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GATEWAY SERIES 
 
 ESSAY ON BURNS 
 
 BY-' 
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 EDWIN MIMS, Ph.D. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY, TENNESSEE 
 
 NEW YORK-:- CINCINNATI •:• CHICAGO 
 
 AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY 
 
Copyright, 1903, by 
 AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY. 
 
 Entered at Stationers' Hall, London 
 
 carlyle's burns. 
 E. P. 1 
 
 
PREFACE BY THE GENERAL 
 EDITOR 
 
 This series of books aims, first, to give the English 
 texts required for entrance to college in a form which 
 shall make them clear, interesting, and helpful to those 
 who are beginning the study of literature ; and, second, 
 to supply the knowledge which the student needs to 
 pass the entrance examination. For these two reasons 
 it is called The Gateway Series, 
 
 The poems, plays, essays, and stories in these small 
 volumes are treated, first of all, as works of literature, 
 which were written to be read and enjoyed, not to be 
 parsed and scanned and pulled to pieces. A short life 
 of the author is given, and a portrait, in order to help! 
 the student to know the real person who wrote the 
 book. The introduction tells what it is about, and 
 how it was written, and where the author got the idea, 
 and what it means. The notes at the foot of the page 
 are simply to< give the sense of the hard words so that 
 the student can read straight on without turning to a 
 dictionary. The other notes, at the end of the book, 
 explain difficulties and allusions and fine points. 
 
 99^827 
 
6 Preface by the General Editor 
 
 The editors are chosen because of their thorough 
 training and special fitness to deal with the books 
 committed to them, and because they agree with this 
 idea of what a Gateway Series ought to be. They 
 express, in each case, their own views of the books 
 which they edit. Simplicity, thoroughness, shortness, 
 and clearness, — these, we hope, will be the marks of 
 the series. 
 
 HENRY VAN DYKE. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 I. Thomas Carlyle 
 
 Mr. Augustine Birrell, a leading member of the Eng- 
 lish Parliament and one of the cleverest of contemporary 
 critics, has said recently : " Young man, do not be in 
 too great a hurry to leave your Carlyle unread." To 
 follow this advice is not so easy for the young as it 
 might seem. Carlyle, as a man, had some characteristics 
 that repel those who do not know the stronger and 
 finer elements in his character, while as a writer he has 
 eccentricities of style and exaggerations of thought that 
 cause the uninitiated to do him an injustice. As these 
 words are being written the public is hearing again the 
 story of Carlyle's married life with emphasis on the un- 
 pleasant features of his character and his writings. The 
 world will not know him at his best until it sees him far 
 removed from some of the disagreeable facts revealed by 
 his friend and biographer, Froude. 
 
 To the young of his own day he was an inspiring voice. 
 Matthew Arnold, in a memorable passage in his address 
 on Emerson, speaking of the " voices " that sounded at 
 Oxford when he was a student there, refers to the puis- 
 sant voice of Carlyle as " fresh, comparatively sound, 
 
 7 
 
8 Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
 
 ' and reaching our hearts with true prophetic eloquence. " 
 V'heii-Tyndall wasr.a young man, Carlyle supplied a moral 
 impulse' that "Ida him to a strenuous life of scientific 
 research. Froude, after describing the doubt and unrest 
 that pervaded the minds of Englishmen in the middle 
 of the century, says that the voice of Carlyle was " like 
 the voice of ten thousand trumpets in the ears of many 
 young Englishmen.' , To many men Carlyle has been, 
 if not a teacher, a prophet, emancipating them from all 
 forms of cant and awakening them to the divine signifi- 
 cance of life. It is with a view to arousing an interest 
 in Carlyle's personality and to cause students to read 
 with genuine appreciation the Essay on Burns and, later, 
 other works of Carlyle, that these introductory words 
 are written. 
 
 Thomas Carlyle was born at Ecclefechan in Annan- 
 dale, Scotland, December 4, 1795. The immediate family 
 to which he belonged cannot trace its ancestry further 
 than Thomas Carlyle, the author's grandfather, who 
 worked as carpenter and farmer for half the year and 
 for the remainder led a wandering life somewhat after 
 the type of the border raiders, frequently leaving his 
 family in destitute circumstances. His son, James Car- 
 lyle, after a youth in which he had to " scramble 
 ('scraffie ! ') for [his] very clothes and food," settled in 
 Ecclefechan in 1773, becoming first an apprentice to a 
 stone mason, then a master builder, and later an inde- 
 pendent farmer. The words in which Carlyle has char- 
 acterized his father are worthy of note : 
 
Introduction 9 
 
 " More remarkable man than my father I have never 
 met in my journey through life ; sterling sincerity in 
 thought, word, and deed, most quiet, but capable of 
 blazing into whirlwinds when needful, and such a flash 
 of just insight and brief natural eloquence and emphasis, 
 true to every feature of it as I have never known in any 
 other. Humour of a most grim Scandinavian type he 
 occasionally had ; wit rarely or never — too serious for 
 wit — my excellent mother with perhaps the deeper piety 
 in most senses had also the most sport. No man of my 
 day, or hardly any man, can have had better parents. 
 None of us will ever forget that bold glowing style of 
 his flowing free from the untutored soul. Never shall we 
 again hear such speech as that was. The whole district 
 knew of it. In anger he had no need of oaths ; his words 
 were like sharp arrows that smote into the very heart." 
 
