ae Fond Kiss' is found in 
 ^ The Parting Kiss' of Robert Dodsley (1703-1764), 
 which was set by Oswald." I am not content to 
 take this on trust ; let us see. Here is Dodsley : — 
 
 One fond kiss before we part, 
 
 Drop a tear, and bid adieu ; 
 Though we sever, my fond heart 
 
 Till me meet shall pant for you. 
 
 Turn from this miserable doggerel to "Burns' im- 
 mortal lines" — the phrase is Henley's — and we will 
 see what Matthew Arnold has to say of them later 
 ■on: — 
 
 Ae fond kiss, and then we sever ! 
 
 Ae fareweel, and that forever ! 
 Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee. 
 
 Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee. 
 
 Had we never loved sae kindly. 
 
 Had we never loved sae blindly. 
 Never met, or never parted — 
 
 We had ne'er been broken-hearted. 
 
 Red Page has been prejudiced enough, silly 
 enough to say that Burns hail rarely power to elevate 
 or inspire any but the Scotch, and them chiefly in 
 their drunken moods, but I venture to assert that
 
 SOME BULLETIN BLUNDERS. 
 
 there is not an unshaven scribe with an inky fore- 
 finger in a clingy backroom anywhere, who would 
 not, moved by this passionate lament, rather be able 
 to append his signature to it than to anything the 
 Bulletin ever printed. But no doubt this crimson 
 authority has classed Ae Fond Kiss either as a 
 " Neat Vamp" or as a " Clean-Steal." It would not 
 be hard to fitly describe him by one larid but appro 
 priate epithet in familiar use. 
 
 Take the following as another example of 
 Henley's at times haggling method of handling 
 Burns. He asserts that My Nannie, was 
 perhapft suggested by Ramsay's formal lines : — 
 
 While some for pleasiire pawn their health 
 
 'IVixt Lais and the bagnio, 
 I'll save myself, and without stealth 
 
 Kiss and caress my Nannie, O ! 
 
 Listen to three verses out of Burns' ten : — 
 
 Behind you hills where Ltxgar flows, 
 Mang woods and mosses many, 0, 
 
 The winter sun the day has closed, 
 And I'll awa to Nanny, O. 
 
 Her face is fair, her heart is true ; 
 
 As spotless as she's bonnie' O, 
 The opening gowan, wat wi dew, 
 Nae purer is than Nannie, O.
 
 36 SOME BULLETIN BLUNDERS. 
 
 Oor auld guidman delights to view 
 His sheep and kye thrive bouuie, O, 
 
 JBut I'm as blithe that hands his pleugh, 
 And hae nae care bnt Nannie, O. 
 
 Is there any resemblance, in quality or kind, 
 between the two sets of verses, other than in the use 
 of three words — My Nannie, '? And these, as 
 Cunningham points out, were used in association 
 long before Ramsay's day.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Burns compared with His Alleged Sources of 
 
 Inspiration. 
 
 It seems absurd that charges of literary larceny 
 should be made against one who was, as Charles 
 "Whibley says : •' So prodigal of his gifts that be would 
 send a poem to a friend and forget its existence." 
 Can it be imagined that a cold-blooded plagiarist 
 would write, as did Burns to Thomson, in these 
 terms : — " Are you not vexed to think that the men 
 of genius who composad our fine Scottish lyrics 
 should be unknown. It has given me many a heart- 
 ache !" This is scarcely the language of a filcher. 
 But the sins of the publishers have been placed on 
 his shoulders ; the use of a mere over-word or chorus 
 has been deemed literary burglary, and the formation- 
 of centos from widely scattered fragments — brought 
 together to enrich Scottish literature and not for 
 personal gain or honor — has been denounced as if it 
 
 D
 
 38 BURNS COMPARED WITH HIS 
 
 were an infamous crime. Even if all were true that 
 has been said about Burns by the Bulletin, it might 
 have been considered as a circumstance of extenuation 
 that death snatched him away in his thirty-seventh 
 year ere he had time to weed out or revise his weaker 
 works, to label more definitely his borrowings, to 
 brand more indelibly his own creations. Yet without 
 any definite evidence, on mere suspicions founded on 
 prejudice and never verified, the Bidletin\i reviewer 
 has asserted, with all the dogmatic downrightness of 
 an infallible oracle, that ; — 
 
 " In the clean-steal category are ' The Primrose' 
 (ravished from Thomas Carew — Burns himself calls 
 it ' an old English song which I daresay is but little 
 known' — wherefore he ravished) ; Bonnie Dundee ; 
 Whistle and I'll come to You, My Lad ; Landlady 
 •count the Lawin ; Laddie, Lie Near Me ; We're a' 
 Noddin' ; and some two score more. In these cases, 
 if Burns has not annexed the whole of his originals, 
 he has annexed so much of idea, phrase and rhyth- 
 mus that the song would be nothing without them." 
 
 It is interesting to observe the lengths to which 
 unscrupulous prejudice will go. The Primrose was 
 ■collected for Thomson — who just then wanted words 
 set to certain old tunes — by Burns. He wrote thus 
 to him : "For Todlin' Hame (a Scots tune of ancient 
 origin) ; take the following old Enghsh song, which
 
 ALLEGED SOURCES OF INSPIRATION. 39 
 
 I daresay is but little known. N.B. — I have altered 
 it a little." (He did not even Scotticise it.) I know 
 no better proof of the malignity of the Bulletin's 
 bludgeoner. Reviewing Henley's book ; basing his 
 a,ttacks presumably on evidence therein, he accuses 
 the poet of 'clean-stealing' Carew's poem. Let me 
 hoist him with a quotation from Henley ! On page 
 10-4 of volume iv. this editor says :--" Burns did but 
 ply his trade with a view to filling a page in Thom- 
 son's book ; and as he claimed not the maker's 
 honors but was content with the vamper's, there is 
 no more to be said about the matter, so far as he is 
 concerned. But one can't help wishing that he had 
 lived to curb the enthusiasm of certain of his com- 
 mentators." It is never safe to review a book after 
 merely smelling the paper-knife ! I have read many 
 ■editions of Burns and have never yet met The Prim- 
 rose in any. The commentator alluded to by Hen- 
 ley is Scott Douglas — a very incompetent literary 
 authority, who published a very heterogeneous edition 
 of the poet ; a menace, from the rubbish included, to 
 his reputation. The manner by Avhich songs came to 
 be attributed to Burns which he never wrote and 
 never claimed, is easily traced. Creech, Currie, 
 Cunningham, and others, printed his collections for 
 music together Avith his accompanying letters, which 
 gave full information concerning them. Some later 
 publishers retained some of the songs, and condensed 
 the letters into foot-notes. Two or three still later 
 publishers, either ignorant or careless, kept one or
 
 40 BURNS COMPARED WITH HIS 
 
 two songs and dropped their foot-notes. But to blame 
 the poet for what took place fifty or a hundred years 
 after his death, is cruel, cowardly, and contemptible. 
 
 The so-called ' clean-steal ' of Whistle and 
 I'll come to you, my Lad, lies chiefly in an adapta- 
 tion of its chorus from that of an old Scotch song. 
 Cunningham somewhere says — "Burns' version of 
 this lyric is founded on an old fragment, but he 
 poured his own feeling and fancy so happily through 
 the whole, that not a single line remains entire, nor 
 can the new be pronounced free of the language of 
 the older ministrel." Burns acknowledged his debt,, 
 and Cunningham proclaimed the acknowledgment. 
 Yet Burns is styled a thief, and the Scotch are 
 accused of ignorantly participating in the robbery— 
 of reset after the theft. But let us iiiake comparison 
 of the evidence, supplied by Henley, on which the 
 charge of theft is founded. 
 
 BEFORE BURNS. 
 
 Peggy's a maid both kind and fair, 
 
 And Peggy is dear to Jolinny, 
 And none in all Scotland here and there. 
 
 None is so blithe and bonnie. 
 And Peggy has vow'd their love to own. 
 whistle my love and I'll come down 
 And gang to the kirk wi' Johnnie. 
 — From Whistle and I'll come down.
 
 ALLEGED SOURCES OF INSPIRATION. 41 
 
 Whistle and I'll cum to ye, my lad ! 
 
 Whistle and I'll cum to ye, my lad ! 
 
 Gin father and mither and a' should gae mad. 
 
 Whistle and I'll come to ye, my lad ! 
 
 — From song in Herd MS. 
 
 AFTEE BURNS. 
 
 O whistle, and I'll come to you, my lad ; 
 O whistle, and I'll come to you, my lad ; 
 Tho' faither and mither and a' should gae mad, 
 •O whistle, and I'll come to you, my lad. 
 
 Bvit warily tent, when ye come to court me. 
 And comena unless the back-yett be a-jee ; 
 
 Syne up the back-stile, and let naebody see, 
 And come as ye werena comin to me. 
 