 He always counted it as one of the greatest of bless- 
 ings that he had the example of " a real man of God's 
 own making " continually before him, " a true Workman 
 in this vineyard of the Highest." In later years the 
 sight of a bridge or of a house that his father had built 
 inspired him to do honest and enduring work, his highest 
 ambition being to write books as his father had built 
 houses. 
 
 His father early in life had come under the influence 
 of the Scottish Kirk and was noted for his rugged and 
 unswerving piety. The religious element was also largely 
 developed in his mother, Margaret Aitken — " of the 
 fairest descent, that of the pious, the just and wise." 
 
io Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
 
 She was more approachable than his father; "my heart 
 and tongue played freely only with my mother." She 
 could barely write when he was a young boy and learned 
 to write well in order to correspond with her son. The 
 burden of these letters was, whether he was at the 
 University of Edinburgh or later in London, " Do make 
 religion your great study," " Tell me honestly if you 
 read your chapter e'en and morn, lad." Although his 
 father had perhaps a greater influence in determining 
 his intellectual life, his mother was the one whom of all 
 others, in his childhood or in his later years, he loved 
 best. 
 
 He learned reading from his mother and arithmetic 
 from his father, who, realizing at an early day that his 
 son was a brilliant boy, determined to give him a good 
 education. Accordingly Thomas was sent to Annan in 
 1806. Here he experienced the hardship of being 
 thrown with rude companions who made his life miser- 
 able, and the pedantry of teachers who had little power 
 to inspire him. " My teachers," says he in a passage in 
 Sartor Resa,7'tus, evidently autobiographical, " were hide- 
 bound pedants, without knowledge of man's nature or of 
 boy's; or of aught save their lexicons and quarterly ac- 
 count books. Innumerable dead Vocables they crammed 
 into us and called it fostering the growth of mind." The 
 chief benefit in this academy life was in reading widely 
 in all the books that he could find, and in a reasonably 
 good training in Latin and French. 
 
 His father, desiring that his son should give himself 
 
Introduction II 
 
 to the ministry, determined to put him at the University 
 of Edinburgh, whither he went in 1809, walking the dis- 
 tance of eighty miles. His university training was little 
 different from that at the Annan Academy, except that 
 in mathematics he found an inspiring teacher, Professor 
 Leslie. The large library afforded him opportunities to 
 "read fluently in almost all cultivated languages in almost 
 all subjects and sciences," while through some few of his 
 college chums he had some contact with the world of real 
 life. Judging from the early letters that passed between 
 these young university students, they must have been 
 thoroughly alive to what was then happening in the 
 world and shrewd interpreters thereof. Carlyle was 
 called " Jonathan," " the Dean," etc., because of his 
 evident tendency to satirize the foibles of men after the 
 manner of Swift. 
 
 After graduating at the university, and before entering 
 upon the work of the ministry, he taught school (1814- 
 18 18), first for two years at Annan, and then for about 
 the same length of time at Kirkcaldy. Carlyle's tempera- 
 ment could never adapt itself to school-mastering, although 
 he did his duty faithfully. He disliked the business more 
 and more and resolved finally to " perish in the ditch " 
 rather than continue it. The monotony of teaching 
 was broken by his vacations which were spent at Main- 
 hill, where his father had moved from Ecclefechan. At 
 Kirkcaldy he became the intimate friend of Edward 
 Irving, who besides furnishing him with books — notably 
 Gibbon's complete works, which he eagerly devoured in 
 
12 Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
 
 twelve days, and many of the French classics — was his 
 companion on many long walks by the seashore, — " a fine 
 long sandy beach," — and in trips to Edinburgh and the 
 Trossachs. They had been brought up within a few miles 
 of each other, and both of them were now looking toward 
 the ministry, so that there was both intellectual and 
 spiritual comradeship. Although their paths diverged 
 widely in later years, their friendship in this, the dawn of 
 life, was of the greatest significance to Carlyle, who for 
 the first time realized " the communion of man with 
 man " — " the freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul 
 mine ever came in contact with." 
 
 Neither the zeal of his parents nor the intimate com- 
 radeship of Irving could induce Carlyle to go into the 
 ministry. Both his temperament and his tendency to 
 investigate the faith that he was supposed to champion 
 led him gradually to give up his purpose. Having saved 
 ninety pounds from his four years of teaching, he deter- 
 mined to go to Edinburgh and study law. He found no 
 satisfaction in that, however, nor in writing for Brewster's 
 Encyclopedia, nor in tutoring. From now until 1821 
 came the saddest and most miserable years of his life. 
 He was attacked by dyspepsia and knew what it was 
 " to be immured in a rotten carcass, every avenue of 
 which is chained into an inlet of pain, till rny intellect is 
 obscured and weakened, and my head and heart are alike 
 desolate and dark." " I want health, health, health," was 
 his pathetic cry. More than physical suffering, however, 
 was the spiritual crisis through which he now passed. 
 
Introduction 13 
 
 Unable to find his work in the world, — to adjust his in- 
 ward and outward capabilities, — he was brought face to 
 face with that nameless unrest, that " high, sad, longing 
 discontent," that so many of the stronger men of the 
 nineteenth century have had to face. The mood of 
 Byron and of Goethe's Werther was upon him. Even in 
 his home at Mainhill, where he went at the earnest solici- 
 tation of his father and family, he " wandered about the 
 moors like a helpless spirit." In a passage characterized 
 by exquisite beauty and pathos, he has told of the 
 evening when he and Irving, walking from Glasgow to 
 Annandale, began to talk of the truth of the Christian 
 religion. "The talk had grown ever friendlier, more 
 interesting : at length, the declining sun said plainly, You 
 must part. . . . We leant our backs to a dry stone 
 fence, and looking into the western radiance, continued 
 in talk yet a while, loth both of us to go. It was here, 
 just as the sun was sinking, Irving actually drew from 
 me by degrees, in the softest manner, the confession that 
 I did noi think as he of Christian religion, and it was vain 
 for me to expect I ever could or should." 
 
 But Carlyle could not remain in a state of unrest and 
 doubt. Several influences aided him in working out a 
 genuine and enduring faith. First of all, his own moral 
 integrity and spiritual earnestness that defied the spirit 
 of doubt, even when he was under its spell. 
 
 " Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds, 
 At last he beat his music out." 
 
 The friendship of Irving was soothing to him — " beyond 
 
14 Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
 
 all other men he was helpful to me when I most needed 
 help." More significant still, " the steady confidence of his 
 father, the anxious affection of his mother and the cordial 
 sympathy of his brothers and sisters " supported him. 
 From an intellectual standpoint the determining influence, 
 aside from all these, was the study of German literature, 
 which was to him as " the revelation of a new Heaven and 
 a new Earth." Goethe especially brought to him the 
 gospel that he was in search of, for Goethe had not only 
 suffered and mourned in bitter agony under the spiritual 
 perplexities of his time, but he had also mastered them. 
 He was above them and had shown others how to rise 
 above them. He had travelled the road that Carlyle 
 was travelling and had found his way from inward im- 
 prisonment, doubt, and discontent, into freedom, belief, 
 and clear activity. He taught Carlyle "to reconcile 
 reverence with clearness ; to deny and defy what is False, 
 yet believe and worship what is True." 
 
 And so, after years of intense spiritual agony, Carlyle 
 found an answer to his questions and doubts. In Sartor 
 Resartus he has told of the memorable afternoon in June, 
 1 82 1, when, while taking one of the many walks to the 
 seashore, he had an experience that corresponds to 
 the conversion that Christians speak of. " And as I so 
 thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole 
 soul ; and I shook base Fear away from me forever. I 
 was strong, of unknown strength ; a spirit, almost a god. 
 Ever from that time the temper of my misery was 
 changed : not Fear or whining Sorrow was it, but Indig- 
 
Introduction 1 5 
 
 nation and grim fire-eyed Defiance. Thus had the 
 Everlasting No pealed authoritatively through all the 
 recesses of my Being, of my Me j and then was it that 
 my whole Me stood up in native God -created majesty, 
 and with emphasis recorded its Protest. ... It is from 
 this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual New-birth, 
 or Baphometic Fire-baptism ; perhaps I directly there- 
 upon began to be a Man." 
 
 Although this incident is an important landmark in 
 Carlyle's life, it was four years before he conquered all 
 his scepticisms, agonizings, doubtings. He was never at 
 ease in Zion ; he was to have struggle after struggle, but 
 from this time he was committed to two or three funda- 
 mental truths and had thus won, as he afterward said, 
 u an immense victory." The faith of Carlyle — so im- 
 portant for the understanding of his later life — may 
 be summed up in three passages from Sartor Resartus. 
 *' What is Nature? Ha ! why do I not name thee God? 
 Art thou not the ' Living Garment of God ' ? . . . The 
 Universe is not dead and demoniacal, a charnel-house 
 with spectres, but godlike and my Father's ! " " Love 
 not Pleasure ; love God. This is the Everlasting Yea, 
 wherein all contradiction is solved ; wherein whoso walks 
 and works, it is well with him." "I too could now say 
 to myself: Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even 
 Worldkin. Produce ! produce ! Were it but the pitifullest 
 infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God's 
 name ! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee : out with it, 
 then. Up, Up ! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, 
 
1 6 Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
 
 do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called To- 
 day ; for the Night cometh wherein no man can work." 
 Henceforth he was ready to proclaim his Gospel — the 
 divineness of Nature, the infinite nature of Duty, and the 
 overwhelming necessity of Work. 
 
 In 1822 Carlyle's prospects became brighter, and two 
 chances were offered for him to put into practice his 
 gospel of work. Edward Irving, now growing famous in 
 London, secured for him the position of tutor for the 
 Buller family — parishioners of Irving — at a salary of 
 ^"200, and soon afterward, at a suggestion of Irving's, 
 the editor of the London Magazine made overtures for 
 some translations of German literature. The two 
 fitted in with each other. Faithful to the discharge of 
 his tutorial work, and winning the highest respect of the 
 Buller family, especially of his pupil, Charles Buller, 
 who now and throughout his life was his warm friend, 
 he worked in his leisure moments and during his vaca- 
 tions at Mainhill on the life of Schiller and a translation 
 of Wilhelm Meister. Carlyle's first literary work was 
 thus in the translation and interpretation of German 
 literature, which, at the critical time in his life, had meant 
 so much to him. Schiller's life was an inspiration to him, 
 for he too had won the fight with poverty, disease, neg- 
 lect, and doubt. More satisfying was the translation of 
 Goethe's novel, the most significant portion of which — 
 the passage dealing with the three kinds of reverence — 
 made a profound impression on him. 
 