 At kirk, or at market, whene'er ye meet me. 
 Gang by me as tho' that ye carena' a flee ; 
 
 But steal me a blink o' your bonnie black e'e 
 Yet look as ye werena lookin at me. 
 
 Aye vow and protest that ye carena for me. 
 And whiles ye may lichtly my beauty a wee ; 
 
 But court na anither, tho' Jokin' ye be. 
 For fear that she wile your fancy f rae me. 
 
 Burns laid no claim to Bonnie Dundee. The 
 version now most popular — it begins ' To the Lords 
 of Convention, 'twas Claverhouse spoke' — is by Sir 
 Walter Scott. In a letter to Cleghorn, Burns says 
 ^' You will see by the above that I have added a 
 stanza to Bonnie Dundee." This Avas the one
 
 42 BURNS COMPARED WITH HIS 
 
 beginning — ' My blessin's on thy sweet wee lippie/ 
 He used infinitely less of the various editions in 
 circulation than did Scott, who has taken the whole 
 chorus — holus-bolus. But Burns, who died before 
 his sun had attained its meridian, leaving his 
 poetical affairs in confusion, is styled a thief, though 
 his borrowings were less and his acknowledgments 
 no less ample than were those of the later poet, who 
 goes scot-free of abuse. 
 
 * * * ^ 
 
 With the MS. of Landlady, count the Lawin' 
 Burns acknowledged his indebtedness to some old 
 songs. Let me quote for the purpose of comparison. 
 
 BEFORE BURNS. 
 
 Here's to the King, 
 
 Te ken wha I mean, 
 And to ilka honest boy, 
 
 That will do it again. 
 
 — Jacobite Sotig. 
 
 When you hear the pipe soun's 
 
 Tuittie tattie to the drums, 
 Up your swords and down your guns, 
 
 And at the louns again. 
 
 —Old Ballad. 
 
 Every day my wife tells me 
 
 That ale and brandy will ruin me ; 
 But if gude liquor be my dead, 
 This shall be written on my head. 
 Landlady, count the lawin'. 
 
 — From Burns' MS.
 
 ALLEGED SOURCES OE INSPIRATION. 4S 
 
 AFTEE BURNS. 
 
 Landlady, count the lawin' 
 The day is near the dawin : 
 Ye're a blin' drunk, boys, 
 And I'm but jolly fou. 
 Hey tutti, taiti, 
 How tutti, taiti — 
 Hey t^itti, taiti, 
 Wha's f u noo ? 
 
 Cog, an' ye were aye fou, 
 Cog, an' ye were aye t'ou, 
 I wad sit and sing to you. 
 If ye were aye fou. 
 
 Weel may ye a' be ! 
 Ill may ye never see ! 
 God bless the king, boys. 
 And the companie ! 
 
 It is positively astounding that Henley should 
 call Burns' third verse a variation of the Jacobite 
 song ; only a violent mental squint enables the 
 Bulletin to style the song a clean-steal. 
 
 It will surprise no one who has followed me thus 
 far to learn that Burns laid no claim to Laddie, lie 
 Near Me. He was asked to set words to the air of a 
 song so named, and refused on the grounds that he
 
 44 BURNS COMPARED WITH HIS 
 
 did not know the tune. Henley, however, is of 
 opinion that Burns amended and condensed the 
 original for Thomson. But in his Remarks on Scot- 
 tish Song — appended first to Cromek's edition of his 
 verses, and included in many modern editions of 
 Burns' works — Burns says : ' This song is by Black- 
 lock.' (Dr. Thos. Blacklock was the blind poet men- 
 tioned by Dr. Samuel Johnson in a letter to Mrs. 
 Thrale, dated from Edinburgh, Aug. 1773.) Is this 
 the conduct of a ' Clean-Stealer '? It is a safe thing 
 to libel a man dead for over 100 years ! By the way, 
 for the information of ignorant and malicious critics, 
 I may further say that Burns' Remarks on Scottish 
 Song were written by him in an interleaved copy of 
 the first four volumes of Johnson's Musical Museum. 
 Thence they were transcribed by Cromek, and pub- 
 lished in his Reliques of Burns. They are now to be 
 found in the Chandos and other modern editions of 
 the Scottish poet's works. 
 
 As for We're a' Noddin', Burns supplied it to 
 Johnson's Musical Museum, and the note therein 
 says " corrected by Burns." As Burns never claimed 
 the song — the bulk is his, nevertheless — the Bulletin'' s 
 Red Page has no reason for saying that he stole it. 
 Concerning all those songs which the Bulletin 
 vulgarly and incorrectly styles " Clean-steals," 
 Henley's description is that Burns had a lead. 
 The contrast between the fairly-instructed editor and 
 his biased quite ignorant reviewer is marked.
 
 ALLEGED SOURCES OF INSPIRATION. 45 
 
 But my readers may now compare the song as 
 it was when Burns found it with its after condition : — 
 
 BEFOEE BUENS. 
 
 Cats like milk, and dogs like broo, 
 
 Lads like lassies, and lassies lads too ; 
 
 And they're a' nodding, nidding, nidding, nodding, 
 
 They're a nodding at oor house at harne. 
 
 Kate sits i' the neuk supping hen-broo, 
 Deil take Kate if she does not know it too ; 
 And they're a' nodding, nidding, &c. 
 
 # * * * 
 
 AFTEE BUENS. 
 
 Chorus. 
 
 We're a' noddin, 
 Nid, nid, noddin, 
 We're a' noddin 
 At oor hoose at hanie. 
 
 ' Gruid e'en to ye Kimmer, 
 And how do ye do ? ' 
 ' Hicvip', quo Kimmer, 
 'The better that I'm fou ! ' 
 We're a noddin, &c. 
 
 Kate sits i' the neuk, 
 
 Suppin' hen-bi 00, 
 
 Deil tak Kate 
 
 An she be na noddin too ! 
 
 An we're a', &c.
 
 46 BURNS COMPARED WITH HIS 
 
 ' Hoo's a' wi ye, Kimmer ? 
 And how do yoii fare ? ' 
 ' A pint o' the best o't, 
 An' twa pints maix- ' ! 
 An we're a', A:c. 
 
 ' Hoo's a' wi ye, Kimmer ? 
 And ho w div ye thrive ? 
 How many bairns hae ye ? ' 
 Quo Kimmer, ' I hae five.' 
 An we're a', &c. 
 
 ' Are they a' Johnnie's ? 
 • She : ' Atweel na ; 
 Twa o' them were gotten 
 When Johnnie was awa. ! ' 
 An we're a', &c. 
 
 Cats like milk 
 
 And dogs like broo ; 
 
 Lads like lassies weel, 
 
 And lassies lads too. 
 
 We're a' noddin , 
 
 Nid, nid, noddin, 
 
 We're a' noddin 
 
 At oor hoose at hanie. 
 
 Continuing his tortuous course the Bulletin's 
 red-handed murderer of reputation ingeniously said 
 that : " Burns never claimed credit for many of the 
 verses which his eulogists attribute to him. If he 
 did, he might have claimed credit for a Clean- Steal 
 like the ' Dusty Miller.'"
 
 ALLEGED SOURCES OF INSPIRATION. 47 
 
 If this slip-shod stuff has any meaning, it is that 
 Bums (lid not use The Dusty Miller as his own. 
 Nevertheless, it is styled a ' Clean-Steal.' What 
 next ? The facts are that Barns remodelled the 
 first stanza of the ' Miller,' and added thereon an 
 entirely new verse. He did not sign it, and, in the 
 notes to his poems, this information was given. 
 Consequently, only the most superficial of Burns' 
 admirers could view the Dusty Miller as ' an egg 
 of genius that only Burns' mind could lay,' and only 
 the most malevolent of his critics could dub it a 
 * Clean-Steal.' There are minds which lay other 
 varieties of egg — the egg of innuendo, of misrepre- 
 sentation, of suppression, of absolute untruth ! 
 BEFOEE BUENS. 
 
 O, the Dusty Miller, O the Dtisty Miller, 
 Dusty was his coat. Dusty was his ciillour ; 
 Dusty was the kiss I got frae the Miller ! 
 Oh, the Dusty Miller wi' the dusty coat, 
 He will spend a shilling ere he win a groat. 
 
 O' the Dusty Miller, —Herd, MS, 
 
 * * * * 
 
 AFTER BURNS. 
 
 Hey the dusty miller 
 
 And his dusty coat ! 
 He will spend a shilling 
 
 Or he win a groat. 
 Dusty was the coat. 
 
 Dusty was the colour. 
 Dusty was the kiss 
 
 That I got frae the miller !
 
 48 BURNS COMPARED WITH HIS 
 
 Hey the dusty miller 
 
 And his dusty sack ! 
 Leeze me on the calling 
 
 Fills the dusty peck ! 
 Fills the dusty peck, 
 
 Brings the dusty siller ! 
 I wad gie my coatie 
 
 For the dusty miller. 
 