 In June, 1824, Carlyle, who had up to that time never 
 
Introduction 17 
 
 been out of Scotland, went with the Bullers to London, 
 where he had the pleasure of being thrown intimately 
 again with his old friend Irving, through whom he got an 
 introduction to some of the more prominent literary men 
 of that time. It may be said that English literature was 
 then in a state of decline. The men of the preceding 
 age were either dead or had done their best work, while 
 the men who were to make the literature of the Victorian 
 age were as yet in their teens. Naturally, Carlyle was 
 not very favorably impressed with the literary world. 
 His comments on authors are at once unappreciative and, 
 in some cases, unjust. Coleridge, whom he afterward 
 described in his masterful way in the life of Sterling, 
 he found " unprofitable, even tedious " ; Lamb, whose life 
 might have taught him lessons in patience and self-sacri- 
 fice, is spoken of in the most contemptuous words ; De 
 Quincey is a dwarf with "a laudanum bottle in his pocket 
 and the venom of a wasp in his heart " ; while Hazlitt's 
 connection with ginshops and pawnbrokers is selected 
 as his distinguishing characteristic. That which disgusted 
 Carlyle most was the fact that literature was largely re- 
 duced to reviewing for the magazines, which seemed to 
 him to destroy the independence of authors. " Does 
 literature lead to this? Good heavens! . . . And is 
 this the literary world ? " He will not be " a miserable 
 scrub of an author sharking and writing articles about 
 town like Hazlitt." He returned from London con- 
 vinced that he would have to fight his battles alone. 
 One bright spot in this London life was a letter from 
 carlyle's essay on burns — 2 
 
1 8 Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
 
 Goethe — "like a message from fairyland" — acknowl- 
 edging the work that Carlyle had done, and greeting him 
 as a new moral force in European literature. He 
 was encouraged to go on with his work. After mak- 
 ing arrangements with a London publisher to translate 
 specimens of German romance, he settled at Hoddarn 
 Hill, a little farm selected by his father as a suitable place 
 for him to live. Here his brother Alick worked the 
 farm for him, while his mother and sisters kept house. 
 He had long, solitary rides on his horse " Larry," 
 within full view of the Cumberland mountains. He 
 enjoyed quiet for his work and a deep religious peace 
 such as he had never known. A russet-coated idyl he 
 called the year at this place — "one of the quietest, on 
 the whole, and perhaps one of the most triumphant and 
 important of my life/' 
 
 The happiest incident in this year's life at Hoddam 
 Hill was the coming of Jane Welsh, who for ten days 
 visited the Carlyles in their humble home. He had been 
 introduced to her four years before by their mutual friend, 
 Irving, and had since then visited her often at her home 
 in Haddington. She was the daughter of a prosperous 
 physician, John Welsh (a lineal descendant of John Knox), 
 and of a sensitive, high-strung mother. From her child- 
 hood she had been a brilliant and ambitious girl, battling 
 with the conventional and commonplace people by whom 
 she was surrounded. Under the tutelage of Irving she had 
 been stimulated in her passionate desire for learning. With 
 attractive manners and brilliant conversational power, 
 
Introduction 19 
 
 she was generally known as the flower of Haddington, 
 and was much sought after by the men of that district. 
 Drawn into a larger world of thinking and living by Irving, 
 she had fallen in love with him and he with her. But on 
 account of his engagement to Miss Martin — an engage- 
 ment from which the young lady would not release him — 
 their love affair ended with the marriage of Irving and 
 the, at least, temporary disappointment of Jane Welsh — 
 and, as some have thought, with the tragedy of each 
 of them. In 182 1 she had met Carlyle, and though 
 repelled by his rough manners and his uncouth figure, 
 she had been attracted by his sterling worth and his un- 
 doubted genius. At first their friendship was the result 
 of intellectual sympathies ; in the first letters that passed 
 between chem we find suggestions of poems and novels 
 that might be written in common. Gradually, however, 
 Carlyle came to look upon her as the one suited to be 
 his wife — a notion against which she struggled with 
 diminishing force. The letters that had passed between 
 them while Carlyle was in London were characterized at 
 times by affection, at other times by mutual misunder- 
 standing and shrinking from what seemed to be their 
 destiny. 
 
 It was to satisfy herself completely as to Carlyle and 
 his family that she made the visit to Hoddam Hill in the 
 summer of 1825. She went away determined, much 
 against the wishes of her mother, who had objected both 
 to Carlyle's impatience and to his lack of religion, to link 
 her fate with this rugged, and as yet unknown, man. To 
 
20 Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
 
 her aunt she wrote : " He has a warm, true heart to love 
 me, a towering intellect to command me, and a spirit 
 of fire to be the guiding star of my life ; . . . not a great 
 man according to the most common sense of the word, 
 but truly great in its natural proper sense : a scholar, a 
 poet, a philosopher, a wise and noble man, one who 
 holds his patent of nobility from Almighty God, and 
 whose high stature of manhood is not to be measured 
 by the inch rule of Lilliputs." 
 
 They were married October 17, 1826, and went, not 
 to some country paradise such as Hoddam Hill, but to 
 Comely Bank, Edinburgh, where they lived for eighteen 
 months a quiet and somewhat disillusioned life. Mrs. 
 Carlyle's hopes with regard to sharing the intellectual 
 work of Carlyle were not realized ; for now and hereafter 
 her husband could do his best work only in almost entire 
 isolation, while both of them suffered from ill health and 
 natural irritability that were to be the sources of con- 
 tinual unhappiness, especially in later years. At Comely 
 Bank they entertained in a very simple way the literary 
 men of Edinburgh — Brewster, Jeffrey, De Quincey, and 
 John Wilson (" Christopher North "). It was difficult for 
 Carlyle to get any settled work, for his German transla- 
 tions were not prospering as they had promised. He 
 began to write a novel, Wotton Reinfred, which, though 
 never completed, was afterward worked into Sartor 
 Resartus. Jeffrey, at that time the brilliant editor of the 
 Edinburgh Review, had been especially attracted by 
 Mrs. Carlyle, and now opened the columns of his review 
 
Introduction 21 
 
 for Carlyle's articles on Richter and The State of German 
 Literature, articles in which Carlyle defended the Ger- 
 mans against the charges of bad taste, mysticism, and 
 obscurity. 
 
 After trying unsuccessfully for positions in London 
 University and at St. Andrews, Carlyle decided in May, 
 1828, to move to Craigenputtock, — the ancestral home 
 of the Welshes, — where, with the exception of two winters 
 spent in London (1 831-183 2) and Edinburgh (1832- 
 1833), he lived until 1834. Mrs. Carlyle had written be- 
 fore her marriage that she would not live there with an 
 angel ; now she acceded to the wishes of her husband with 
 good grace and began her life, as Jeffrey said, as an exile to 
 Siberia. Froude describes this place as " the dreariest spot 
 in all the British dominions," a house in the middle of the 
 desert — " gaunt and hungry looking," surrounded by 
 peat bogs, and sixteen miles distant on every side from all 
 conveniences of life, shops, and even post-offices. There 
 were times when Mrs. Carlyle took pleasure in looking 
 after the garden, poultry yard, dairy, and kitchen, and in 
 the evening readings with her husband, but most of the 
 time the dreariness and isolation of her life wore heavily 
 upon her. For Carlyle this life was undoubtedly the best 
 that he could have lived. His long rides on horseback 
 and his walks over the moors with the ground crisp under 
 his feet — " the stars shining over his head, silent in the 
 great silence" — gave him "a stock of robust health," and 
 what is better, gave him opportunity for those medita- 
 tions and spiritual reveries that were to be permanent con- 
 
22 Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
 
 tributions to the thought of the century in which he lived 
 " In those years we see the leap from the immature en- 
 ergy of youth to the full intellectual strength of completed 
 manhood." The essays on Burns, Voltaire, Diderot, Dr 
 Johnson and Characteristics, show an ever surer mastery 
 of form and more definite conception of literature and 
 life. He had fought out his battle with unbelief in the 
 early twenties. Scarcely less formidable was his fight for 
 literary independence against the acknowledged leaders 
 of that day. In his ears were sounding continually the 
 words of Jeffrey, who slashed the Essay on Burns to pieces 
 and took occasion to advise him as to his future work. 
 This advice was friendly, no doubt, but it was none the less 
 the voice of the tempter. Failing on Wordsworth and Cole- 
 ridge, Jeffrey hoped to succeed in keeping this brilliant 
 young man in the paths of elegance and good taste and out 
 of the ways of mysticism and idealism. He told him that 
 he was misusing his talent, standing in his own way, with 
 his " desperate darkness of audacious mysticism," his man- 
 nerisms and affectation, and his advocacy of German litera- 
 ture. He pointed to Macaulay's great success and told 
 him that the same brilliant future awaited him if he would 
 write like a cultivated Englishman and not be so desper- 
 ately in earnest about things that were of no importance. 
 Even Carlyle's best friends, such as Emerson and, later, 
 John Sterling, pleaded with him against his "defying 
 diction." 
 
 In the face of such criticism, in the face of poverty 
 and neglect, Carlyle wr6te Sartor Resartus, at once the 
 
Introduction 23 
 
 dory of his own spiritual growth and his almost defiant 
 /iolation of the conventional diction of the time. He 
 felt for some time that he had a book that " would cause 
 ears to tingle, and one day out it must and will issue." 
 In 1830 he wrote the first sketch, and from February, 183L, 
 to the autumn of the year, he expanded and rewrote it 
 in book form. When he finished writing it his wife said, 
 " It is a work of genius, dear," but when he went to Lon- 
 don to dispose of it, he found no publisher who would 
 consider it. None cried, Good speed to it. " Much as 
 I can speak, I am alone, alone." It was finally published 
 in Fraser's Magazine, beginning with December, 1833, 
 and came out in book form in America in 1836, under the 
 patronage of Emerson. In England for six years it made 
 no impression whatever, and Carl vie could only say in 
 the midst of every possible discouragement, " Courage, 
 courage ! " 
 
 The one voice that came to him in these years of 
 obscurity was that of Emerson. Just at the end of 
 their stay at Craigenputtock "the Carlyles were sitting 
 alone at a dinner on Sunday afternoon at the end of 
 August [1833], when a Dumfries carriage drove to the 
 door and there stepped out of it a young American, 
 then unknown to fame." It was like the coming of a 
 sky messenger to the two lonely people, and the friend- 
 ship then begun was one of great inspiration in the life 
 of each man. Emerson said to Carlyle, "Faint not — 
 the word you utter is heard, though in the ends of the 
 earth and by humble men ; it works, prevails." 
 
24 Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
 
 During Carlyle's second visit to London (1831-1 83 2) 
 he had met John Stuart Mill and Leigh Hunt, who turned 
 his attention toward London. Furthermore, while writ- 
 ing his essays on Voltaire, Diderot, and the Diamond 
 Necklace, and later in his wide reading in the Advocate's 
 Library at Edinburgh (in the winter of 1832-1833), he had 
 become greatly interested in the French Revolution, the 
 history of which he now determined to write. To do 
 this he must be near the large libraries, and so in 1834 
 the Carlyles moved to London. They settled at 5 (now 2 1 ) 
 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, where they lived for the remainder 
 of their lives. 
 