 Still further urging on his wild career, the 
 Bulletins Red Page asserted that:—" The two best 
 lines in Scots Wha Hae are not Burns' ; Auld Lang 
 Syne is not Burns' ; Comin' Thro' the Eye is not 
 Burns' ; My Love is Like the Eed, Red Rose is not 
 
 ■p, ' >> 
 
 Jurns 
 
 Concerning this magnificent war-song, which, 
 ■says Carlyle, " Should be sung with the throat of 
 the whirlwind," Burns makes this statement : — "I 
 have borrowed the last stanza from the common- 
 stall edition of Wallace — 
 
 A false usurper sinks in every foe. 
 And Liberty returns with every blow. 
 
 And no one has been able to show his further 
 indebtedness. But here is the chant, as Burns 
 left it :— 
 
 Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled, 
 Scots, wham Bruce has aften led; 
 Welcome to your gory bed, 
 Or to Victorie !
 
 ALLEGED SOURCES OF EWSPIRATION. 49 
 
 Now's the day, and now's the hour : 
 See the front of battle lower ; 
 See approach proud Edward's power — 
 Chains and Slaverie ! 
 
 Wha will be a traitor knave ? 
 Wha wad fill a coward's grave ':' 
 Wha sae base as be a slave ? 
 Let him turn and flee 't 
 
 Wha for Scotland's King and Law, 
 Freedom's sword will strongly draw ? 
 Freeman stand, or Freeman fa' 
 Let him on wi' me ! 
 
 By oppression's woes and pains ! 
 By your Sons in servile chains ! 
 We will drain ouv dearest veins. 
 But they shall be free ! 
 
 Lay the proud usurpers low ! 
 Tyrants fall in every foe ! 
 Liberty's in every blow ! 
 Let lis do, or dee ! 
 
 The Bulletin fully quoted My Luve is Like in 
 order to prove that Burns had no fire of his own, 
 and filched the poetic flame. In Cunningham's and 
 many other editions it is stated that this was a 
 paraphrase of an old Nithsdale song. The first verse 
 was little improved by Burns ; the two next quoted 
 first appeared, it is said, in a chap-book (1792). If 
 the poet had no hand in putting them there ; if they 
 were not " cribbed " from him, as were many other
 
 50 BURNS COMPARED WITH HIS 
 
 songs by the chapmen of his generation and the 
 next ; if they were not of the bogus Burns' 
 "originals" then so numerously in process of 
 manufacture ; then only the verse beginning As 
 fair art Thou, My Bonnie Lass, can be fairly 
 attributed to him. The ideas, however, of the 
 quoted verses were like shifting sands — always 
 changing in form, quantity and place, but Burns' 
 patchwork lives as he left it always, never as he 
 found it, and Henley is forced to style My Luve is 
 Like, a "■ mosaic of rather beggarly scraps of verse, 
 . . . . exquisitely done, of course." That can 
 be no clean-steal which Burns never claimed ; at 
 most, it is a vamp. Even so, is there to be no 
 admiration, nothing but abuse, for the man who, 
 from some " beggarly scraps " blown hither and 
 thither by the four winds of heaven, wove an 
 exquisite song— perfect in pattern and full of 
 harmony '? Let us compare : — 
 
 BEFORE BURNS. 
 
 Gate 
 
 Her cheeks are like the roses 
 
 That blossom fresh in June, 
 O, she's like a new-strung instriiment 
 
 That's newly put in tune. 
 
 —From a black letter ballad, " The Wantnn fFifc of Castle 
 * * * * 
 
 The seas they shall run dry, 
 
 And rocks melt into sands ; 
 Then I'll love you still, my dear. 
 
 When all those things are done. . .
 
 ALLEGED SOURCES OF INSPIRATION. 51 
 
 Fare yon well, my own true love, 
 
 And fare you well for a while, 
 And I will be sure to return back again. 
 
 If I go ten thousand mile. 
 
 —Chapbook of 1792. 
 
 The Day shall turn to Night, dear Love, 
 
 And the Eoclis melt with the Sun, 
 Before that I prove false to thee, 
 Before my life be gone, dear Love, 
 Before my Life be gone. 
 
 — From the Loyal Lover's Promise. 
 
 BUENS. 
 
 O, my luve is like a red, red rose, 
 That's newly sprung in June. 
 
 O, my luve is like the melodie, 
 That's sweetly play'd in tune. 
 
 As fair art thou, my bonnie lass, 
 
 So deep in luve am I, 
 And I will luve thee still, my dear. 
 
 Till a' the seas gang dry. 
 
 Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear, 
 And the rocks melt wi' the sun. 
 
 And I will luve thee still, my dear, 
 "While the sands o' life shall run. 
 
 Now fare thee weel, my only luve. 
 And fare thee weel a while ! 
 
 And I will come again, my luve, 
 Tho' it were ten thousand mile !
 
 52 BURNS COMPARED WITH HIS 
 
 Henley does not quote anything which remotely 
 resembles Comin' thro' the Eye as a probable source 
 of inspiration. The words " And I led her into the 
 Eye," which occur in a filthy English ballad, are all 
 he brings forward. Cunningham says : " Burns 
 took the old strain . . . thrashed some of the 
 loose chaff from about it, and sent it to the Museum." 
 He quotes a verse of the ' old strain,' whose style, 
 and particularly its use of the word ' gloom,' leads 
 me to think it post-dates Burns. No evidence exists 
 to justify the assertion that Comin' thro' the Eye 
 is not Burns'. Nevertheless it is rarely attributed to 
 him and as seldom published with his works. 
 
 BUENS. 
 
 0, Jenny's a' weet, piiir body, 
 
 Jenny's seldom dry ; 
 She draigl't a' her petticoatie, 
 
 Comin' thro' the rye ! 
 
 Comm' thro' the rye, puir body, 
 
 Comin' thro' the rye. 
 She draigl't a' her petticoatie, 
 
 Comin thro' the rye ! 
 
 Gin a body meet a body 
 
 Comin' thro' the rye. 
 Gin a body kiss a body, 
 
 Need a body ci-y ? 
 
 Gin a body meet a body 
 Comin' thro' the glen. 
 
 Gin a body kiss a body 
 Need the warld ken P
 
 ALLEGED SOTKCES OF IXSPI hWnON. .JJ 
 
 (rin :i )iii(ly nwvi a Imdy 
 ('oiuin' frae the well, 
 
 (rin a body court a Ijudy, 
 Need a borlv tell ? 
 
 Ilka lassie has lier hullie, 
 
 Nane they sae hae f, 
 Hut a' till.' lads they lo'e nie weel 
 
 Au' iiane the waur am T. 
 
 Henley's notes on Auld Lang Syne are but 
 little more complete than those of Cunningham, 
 Creech, or Currie. In styling this a " derived song " 
 the Hnlletiii war^ right. When the Bulletin said it 
 was )}(it Burns' song, then, however, it spoke in error 
 and contradicted its prior assertion. F'our of the 
 five verses are wholly his ; the first verse and chorus 
 — inspired, without doubt, by the lines now ([noted 
 — are immeasurably superior to the originals. In 
 fact, only an enthusiast, competent to see latent 
 possibilities, could write, as did Burns to Mrs. 
 Dunlop :— '• Light lie the turf on the breast of the 
 heaven-inspired poet who composed this glorious 
 fragment." Of course, it may be that Burns, like 
 many of his predecessors and contemporaries, in this 
 case as in others manufactured originals in order to 
 get a better hearing for his own verses. 

 
 .7/ jich'NS coMi'.\u::i) wii ii ms 
 
 BEFORE BURNS. 
 
 Shoiild old acquaintance he forgot. 
 
 And never thought iipon, 
 'I'he Flames of Love extinguished 
 
 And freely past and gone ? 
 Is thy kind Heart now gjowu so cold 
 
 hi that Loving Breast <>t thim-. 
 'I'liat thou cau'st never oncf retlert 
 
 On Old-long-syne ? 
 
 Chorus. 
 On old long syne, 
 On old long syne, my jo, 
 On old long syne : 
 That thou can'st never oiicc ivHccl 
 ( >ii old long syuf. 
 
 — Aiioityntoiis JiUohitc FniginenI 
 
 BURNS. 
 
 Should auld acquaintance be forgot , 
 An' never brought to min' ? 
 
 Sliould auld acquaintance be forgot 
 An' days o' auld lang syne ? 
 
 We twa liae run ahoot tlie braes. 
 
 And pu'd the gowans line ; 
 Mut we've wandered mony a weai'.v til 
 
 Since days o' auld lang syuf. 
 
 We twa liLif paidl't in the Imni, 
 V\\>\n morning sun till dine ; 
 
 Hut seas between us braid liac roared 
 Since days o' auld lang syne,
 
 .\LLi:(]i:i> sorucKS of insi'ii^a now .j.t 
 
 8:i(_' heir's ;i, Inuil, my Iriisty f'ritni', 
 
 And >^'it''s a liaud <>' tluile ; 
 And we'll tak a richt guid willie-waught 
 
 For days o' auld lang syne. 
 