 The first three years spent here were a continuation, in 
 many respects, of the hard struggle that they had gone 
 through at Craigenputtock. There was little social life, 
 and Carlyle was working prodigiously on his history 
 — writing as "with force of fire." For twenty-three 
 months he did not receive a penny for his writings. 
 " Literature will never yield bread," he said, " nor stom- 
 ach to digest bread." With extreme poverty staring 
 him in the face he rejected a place on The Times and 
 also a clerkship with the Montagues, fully persuaded 
 that his one work was to write. In March, 1835, he 
 had finished the first volume of his history. Giving it 
 to his friend Mill to read, he was overwhelmed one 
 morning with the news that the manuscript had been 
 carelessly thrown into the fire by a servant. Crushing 
 his feeling for the moment out of sympathy for Mill, 
 he groaned for weeks under this almost intolerable 
 
Introduction 25 
 
 affliction. He went to work, however, to rewrite the 
 volume, determined to stake all on the success of the 
 work. " If this does not succeed," he said, " I will 
 go to America and build a new Scotsbrig in the west- 
 ern forest." By prodigious work, without taking any 
 vacation, he finished it early in 1837, saying to his 
 wife as he walked out of the room, " I know not whether 
 this book is worth anything, nor what the world will do 
 with it, or misdo, or entirely forbear to do, as is likely ; 
 but this I can tell the world, you have not had for a 
 hundred years any book that comes more direct and 
 flamingly from the heart of a living man." 
 
 Carlyle-was not this time to be disappointed. The 
 French Revolution established him in the minds of all 
 thinking people as one of the great men of letters of his 
 day. Sou they read it several times. Dickens carried a 
 copy of it with him wherever he went. Thackeray re- 
 viewed it sympathetically. Carlyle had won his battle, 
 not by writing as other men did, not by following any of 
 the conventionalities of literary art, but by writing in his 
 own way his own interpretation of history. Even Jeffrey 
 and Macaulay recognized that he did well in not trying 
 to do as other men. The same year that saw the 
 publication of the French Revolution witnessed Carlyle's 
 appearance as a lecturer. For four successive years he 
 lectured to some of the most brilliant audiences that 
 ever assembled in London, the most notable of the series 
 being Heroes and Hero-Worship, published in book form 
 in 1 84 1. It must have been a strange phenomenon, that 
 
26 Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
 
 of this rude Scotchman with his Scotch accent and his 
 glowing eyes pouring out upon the fashionable people of 
 London his "Annandale grapeshot" He had no con- 
 ventional message for them, but attempted always to 
 overcome prejudice or to awaken interest in men not 
 hitherto considered of any vital importance. 
 
 Carlyle was never a "clubbable" man, but he and his 
 wife mingled freely in society at times. He was thrown 
 in a social way with the men of the older generation, 
 such as Land or, Rogers, Moore, South ey, and Words- 
 worth. He was also a member of the Sterling Club, to 
 which belonged Tennyson, Spedding, Milnes, Maurice, 
 and others of the brightest and most promising scholars 
 and men of letters. He was evidently a good conversa- 
 tionalist, although he had the fault that he criticized in 
 Coleridge, the habit of doing all the talking himself. He 
 was dramatic, extravagant, overbearing. He was prob- 
 ably at his best in his own home when one or two men 
 that he liked best would come to him. In a letter to 
 Tennyson, written after the appearance of the 1842 edi- 
 tion of the latter's poems, he says : " But do you, when 
 you return to London, come down to me and let us smoke 
 a pipe together. With few words, with many, or with 
 none, it need not be an ineloquent Pipe." 
 
 One season the Carlyles entertained a company of 
 their friends in a somewhat formal reception. " At 
 midnight," Carlyle says, " I smoked a peaceable pipe, 
 praying it might be long before we saw the like again." 
 One of the pleasures he enjoyed most was the friendship 
 
Introduction 27 
 
 of the better class of noblemen — notably, the Ashburton 
 family and Lord Houghton, whom he visited frequently 
 in their London and country homes. We read also of 
 excursions to Wales, Belgium, the Lake country, and 
 elsewhere. Always the city of London was interesting 
 and deeply impressive to Carlyle. He could see from 
 his window the towers of Westminster and the dome of 
 St. Paul's. He never tired of walking in the parks or of 
 watching the crowds upon the streets. " He rode and 
 walked about the environs of London ; and the roaring 
 of the suburban trains and the gleam of the green and 
 crimson signal lamps were wildly impressive to him." 
 
 However interested he was in London or in other parts 
 of England, he went almost every year to his home in 
 Scotland ; especially after the completion of a book or 
 a series of lectures would he find rest and peace in his 
 mother's quiet home. His father's death in 1832 had 
 drawn him all the nearer to his mother and her family. 
 A typical vacation is that of 1837, after finishing the French 
 Revolution and his first course of lectures — wholly idle> 
 reading novels, smoking pipes in the garden with his 
 mother. He writes to his wife : "The trees wave 
 peaceful music in front of my window. Mother is wash- 
 ing in the kitchen to my left. The sound of Jamie 
 building his peat-stack is audible, and they are storing 
 potatoes down below. . . . I hear the rustle of the trees, 
 the music of the burn." In another letter he says : 
 " One night, late, I rode through the village where I was 
 born. The old kirkyard tree, a huge old gnarled ash, 
 
28 Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
 
 was nestling itself softly against the great twilight in the 
 north. A star or two looked out and the old graves were 
 all there, and my father and my sister j and God was 
 above us all." In the same graveyard his mother was 
 placed in 1853. After her death he continued to visit 
 his brothers and sisters, keeping to the last the clannish 
 spirit so characteristic of Scottish families. 
 