 And snrely you'll be your pint-stoiip? 
 
 As surely I'll be mine ; 
 And we'll tak .a cui) o' kindness yet 
 
 For days o' auld lang syne. 
 
 Chorus. 
 
 For auld lang syne, my dear, 
 
 For auld lang syne. 
 We'll tak a i-up o' kindness yet, 
 
 For auld lung syne. 
 
 One pities the unfortunate bigot whose prejudice 
 drives him to censure Burns for turninc: out work of 
 this class. What an immeasurable quantity of good 
 feeling it has promoted throughout the world ! 
 
 Following up his trail of discontent and disap- 
 proval, the l)ilious critic is found quoting Aye Waukin 
 as an example of the old Ballad diamond. Reference 
 will show that his case is insupportable. Of its six- 
 teen lines at least twelve — according to Henley (who 
 styles .it a ' masterpiece by Burns ') and by general 
 consent — are Burns' own. The lines juxtaposed by 
 the Bulletin to Aye Waukin — When l^raving Angry 
 Winter's Storms — as an example of the Burns' paste,
 
 56 BURNS COMPARED WITH HIS 
 
 are in his very worst style. It is palpably untrue 
 that it is his ' typical Very Own.' He says himself : 
 ' These English songs gravel me to death. I have 
 not the command of the language that I ha^•e of my 
 native tongue. In fact, I think that my ideas are 
 more barren in English than Scottish.' The Iliilli- 
 tinn devices for the discrediting of Burns are certainly 
 ingenious. Are they honest "? Here is the original 
 stone in the rough and the diamond of Burns' 
 polishing. 
 
 BEFORE BURNS. 
 
 O wat, wat, 
 
 O wat and weary ! 
 Sleep I can get nane 
 
 For thinkin' on ray Deary ! 
 A' the nicht I wake, 
 
 A' the day I weary, 
 Sleep I can get nane 
 
 For thinkin' on my Deary ! 
 
 —Herd, M. S. 
 
 BURNS. 
 
 Ay waukin, 0, 
 
 Waukin still and weary ; 
 Sleep I can get nane 
 
 For thinking on ray dearie 
 
 Simmer's a pleasant time : 
 Flowers of every colour, 
 
 The water runs ower the heugh, 
 And I long for ray lover.
 
 ALLEGED SOURCES UE INSPIRATION. 
 
 When I sleep I dream, 
 When I wauk I'm eene, 
 
 Sleep I can get nane 
 
 For thinkin' on my dearie. 
 
 Lanely night comes on, 
 A' the lave are sleepin. 
 
 I think on my bonnie lad, 
 And bleer my een wi' greetin. 
 
 Aye waukin', O, 
 
 Waukin still an' weary ; 
 ISleep I can get nane 
 
 For thinkin' o' my dearie. 
 
 The Bulletin'. s Red Page also stated that ;— ' The 
 clean-steal class slides imperceptibly into the neat 
 vamp, in which Burns contributes so much to the 
 construction that the product is practically a new 
 song.' Nevertheless, a little further on it insinuated 
 that the public, and especially ' the average Scotch- 
 man,' have been deceived too long by a reputation 
 which is ' legendary and Scottish ;' and throughout 
 the pervading idea is that Biu-ns should be expur- 
 gated of the Neat- Vamps (the practically new 
 songs) as well as the Clean -Steals. 
 
 Another contradiction : In one place the Bulle- 
 tin said that Burns is credited with 108 songs which 
 are neat-vamps ; further down it credited him with 
 108 Neat-Vamps and Derivatives when bunched to- 
 gether. Starting out to take away a man's reputa- 
 tion, some appearance of accuracy should have been
 
 3S BURMS COMPARED WITH 11 IS 
 
 pi-eserved. The Bulletm also asserted that among 
 the vainps must be included The Birks of Aberfeldie , 
 Macpherson's Farewell, For our Rightful King, The 
 Siller Tassie, John Anderson, My Jo, and were 
 My Love. The man who would call The Birks of 
 Aberfeldy a vamp is either cursed with literary op- 
 thalmia or is guilty of deliberate false testimony. It 
 has live verses — all Burns' very own, and he only 
 vamped the chorus from that of an old song. There- 
 in it ran thus — 
 
 ' (_) bonnie iaswie, wilt thou j,'o 
 To the birks of Abergeldy V 
 
 Therefore, the extent of Burns' indebtedness is two 
 lines of very matter-of-fact entreaty. Further, the 
 chorus has had so little influence on Burns' song as 
 not to qualify it for the derivative class. 
 
 ^ ^ ^ :if. 
 
 Of the 24 lines that make up Macpherson's 
 Lament, three are borrowed, but none of the others, 
 in spirit or in language, owe anything to the old 
 ballad. My readers can draw their own conclusions 
 from comparison. 
 
 BEFORE BURNS. 
 
 I spent my time in rioting, 
 
 Debauched my health and strength ; 
 I pillaged, plundered, murdered, 
 
 ilut now, alas ! at length 
 I'm brought to i)unishment condign ; 
 
 I'ale death draws near to me ;
 
 ALLEGED SOURCES OE INSPIRATION. 
 
 The end I ever did project, 
 T>) hang upon a tree. 
 
 Then wantonly and rantinj^ly 
 I am resolved to die ; 
 
 And with undaunted courage J 
 Shall mount this fatal tree. 
 
 -Cuj'tdiii Aiilnixtons h'ati'iri'll. 
 
 FiUHNS. 
 
 Farewell, ye dungeons dark and stronj^ 
 
 The wretch's destinie ; 
 Macpherson's time will not be long 
 
 On yonder gallows tree. 
 
 Chohus. 
 
 Sae rantingly, sae rantuigly, 
 
 Sae dauntingly gaed he ; 
 He played a spring and danceil it lound, 
 
 Beneath the gallows-tree. 
 
 Oh ! what is death but parting breath ? 
 
 On many a bloody plain 
 I've dared his face, and in this place 
 
 I scorn him yet again ! 
 
 Untie these bands frim oh my hands 
 And bring to me my sword ! 
 
 And there's no a man in all Scotland 
 But I'll have him at a word. 
 
 I've lived a life of sturt aud strife ; 
 
 I die by treachery : 
 It burns my heart I must depart 
 
 And nut avenged be.
 
 60 BURNS COMPARED WITH II IS 
 
 Now farewell light, thou sunshine bright, 
 
 And all beneath the sky ! 
 May coward shame disdain his name, 
 
 The wretch that dare not die ! 
 
 Henley says of A ' foi- oui- Kightful King, that 
 Buohan, who attributed it to Captain Ogilvie, was 
 ' still bent on fathering everything on somebody' — a 
 line the Bulletin might commit to memory. 
 The first and last verses of Mcdli/ Stcivart — an alleged 
 blackletter ballad of which the earliest copy extant 
 bears as date 1807 — are the only verses that in any 
 way resemble Burns' song, which dates in publica- 
 tion from 1796. The Demon Lover has two lines 
 which resemble those now quoted. Of Burns' 80 lines, 
 none owe anything to Mally Stewart, except his 
 third verse, which has been taken almost verbatim, 
 and, says Henley, 'set in a jewel of Burnsian gold.' 
 Of the whole song, Henley goes on to say that 
 i Burns touched his borrowing to issues as fine as 
 the Romantic Lyre has to show.' 
 
 BEFORE 13UKN8. 
 
 Mally Stewakx. 
 
 (1) 
 
 The cold winter is past and gone, and now comes in the Spring, 
 And I am one of the King's Life-Guards, and must go tight 
 for my King, 
 
 My dear, 
 
 I must go tight for my King,
 
 ALLECEi) SOURCES Of INSPIKATIO!^. 61 
 
 IX. 
 
 The trooper turned himself about all on the Irish shore, 
 He has given the bridle reins a shake, sayin;^ adieu for ever- 
 more 
 
 My dear, 
 Adieu for evermore ! 
 
 AFTER BURNS. 
 
 ll was a' for our rightfu' King 
 We left fair Scotland's strand . 
 
 It was a' for our rightfu' King, 
 We e'er saw Irish land, 
 
 My dear— 
 We e'er saw Irish land. 
 
 Now a' is done that men can do, 
 
 And a' is done in vain, 
 My Love and Native Land farewell. 
 For I maun cross the main. 
 My dear — 
 For I maun cross the main, 
 
 * * * 
 
 He turned him right and round about 
 
 Upon the Irish shore 
 And gave his bridle-reins a shake, 
 
 With adieu for evermore. 
 My dear — 
 And adieu for evermore. 
 
 The sodger frae the war returns, 
 
 The sailor frae the main. 
 But I hae parted frae my love 
 
 Never to meet again, 
 My dear — 
 Never to meet again.
 
 6i bOn\'s CoMrAhU'J) wriii Hi> 
 
 When day is gone and nicht is come, 
 
 \nd a' folk bound to sleep, 
 1 think on him that's far awa 
 
 The lee-Iang nicht and weep, 
 My dear — 
 The lee-tang nicht and weep. 
 
 It is my opinion that Mallij 'Stewart was parti;/ 
 stolen from Rums railicr than that Hums hormurfl from 
 Mally Stewart. 
 
 Usually known as My Bonnie Mary, The 
 Siller Tassie owes 14 or 15 of its 16 lines to Burns. 
 The poet told the publisher that he took the first 
 half-stanza from an old ballad. The borrowed lines 
 or line hardly contain the motive of the song — which 
 never can be honestly called a vamp. 
 
 . BEFOEE BURNS. 
 
 Go fetch to me a pint of wine, 
 
 Go till it to the Brim ; 
 That I may drink my gude Lord's health, 
 
 Tho' Errol be his name. 
 
 BURNS. 
 
 Gae bring to me a pint o' wine, 
 
 An' fill it in a siller tassie ; 
 That I may drink before I go, 
 
 A service to my bonnie lassie. 
 My boat rocks at the pier of Leith ; 
 
 Fu' loud the wind blaws frae the ferry ; 
 The ship rides by North Berwick law. 
 
 An' I maun leave my bunuie Mary.
 
 ALLUGEU SOIJRCKS OF INSPIRATION. (iJ 
 
 The trumpets sound, the banners liy, 
 
 The glittering spears are ranked and ready ; 
 The shouts o' war are heard afar, 
 
 The battle closes thick and bloody. 
 But it's no the roar o' sea or shore 
 
 Wad make me langer wish to tarry ; 
 Nor shout o' war that's heard afar, 
 
 It's leavin' thee, my bonnie Mary. 
 
 Burns never claimed O were my Love ; which 
 the Bulletin placed in its list of his vamps. Nor 
 is it a vamp. In the Creech edition it has heen set 
 forth for over one hundred years, over Burns' signa- 
 ture, that only a portion of this lovely song was his ; 
 ' the average Scotchman' has been supplied for about 
 105 years with reliable information as to what is 
 Burns' and what is not. In a letter to Thomson, it 
 is stated by Burns that, in order to eke out a song to 
 the air Hughie Graham, he had added eight lines 
 to an ' inexpressibly beautiful fragment' taken from 
 Witherspoon's Scottish Collection. The eight lines 
 beginning ' Oh, were my Love yon Lilac Fair' are 
 wholly Burns' ; the eight lines which commence ' Oh, 
 gin my Love were yon Red Rose," belong to some 
 gifted Unknown whose muse Burns has slightly 
 assisted.
 
 61 BURNS COMPARED WITH HIS 
 
 IMPROVED BY BURNS. 
 
 gin my love were yon red rose 
 
 That grows upon the castle wa', 
 And I mysel' a drap o' dew. 
 
 Into her bonnie breast to fa' ! 
 Oh, there, beyond expression blest, 
 
 I'd feast on beauty a' the night ; 
 Seal'd on her silk saft faulds to rest 
 
 Till fley'd awa' by Phoebus' light. 
 
 BURNS VERY OWN. 
 
 O were my love yon lilac fair, 
 
 Wi' purple blossoms to the spring ; 
 And I, a bird to shelter there, 
 
 When weared on my little wing ; 
 How I wad mourn, when it was torn 
 
 By Autumn wild and Winter rude ! 
 But I wad sing on wanton wing. 
 
 When youthfu' May its bloom renewed. 
 
 Of John Anderson, My Jo, 16 lines are printed 
 in the ordinary editions, but there are eight others 
 in existence which Burns left out because they had 
 not the delicate pathos of the lines retained. As a 
 matter of fact, Burns borrowed nothing; from the 
 gone-before but the refrain of five words — ' John An- 
 derson, My Jo, John,' and if the verses in the Merry 
 Mii.«es, as some most shrewdly suspect, were his own
 
 ALLEGED SOURCES OF INSPIRATION 65 
 
 parody of his own soiii;-, then he hon-owed nothing. 
 So. where the vamp theory has a rightful footing 
 none hnX <i Red Page may say. Is the Page too Red 
 lo raise a bhish? 
 
 .John Anderson, my Jo, .lohn, 
 
 I wonder what you mean. 
 To rise so soon in the mornin"-, 
 
 And sit up so late at e'en ; 
 You'll blear out your eyn, John, 
 
 And why will you do so ? 
 Come sooner to your bed at e'en, 
 
 John Anderson, my Jo. 
 
 - From the Merry Muses of Caledonia 
 
 John Anderson, my Jo 
 
 Cum in as ye gae by, 
 And ye sail get a sheip's head 
 
 Weel baken in a pye ; 
 Weel baken in a pye, 
 
 And a haggis in a pat, 
 John Anderson, my Jo, 
 
 Cum in and ye'se get that.' 
 
 -By J dim Anderson, Touu-piper, Kelso. 
 
 BURNS. 
 
 John Anderson, my Jo, John, 
 
 When we were first acquent. 
 Your locks were like the raven, 
 
 Your bonnie brow was brent ; 
 But now your brow is held, John, 
 
 Your locks are like the snaw ; 
 But blessings on your frosty pow, 
 
 John .\nderson, my Jo.
 
 fid 
 
 llUh'.WS COMrAKIil) WITH HIS 
 
 John Auderson my Jo, John, 
 
 We clamb the hill thegither ; 
 And mony a canty day, John, 
 
 We've had wi' atie anither : 
 Now we maun totter doun, .Tolin, 
 
 But hand in hand we'll go. 
 And sleep thegither at the foot, 
 
 John Anderson, my Jo. 
 
 So much for the direct charges !
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 'I'hk IIddman on thk Wall. 
 
 The Bulh'tin^a alleged review of the Centenary 
 ]^>arns teemed with contradictions. In several places 
 the Scotch were damned as an unpoetical and un- 
 imaginative race — this, in order to discredit the 
 Burns of whom they think so iniich. In another 
 place, again for the purpose of discrediting Burns, 
 the ancient 8cotch-song writer.s were thus lauded : — 
 
 The sincerity, the ring, the intensity (either of humour or 
 pathos), the charm and the power, these are always the pro- 
 perty of the rough, so-joyous, so-sad old rhymers (Scotch ) from 
 whom the song Burns borrowed. Often his sympathy gave 
 their worli a better form, but theirs was the living fire. . . . 
 The divine tire that those earlier Titans (Scotch ) stole from 
 Heaven. 
 
 These are peculiar terms to use in descrihing an 
 unpoetical race! But there are other contradictions, 
 fn several instances, Henley is congratulated on his
 
 68 THE HODMAN OF THE WALL. 
 
 production of ;i l>ook whose revelations unmask tlie 
 impostor who has heen so lon.s^- mas(iueradinf>- as a 
 poet. But in another phvce it is calmly stated that 
 " It has always been known or guessed that P.urns 
 was scarcely ever a completely ori^rinal writei'." One 
 statement negatives the other ; neither is correct. 
 Henley's so-called revelations have been common 
 property for over a century. In classic Ihdhtiu 
 phrase, he 'filched them from current literature." 
 
 I had made a random guess that probably Inil 
 one-third of the published editions of Burns con- 
 tained copious notes. The BvUctinx reviewer 
 quibbled therefrom that the alleged ignorance of the 
 average Scot of Burns' alleged plagiarisms is due to 
 the noteless two thirds. This is lovely, coming from 
 one who throughout eight columns revelled in the 
 idea that Henley's edition — published at two guinea; 
 net — would constitute a revelation to the Scottish 
 nation and would obliterate ' The conception of 
 Burns which is legendary and Scottish.' The Page 
 gloated over the disillusionment this fatuous race 
 was about to experience, and said, ' One can con- 
 ceive the horroi- of the foolish people who have trans- 
 formed Burns into a sort of Scottish Mumbo-.Tumbo.' 
 Therein, he betrayed his belief that the ' foolish 
 people'— foolish because they admire Burns — who 
 were inaccessible to former numberless annotated 
 editions were suddenly to be shown the error of their 
 
 iS
 
 THE HODMAN ON THE WALL. 69 
 
 ways by Henley at forty-tAvo shillings per shock ! 
 
 This the sort of thing you get from the critic (?) who 
 starts with a preconceived idea and endeavours to 
 suppress or distort every fact that does not agree 
 with it. 
 