 After attaining independence as a man of letters, 
 Carlyle continued to write with all the force of his genius. 
 In 1839 he published Chartism; in 1841, Heroes and 
 Hero- Worship ; in 1843, Past and Present; in 1845, 
 Life and Letters of Oliver Cromwell; in 1850, Latter Day 
 Pamphlets ; in 1 85 1 , Life of John Sterling ; in 1 85 8-1 865 , 
 Frederick the Great. He brought to all of these works 
 the sincerity of purpose, the indefatigable industry, and 
 the determination to do the best work of which he was 
 capable, that had characterized his earliest works. They 
 were undertaken with a desire either to arouse the people 
 of England to the enormous suffering of the labouring 
 classes, or, as in his historical works, " to recover human 
 figures of immense historical consequence from centuries 
 of accumulated slander and misconception." He wrote 
 them all as with force of fire. 
 
 When he completed Frederick the Great he received 
 a signal recognition of his place in British life in his 
 election as rector of the University of Edinburgh. He 
 had never lost his love of Scotland, and this recognition 
 of his services deeply affected him. Beyond his own 
 expectation or those of his friends, he succeeded in the 
 
Introduction 29 
 
 inaugural address that he delivered in 1866. Tyndall's 
 account of the occasion is an expansion of the words he 
 sent back by telegram to Mrs. Carlyle, "A perfect tri- 
 umph." In the address Carlyle summed up his entire 
 life work and gave to the young men of his alma mater 
 his philosophy of life in a nutshell. A student who wishes 
 to get at the essential heart of Carlyle's work cannot do 
 better than read this notable address, which received not 
 only the applause of the brilliant audience in Edinburgh, 
 but the admiration of men throughout the English speak- 
 ing world. It was the acme of his fame and a fitting 
 climax to his literary career. 
 
 Just after this brilliant success, while he was resting at 
 his brother's home in Annandale, there came the news 
 of Mrs. Carlyle's sudden death. During the period 
 from 1845 to 1857 there had been an almost serious 
 estrangement between them ; but during the last three 
 years of her life, the old affectionate days had come 
 back — "the old tone, the old confidences." "The 
 sunset of their married life recovered something of the 
 colours of its morning," says Froude. The shock of 
 his wife's death was therefore all the keener. "I was 
 rich once," he says, " had I known it, very rich ; and now 
 I am become poor unto the end." As if to atone for 
 the suffering that his wife had endured while living — 
 partly on account of his own irritability — he wrote the 
 beautiful tribute to her now found in his Reminiscences 
 and planned the publication of her Letters and Memorials* 
 
 Not much is to be said of the last years of Carlyle's 
 
30 Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
 
 life. He was, as he described himself to Emerson, "a 
 gloomily serious, silent, and sad old man." Notable 
 honours came to him in 1874 from the German Emperor, 
 and from Disraeli, the prime minister of England. On 
 his eightieth birthday men of letters throughout the Eng- 
 lish-speaking world did honour to him. He died Febru- 
 ary 4, 1 88 1, and was buried — not in Westminster 
 Abbey, where his friend Dean Stanley wished him to be 
 — but in the little graveyard at Ecclefechan, where he 
 had so often paused in his solitary walks and thought of 
 the mysteries of human life. 
 
 II. Carlyle's Character and Influence 
 
 One of the keenest and most unsympathetic of Carlyle's 
 recent critics closes his essay with the statement that his 
 work is everywhere " penetrated with the power of a pro- 
 digious personality." Unbalanced though he was, he 
 stands out in English literary history as one of the 
 most striking and gigantic figures. He has, as Mr. Bur- 
 roughs has said, many of the elements that went to the 
 making of the old Vikings and the Norse gods. Only 
 Swift, in the eighteenth century, produces such a sense 
 of strength and crude titanic force. 
 
 If one seeks, as Cariyle does in the case of Burns, for 
 the source of the tragedy of his life — and tragical in 
 a sense his life was — he will find it in his impatience. 
 The smallest things of life irritated him beyond measure ; 
 we hear of the " demon fowls " of his neighbour's yard, 
 
Introduction 31 
 
 of the "devil's brood of house servants," the "annual 
 earthquake of house cleaning." He was also cross and 
 disagreeable in his conversation. Mrs. Carlyle got so 
 used to his " growls," that she did not feel natural when 
 they were not forthcoming. Even his best friends tired 
 him, after a little. Emerson, at fiiat "a sky messenger," 
 became in his mind an apostle of moonshine and tran- 
 scendental mist ; John Stuart Mill, whose friendship was 
 the inspiration of his early London life, came to be con- 
 sidered " a poor man " ; while Tennyson, whom he had 
 recognized as " a poet of the eternal melodies " in the 
 1842 edition of his poems, could never in his later work 
 attract his admiration. Carlyle's work irritated him ; he 
 groaned under it as under an intolerable burden. His Fred- 
 erick the Great was a " thirteen years' war," his Cromwell, 
 " four years of abstruse toil, obscure speculation, futile 
 wrestling and misery." He was impatient with his age. 
 As his friend John Sterling said, " Wanting peace himself, 
 his fierce dissatisfaction fixes on all that is weak, corrupt, 
 and imperfect around him ; and instead of a calm and 
 steady co-operation with all those who are endeavouring to 
 apply the highest ideas as remedies for the worst evils, he 
 holds himself aloof in savage isolation." He knew nothing 
 of what it means either for the individual or the nation to 
 work within limitations. He found a cure for the evils of 
 his age, either by trying to bring back some age that was 
 passed away, or by evoking some sudden transformation. 
 Prophet as he was of a higher social order in which 
 justice and humanity would prevail, he had little sympathy 
 