 Let me parallel a few more Red Page contra- 
 dictions : — 
 
 By dint of his versatile Burns fits his unimaginative 
 
 energy Burns summed up and countrymen and they fit him 
 
 excelled the achievements of a He inspires a Scotchman less 
 
 dozen poets, on a dozen lines, because he is a poet than be- 
 
 . . . Other poets show dit- cause he is Scotch. . . 
 
 ferent sides of the Scottish Burns is a mere tinker, vam- 
 
 nation ; Burns is like Shakes- per and mender, and little 
 
 peare — he comprehends all more. . . . Burns' lack 
 
 sides. His universal vitality of imagination kept him from 
 
 dings his poems into the uni- soaring far from his facts— he 
 
 versalmind. The early Burns is always a tethered goat 
 
 survives as proverbs survive — grazing in an objective circle, 
 
 because his language is a pithy. The later Burns survives in 
 
 vigorous concentration of what virtue of the ability with which 
 
 every Scotsman thinks and he milked other people's cows 
 
 feels, and continually needs into his own bucket. . . . 
 
 and wishes to express. . . . The average Scot is not im- 
 
 No Scotch poet approaches pressed by poetry. 
 Burns as a satirist. . . Burns' 
 Doric stirs the Scotchman's 
 soul — or brain rather. 
 
 Certainly no one will ever accuse the Bulletin' x 
 reviewer of inability to soar far from his facts ; or, 
 indeed, out of sight of them. Albeit not tethered, 
 in this matter he assumes somewhat the complexion 
 of a goat.
 
 70 THE HODMAN ON THE WALL. 
 
 Loath to begin, my case is so strong that I am 
 loath to leave off, but let me say of the New Cult in 
 Criticism that it is unhealthy ; it rseks of miserable 
 conceits, and savors of cant and trickery. It pre- 
 sents to us the statement that Burns had too healthy 
 a body to be a first-class poet — his health was ruined 
 by over^^ ork as a growing boy — and that good writing 
 is the product of a diseased brain and a disordered 
 liver. I will admit that this hypothesis may account 
 for most of the remarkably good writing seen on 
 the Eed Page, but it is not borne out by general 
 results. This brings me to an extraordinary state- 
 ment, attributed to Henley by the l-hdhtiu, but 
 which I have not encountered myself, and which 
 that journal loudly applauds: — 
 
 A lyrical idea— by which I mean a rhythm, a burden, and 
 a drift— once found, the song writes itself. It writes itself 
 easily or with difticulty, it writes itself well or ill. but in the 
 end it writes itself. 
 
 Either Mr. Henley is misquoted or else he easily 
 writes himself down an ass. The difference between 
 the ' lyrical idea' which writes songs easily and well, 
 and the ' lyrical idea' which writes songs with diffi- 
 culty and ill, is to be found in the difference between 
 the brains at the end of the respective pens. If the 
 lyrical idea alone did the work, then the completed 
 song founded on a lyrical idea could never, by any 
 mischance, be ill. One thing is certain : Take the 
 lyrical idea of any song that Burns ever wrote of 
 any value and place it in the hands of Henley, and
 
 77-//: HODMAN ON IIIE WALL. 71 
 
 all the Bulletin bards that ever spoiled clean paper, 
 and I will engage that in everything which goes to 
 make a lyric, Burns is easily lirst and the rest no- 
 where. The Bulletin's review of Henley's Burns was 
 simply a peg on which to hang an attack on the poet 
 and his countrymen. It was almost as unfair to Hen- 
 ley as it was to Burns ; for there is nothing in Henley's 
 criticisms, or notes, or alleged discoveries which 
 warranted the unreasoning savagery of the Bulletin's 
 onslanght. 
 
 The obscure unknown who parades his little 
 hour as Sir Oracle on the Bulletin's Red Pnge, hard- 
 pressed for a mouse-hole of escape, driven to cover 
 an nndignitied retreat from an untenable position by 
 the dust kicked-up over non-essentials, attempted to 
 mitigate the severity of his chastisement by quoting 
 against me the fact that I am Scotch. While he 
 fails to answer my arguments that can not reduce 
 his discomfiture by one iota. But no Scot was ever 
 less clannish than I. No rv.u'us-worshipper, I had 
 originally assessed him in a much lower place than 
 had Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Cowper, Keats, 
 Charles Lamb, Wm. Hazlitt, Delta Moir, Campbell, 
 Prof. Wilson, J. G. Lockhart, William Pitt, Carlyle, 
 Matthew Arnold, Taine, Gosse, Whittier, Whitman, 
 Tngersoll, Beecher, Auguste Angellier, Andrew Lang, 
 Masson, Henley, Whibley, Francis Thompson, and 
 many others, of all climes, and all creeds, superior 
 individually — as the Himalayas to a mole-hill — in
 
 12 THE HODMAN ON THE WALL. 
 
 weight and authority to my opponent. And so little 
 thought of clan or clique have I in this matter that, 
 had Burns not been in hand, I would have dulled a 
 nib in defence of Tennyson. Nor is this second-hand 
 tinker in criticism liberated by his idiotic inuendo 
 that an inferior versifier can be no judge of poetry. 
 If true, it is time that he, an even more miserable 
 failure than I, ceased to sit in judgment on poets 
 and poetry. On his own showing, a hodman, by ac- 
 cident on the wall, is posing as a builder. But the 
 jibe has not only a boomerang flight, it is also un- 
 true. Taine wisely says : " It is dangerous for an 
 artist to be excellent in theory ; the creative spirit is 
 not consonant with the criticising spirit ; he who, 
 quietly seated on the shore, discusses and compares 
 the waves, is hardly capable of plunging straight and 
 boldly into the stormy sea of invention." 
 
 My task is ended. I have, in accordance with 
 my promise, categorically dealt with and disproved 
 all the calumnies of Bulletin manufacture. To make 
 the victory more apparent, however, the defeat more 
 disastrous, the chain of argument more irrefragable, 
 I will quote an opinion from every one of the great 
 authorities above-mentioned and some others.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 The Dead Speak. 
 
 Said Byron in his letter on Pope : — 
 Of what order according to the poetical aristocracy are 
 Bui-ns' poems ? There are his o/ws wzfl^«;»H, Tarn O'Shanter 
 — a tale ; The Cotter's Saturday Night — a descriptive 
 sketch ; some others in the same style ; the rest are songs. 
 So much for the rank of his productions ; the rank of Burns is 
 the very first in his art. 
 
 ^ ^ w 
 
 Said Sir Walter Scott :— 
 
 Notwithstanding the spirit of many of his lyrics, and 
 the exquisite .sweetness and simplicity of others, we cannot 
 but regret that so much of Burns' time and talents were 
 frittered away in compiling and composing for musical col-
 
 14 THE DEAD SPEAK. 
 
 lections. . . Nu poet of our tongue has displayed liighci- skill 
 in maiiying melody to immoftal verse. . No poet ivith the ex- 
 
 ccption of Shakespeare ever possessed the power of exciting the 
 most varied and diseordant emotions ivitJi such swift transitions. 
 . . Deeply must we regret the avocations which diverted 
 a fancy so varied and vigorous, joined with language and 
 expressions suited to all its changes, from leaving a more 
 substantial mouiuneut to his own fame and the honor of his 
 country. 
 
 # # * 
 
 iSaid J. Cr. Lockhart : — 
 
 The Jolly Beggars, that extraordiuiiry sketch, coupled 
 with his later lyrics in a higher vein, is enoixgh to show that 
 iu him we had a master capable of placing the musical drama on a 
 
 cvel ivith the loftiest of our classical poems. The Beggar's Bush 
 and Beggar's Opera sink into tameness iu the comparison. . . 
 Had Burns piu'sued that ^\•alk and poured out his stores of 
 traditional lore, embellished with his extraordinary powers 
 of description of all kinds, we might have had from his hand 
 a series of national tales, uniting the quaint simplicity, sly 
 humor, and irresistible pathos of another Chaucer, with the 
 strong and graceful versification, and muscidine wit and 
 
 sense of another Dry den. 
 
 Said Professor John Wilson — Christopher 
 North : — 
 
 Hums is by f:ir tin; greatest poet that ever sprang from 
 tiie bosom of the people. 
 
 "X: =rf 4i: 
 
 Said William Pitt: — 
 
 I can think of im verse since Shakespeare's, which comes 
 so sweetly and at once from Nature as does Burns'.
 
 THE DEAD HPEAK. 
 
 Said William Wordsworth : — 
 
 Ikirus erected a luouunient tu Fergussou, . . ))ccausc 
 lie felt he had been prematurely cut utV, aud that his fate 
 Iture uo proportiuu to his deserts. . Burns has raised foy 
 
 Jihnsclf a monument so conspieuous and of such imperishable mater, 
 ials, us to vender a local fabric of stone superfluous, 
 
 # ^" 'iv= 
 
 Said William Cowper : — 
 1 Ihiuk liiirus' poems ou the whole a very extraordinary 
 piuduetiou. He is, I believe, the ouly poet these kiu<i,cloms 
 have produced in the lower ranks of life, since 8hakespeare, 
 who need not be indel>ted for any part of his praise to a 
 rharitaljle consideration of his origin, and the disadvantages 
 under which he has laboured. 
 
 Said Charles Lamb : — 
 A predominant feature of independence impresses every 
 page of our glorious Burns. . . In early life I had a pas- 
 sionate fondness for the poetry of Burns. He was the god 
 of my idolatry. 
 
 Said John Keats, who made a pilgrimage to his 
 
 tomb : — 
 
 Burns ! with honor due, 
 
 I oft have honored thee I 
 
 * # * 
 
 Said Thomas Moore : — 
 Scots Wha Hae, iu a great national crisis, would be of 
 more avail than the eloquence of a Demosthenes. The ex- 
 ample of Burns, in his higher inspirations, should materially 
 elevate the character of English song-writing. 
 
 Said William Hazlitt : — - 
 Burns' pictures of good fellowship, of social glee, of 
 quaint humour, are equal to anything ; they come up to
 
 16 THE DEAD SPEAK. 
 
 nature, and they cannot go beyond it. Burns' poetry is a 
 very highly sublimated essence of animal existence. 
 
 Said Dugald Stewart : — 
 All the faculties of Burns' mind were equally vigorous. 
 The idea which his conversation conveyed of the powers of his 
 mind exceeded, if possible, that which was suggested by his 
 writings. 
 
 Said Thomas Campbell : — 
 Viewing Bui'ns merely as a poet, there is scarcely ano. 
 ther regret, connected with his name, than that his produc- 
 tions, with all their merit, fall short of the talents which he 
 possessed. . . Burns has given clixif vitac to his dialect, 
 . . He stamped the little treasure he possessed in the 
 mintage of sovereign genius. 
 
 Said Alexander Moir, the Delta of Blackwood's 
 
 Magazine : — 
 
 The ci'oic'ii that Bums won can never be reniuvcd fivni his head. 
 Much is yet left for other poets, even among that life where 
 his spirit delighted to work ; but he has built monuments on 
 all the high places and they who follow can only hope to leave 
 behind them humbler memorials. 
 
 Said Thomas Carlyle : — 
 Burns has in his songs a tone and words for every mood 
 of man's heart. /;: will seem a small praise if we rank him as the 
 first of all our song-writers, for we know not where to find one 
 'worthy of beini^ second to him. The songs of Burns are by far the 
 best that the world has seen. We recollect no poet of 
 
 Burns' susceptibility who comes before us from the first and 
 remains with us to the last with such a total want of affecta- 
 tion, lie is an honest man and an honest writer. In his sue-
 
 THE DEAD SPEAK. 77 
 
 cesses and his failures, in his greatness and his littleness, he 
 
 is cvey clear, siinpk, and ti'uc, and glitters ivith no lustre but his 
 
 own. 
 
 « * * 
 
 Said Matthew Arnold : — 
 
 As we draw towards the end of the 18th century, we are 
 met by the great name of Burns. . . At moments he 
 touches high seriousness in a profound and passionate melan- 
 choly, as in those four immortal lines taken by Byron as a 
 motto for The Bride of Abydos, but which have in them a depth 
 of poetic quality such as resides in no verse of Byron's own. 
 . . When the largeness and freedom of Burns get full 
 sweep, as in Tarn 0' Shunter, or still more in that puissant 
 and splendid production, The Jolly Beggars, his world may be 
 what it will, his poetic genius triumphs over it. The piece is a 
 superb poetic sticcess : it has a breadth, truth, and power ichieh 
 make the famous scene in A uerbach's cellar of Goethe'' s Faust, seem 
 artificial and taite beside it, and icliich are only matched by Shake- 
 speare and Aristophanes. Here, where his largeness and free- 
 dom serve him so admirably, and also in those songs and poems 
 where to shrewdness he adds infinite archness and wit, and to 
 benignity infinite pathos, where his manner is flawless, and a 
 perfect poetic whole is the result — here we have the genuine 
 Burns of whom the real estimate must be high indeed. Not a 
 classic, but a poet with thorough truth of substance and an 
 answering truth of style, giving us a poetry sound to the core. 
 
 * * # 
 
 Said Taine — previously quoted : — 
 
 Burns wrote his masterpiece. The Jolly Beggars, like the 
 Gucux of Beranger ; but how much more picturesque, varied, 
 and powerful. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Said Ebenezer Elliott : 
 The liou-heartcd Burns — a Niai-'arti frum Heaven !
 
 7S THE DEAD SPEAK, 
 
 Sang Olivei- Wendell Holmes : — 
 
 Ijravu singer of the coming lime, 
 
 Sweet minstrel of tlie joyous present, 
 
 Crowned with the modest wreath of rhyme, 
 Tlie holly leaf of Ayrshire's peasant. 
 
 ^ *r # 
 
 Sang Elizabeth Barrett Browning :^ 
 
 Burns, with pimgeut passiouiugs 
 Set in his eyes. Deep lyric .springs 
 Are of the tire-mount's issuinga. 
 
 :A- -i^ ^: 
 
 Said Green, the historian ; — 
 
 At the lime of Burns' birth England was mad with 
 hatred of the Scots. When Burns died there was nol a 
 Scotchman who was not proud of being a Scotchman. 
 
 Said John G. Whit tier : — 
 
 I began to read Burns and was lost in wonder. It seemed 
 as if the sky liad lifted and the world widened. . . The 
 great Burns has made all the world his debtor. . . His 
 genius is so great and noble that if it has Ijlots they are so 
 
 little that I don't see them. 
 
 # * * 
 
 Said Henry Ward Beecher : — 
 
 There was more put into the making of Burns than any 
 man of his day. His letters are as wonderful as his poems, 
 and his conversation is regarded as richer than either. I 
 woidd that some dainty Ariel could have waited on the in- 
 sjjired ploughman, and stamped into record the incxhaiistiljle 
 How of his wonderful and rapturous conversation. . . To- 
 day, he has made the world rich ; alive he could not earn food 
 and raiment, nor control his livelihood. . . No finev genius 
 has ever delineated the etevnal foi-ms of Nature. His poems are a 
 torch that never goes out to all in dark places. The nation
 
 rilE DEAD SI'HAK. 70 
 
 which reads Buru.s iu the uursery euuld uever have tyrants 
 iu the Parliament. 
 
 '^^ v.- '<• 
 
 Said Col. Robert G. Ingersoll : — 
 
 If I should give Bums the pi. ice which he is entitled to, 
 taking into eousideratiou what he has done fur me, I should 
 place him second, one above him and only one — Shakespeare. 
 . . 'J'he name of Eobert Burns can never die. He is en- 
 rolled among the immortals and will live for ever. . . He 
 left a legacy of riches to the -u^hole woiid. .Scotland has produci.'d 
 the greatest and noblest of our singers — the one who gave us 
 the sweetest and tendsrest song, the best drinking song, the 
 most beautiful love poem, a song which is the apotheosis of 
 independence, and the grandest and noblest song of all the 
 
 World. 
 
 « * * 
 
 Said Professor Masson : — 
 
 it may be doubted whether any poet of any nation since 
 the world began ever sjink so deeply and fondly as did Burns 
 into the memories of the people. Burns, apart from his 
 poetry, impressed enormously Ijy the general strength and 
 versatility of his iutellect. 
 
 Said Robert Louis Stevenson : — 
 
 IJurus is Scotland's most essentially national production. 
 . . In a time when English versification was particularly 
 stiff, lame, and feeble, and words were used with ultra-acade- 
 mical timidity, he wrote verses tnat were easy, racy, graphic, 
 and forcible, and used language with absolute tact and 
 coiirage as it seemed most fit to give a clear impression. . • . 
 When we rememl^er Bums' oljligations to his predecessors, 
 we must never forget his immense advances on them. . . 
 On his appearance, a coarse and laughing literature was 
 toixched to finer issues sind learned gravity of thought and
 
 so THE DEAD SPEAK. 
 
 natural pathos. . . There nevev was a man of letters with 
 more absolute uonimand of his means; we may say of him, 
 without excess, that his style was his slave. Hence the un- 
 broken literary quality of his pieces, which keeps him from 
 any slip into the weariful trade of word-painting, and pre- 
 sents everything in a clear, continuous medium of thought- 
 . . The man who had written a volume of master-pieces 
 iu six mouths, helped to change the course of literary history. 
 . His humoiu' comes from him in a stream so deep and 
 easy that I will venture lo call him the best of humorous 
 poets. He has a rugged compression, a brutal vivacity of 
 epithet, a homely vigour, a delight in local personalities, and 
 an interest in many sides of life that are often despised and 
 passed over by more ett'ete and cultured poets. 
 
 Said Auguste Angellier — who wrote a memoir 
 of Burns, and translated him into the French : — 
 
 Weigh his defects, his faults, as heavily as you like, the 
 scale where lies the pure gold easily turns the balance. . . 
 The clay of ivhich he was ci'eated uias full of diamonds ; and his 
 life was the proudest and one of the most valiant that any 
 poet ever lived. . . So like was his soul to a great furnace 
 where precious metals were molten, that it might be said he 
 was one of Nature's noblemen.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 What Say the Livixa ? 
 
 Says George Saintsbury : — 
 
 Bums is a great poet, and one of the p;i'eatest of poets. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Says George W. Curtis : — 
 
 His geniiis flashed and })lazed like a toreli among 
 
 tapers. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Says .James Hannay : — 
 
 Burns was not only a great poet l)iit one of tln^ greati's 
 men that the i-aee has produced. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Says the AtJicuacum : — 
 
 We delight in the untrammelled soarings in his native 
 air of Biirns — one of the choicest singers of all time.
 
 82 WHAT SAY THE LIVINC ^ 
 
 Says Walt. Whitman : — 
 Uurns remains to my lieavt and hrain almost the tender 
 est, manliest, and dearest tlesh-andblond figure in all the 
 streams and clusters of bygone poets. 
 
 8ays Andrew Lang : — • 
 Tn one, Nature combinp<l nineh of tho mnsie of tln' 
 future, in the o-t>nei'ons, the tender, the kindly, ilie houiciy, 
 till' impassioned Burns ; the brigJitest of our lyrists, the most 
 hiiiuaii of our Siillrists, th ■ most perfervid of tho perfcrvid 
 Si'ots. , . Burns ahnost always climbs by a trodden way, 
 l)ut his i^enius, like :i forest i\vo. obliterates tln' trares of 
 other and earlier foots*. 'ps. 
 
 # * * 
 
 Says Edmund (torrg : — 
 
 Burns, one of the four o-reat poets of the EightOi'nth 
 Century, is the incarnation of natural song, the embodiment 
 of that whi(di is most spontaneous, most ebullient in the 
 lyrira.l poet of nature. . . His mode of uiritin<i is unparalleled 
 ill its easy buoyant emotion sinee tlie days of EU.zahetli, . . '['he 
 absolute supremacy of Burns is a very remarkable phenome- 
 non. In Scottish x'oetry, he seems not one in a, chain, but 
 the supreme artist to whom all the others iire subsidiary. 
 
 . Scotch Doric verse appears to us like a single growth, 
 
 starting from the rich foliage of Uunl)ai- and his compeers' 
 
 . only to Ijreak into the single aloc-bloi^som of tho ]ier- 
 
 fert Burns. 
 
 ■» * * 
 
 Says Chai'les Whibley :-- 
 
 Hums i.'rote a dozen of the best snugs that the u-orld has 
 heaid, he Ijrought back humour and gaiety, and freedom to 
 an age that had forgotten tliem in the foolish manufacture 
 of odes and fantasies. . . An immortal ma.steri)iece of 
 melody and observation, the squalor of The folly Bci^gars is
 
 WHAT SAY THE LIVING ? 83 
 
 o-lovified by a style so little rustic that every word and every 
 rhythm is fitted to its pnriDose. . . Burns expressed in per- 
 fect verse the vague experiments of tlie chap-bou/is and ballads. To 
 say that he was a plagiarist is tomisiin;lerstandhis mothods. 
 He did )jut seize what may be called the folk-lore of poetry, 
 and convert it to nobler uses. The tunes, mayhap, were old, 
 but he played them upon his richer ampler lyre, until their 
 ori^-in was obscured by a fresh beauty. . . Burns, who 
 rescued half-a-dozen nieasuri's from undeserved o))Scurity, is 
 one of the few singers that tlie world has known. . . He 
 laid his hand upon whatever mateiial he found suitable, )mt 
 he himself was the first to declare his indebtedness, and the 
 genius which transformed a hasty .sketch into a marvel of 
 music was all his own. In undertaking' therefore to dis- 
 rovi'r the origins of Burns, Messrs. Hmlcy :iud llemleis'.n 
 luivo but completed the task indiciti'd by hiiiisflt. 
 '■>' -^ * 
 
 Says Francis Thompson : — 
 
 fb-nleyhas not taken from Burns, he has added to him. 
 He has shown that many supposed "originals" were lati'i' 
 rifacimentos from Burns : and, in imrticular that Buchan and 
 the Ettrick Shepherd are responsible between them for nnm- 
 ])erless fabrications. As St. John gave rise to a brisk industry 
 in forged apocalypses, so of the making of originals to Burns 
 llii'rc was pre.sently no end. Most of them were taken down 
 fruui the lips of an old woman. Buchan, and Stenhouse, 
 and Allan (kmninghain, and Hogg — we can trust none of 
 t 111 '111 : the trail of the old woman is over them all. . . To 
 the question whether Burns couhl write tine songs without 
 another man's motif to hang them on, I think the charming 
 songs which are pure Burns furnish an undoubted affirma- 
 tive answer. . . .John Anderson has a homely jDathos 
 which ?tands by itself. The early Mary Morrison, together 
 with the opening stanzas of the Siller Tfissie, show possibili-
 
 84 WHAT SAY THE LIVING? 
 
 ties of a finer and more romantic sentiment which might 
 have placed him highei as a purely original wi'iter had lie 
 lived in another atmosphere. . . Taking- him, borrowings 
 and all, the merit of his songs lies in the partly dramatic 
 kind ; lliey display vividly mid pictorially, the life nf a whole 
 peasantry as it has not been displayed in English literature. . . 
 Burns, like Homer, is not merely a poet. Init a literature. . . 
 T believe that Burns had geniris, in another age and com- 
 munity, to be a very great poer indeed. As it is, ho was the 
 greatest poet he saw his way to be. 
 
 Says R. H. Stoddard — the American poet — in 
 TJic Century : — 
 
 The lyric siu'vived. . still a voice in English verse. An 
 immortal Voice, for when, slumbei-ing and murmnring in its 
 dreams, it awoke. . . it was >*'itli a start and a cry — a sweet 
 wild cry, a deep, loud shovit — the long triumphant song of 
 the Master Singer — Biirns. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Says the New York Herald : — 
 
 The rich have built a monument to Burns, have given a 
 stone to the man who cried for bread, Imt the people have 
 erected his monument in their hearts, and there will live for 
 ever, the memory 
 
 Of him who walked, in glory and in joy. 
 Behind his plough \ipon the mountain side. 
 
 # * * 
 
 Says Lord Rosebery : — 
 
 A peasant, l)orn in a cottage that no sanitary inspector in 
 these days would tolerate for a moment ; struggling with des- 
 perate effort against pauperism, almost in vain ; snatching 
 at scraps of learning in the intervals of toil, as it were witli
 
 WHAT SAY THE LIVING .' 85 
 
 his teeth; a heavy silent hid, proud of his ploughing. All of 
 a sudden without preface or warning, hu )>re;iks out into ex- 
 quisite song, like a nightingale from the brushwood, and con- 
 tinues singing as sweetly — with nightingale pauses — till he 
 dies. A nightingale sings because he cannot help it ; lu can 
 only sing exquisitely because he knows no other. So it was 
 wirh Burns. . . I would claim that he is not only Scotland's 
 greatest poet, but is worthy to rauk among the greatest poets 
 of the world. 
 
 ■»!" ^ Tt- 
 
 Henley's Burns was the medium by which it 
 was sought to degriide the poet to the level of a 
 a dealer in stolen goods, or a mere mender of dam- 
 aged pots, therefore this Defence may most fitly be 
 closed by a quotation from that volume. Says Hen- 
 ley :— 
 
 Biirns is an amazing compound of style and sentiment 
 with gaiety and sympathy, of wit and tendt'rnesswith radiant 
 humor and an admirable sense of art. . . He had more 
 genius, and genius of a finer, a rarer, and more generous 
 quality than all his immediate predecessors pvit together He 
 wrote masterpiece after masterpiece ivith a rapidity, an assurance, a 
 command of means, a brilliancy of effect, whicii makes his achievement 
 one of the most rcmarkahle in English letters. . . The poet of a 
 parish, he is the least parochial, the most broadly and genu- 
 inely hiunan amongst the lyrists of his race. . . He is 
 national as no poet has ever been, and as no poet ever will be, or 
 ever can be, again. . . The Scotland he loved so well and 
 took snch pride in honoring, could scarce have been the Scot- 
 land she is, had he not been. . . Burns, among the general 
 at least, is better sung than read. But if his songs be the 
 more national, the Poems are the greater, and it is chiefly to 
 the Poems that Burns is indebted for his place in literature, .
 
 86 IV HAT SAY THE LIVING ? 
 
 Of a high courage, a proud] heart, a daring mind, a matchless 
 gift of speech, an abundance of humor, and wit and fire, he 
 was a poet in whom were quintessential the effects and tradi- 
 tions of the Vernacular School. . . In the seqiie],B»rai is 
 found to have a place of his own in the fist fight of English poets 
 after Milton, Cliaiiccr, and Shakespeare. . . Burns, the amazing 
 peasant of genius, the inspii-ed faun, whose voice has gone 
 ringing through the courts of Time these hiindred years or 
 more, and is far louder, far clearer now than when it first 
 broke on the ear of man. 
 
 And here I leave the final decision with my 
 readers.
 
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