32 Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
 
 with men like Lord Shaftesbury or Charles Kingsley, who 
 prepared the way for gradual changes. Earnest as he 
 was to bring about " an exodus from Houndsditch," — 
 an establishment of faith on a proper basis rather than 
 on the prevailing creeds, — he was yet thoroughly im- 
 patient with the authors of Essays and Reviews, or the 
 well-trained scientists who were doing much to make 
 such an exodus possible. The master achievements of his 
 own time — the triumph of democracy and the extension 
 of the scientific spirit and of scientific methods into all 
 departments of human activity — excited in him naught 
 but disgust. In a word, he had not learned the wisdom 
 of Paracelsus : — 
 
 " To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind, 
 . . . . to sympathize, be proud 
 Of their half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim 
 Struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies, 
 Their prejudice and fears, and cares and doubts; 
 All with a touch of nobleness, despite 
 Their error, upward tending, although weak." 
 
 All of which is to say that Carlyle had the tempera- 
 ment of a prophet, rather than the ability to construct 
 and organize institutions and forces. He had to a far 
 greater degree than Scott imbibed " the Presbyterian 
 gospel of John Knox." In the intellectual expression 
 of his religious ideals he had gone far beyond the Kirk 
 of his father, being influenced to a large degree by Ger- 
 man philosophy and literature; but the spirit of the 
 Scotch Kirk, and through that of the old Hebrew Theoc- 
 
Introduction 23 
 
 racy, was the foundation of all his thinking and living. 
 " Though he never wagged his pow in an orthodox pulpit, 
 he was a preacher of righteousness all his days." Goethe, 
 with that rare penetration so characteristic of him, fixed 
 upon Carlyle's chief contribution to modern life when 
 he spoke of him as a moral force. He had the look of 
 a prophet, as all must have felt who ever looked at the 
 great portrait by Millaisin the National Gallery at Lon- 
 don — " his tumbled hair and shaggy beard, his gaunt 
 face, his sunken cheeks and deep-set, wonderful eyes." 
 Literature was only valuable to him as the expression of 
 moral ideas. "Literary men," he says, "are the ap- 
 pointed interpreters of this Divine Idea ; a perpetual 
 priesthood, one might say, standing forth, generation 
 after generation, as the dispensers and living type of 
 God's everlasting wisdom." 
 
 It is from this essentially religious standpoint that all 
 his books are written. He was' not a man to make dis- 
 tinctions, he overstated things, but the overruling passion 
 of his life was to arouse the people of England to a sense 
 of the reality of a just and sovereign God. He had, says 
 Mr. William Vaughan Moody, " an intense moral indigna- 
 tion against whatever is weak, or false, or mechanical ; 
 an intense moral enthusiasm for whatever is sincere and 
 heroically forceful." He attacked the materialism of his 
 age because he saw in it the deadening of the spiritual 
 forces of man. He had little patience with science be- 
 cause it seemed to him to try to do away with the infinite 
 wonder and miracle of God's universe. He opposed 
 carlyle's essay 6*n burns — 3 
 
34 Carlyle' s Essay on Burns 
 
 democracy because it seemed to put the voice of the 
 multitude above the voice of the inspired leader or of 
 God himself. He set himself squarely against both the 
 Oxford and Broad Church movements because they 
 seemed to him to lack the moral fibre and the religious 
 fervour of the sterner religion of Puritanism. It is easy 
 to see now that Carlyle was wrong in his interpretation of 
 all these contemporary movements, and yet the value of 
 his work in pointing out the dangers inherent in them can 
 never be overestimated. Undoubtedly the great danger of 
 modern life has been its tendency to substitute mechanics 
 for dynamics — institutions, methods, societies, ballot- 
 boxes, constitutions, have, at times, taken the place of spir- 
 itual forces. " There is a science," says Carlyle, " which 
 treats of, and practically addresses, the primary, unmodi- 
 fied forces and energies of man, the, mysterious springs 
 of Love, and Fear, and Wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry, 
 Religion, all which have a truly vital and infinite char- 
 acter." "The truth is men have lost their belief in the 
 Invisible, and believe, and hope, and work, only in the 
 Visible ; or to speak it in other words : This is not a 
 Religious age. Only the material, the immediately prac- 
 tical, not the divine and spiritual, is important to us." It 
 is this intense zeal for moral power, as the proper basis 
 of all genuine progress that makes the French Revolu- 
 tion, not merely a study in history, but a dramatic 
 presentation of the truth that God's laws must be obeyed 
 if a nation would prosper. Cromwell was a great hero 
 because on battlefield and in senate council he found 
 
Introduction 35 
 
 no higher authority than the words of the Hebrew 
 psalmist or prophet. Even Frederick the Great, who had 
 little of Cromwell's positive faith in God, became, by 
 reason of the very forcefulness of his personality, the 
 means through which the Almighty spoke to men. Past 
 and Present, Chartism, and even the bitter Latter Day 
 Pamphlets are all characterized by the intense vigour 
 of a man who is delivering the message of God, who will 
 not look with favour upon injustice or man's inhumanity 
 to man. 
 
 It is the vigour of his moral teaching that has made 
 Carlyle such a force in his century. Scientists like Tyn- 
 dall and Huxley, even while chafing under his criticism, 
 left notable expressions of their indebtedness to him, both 
 as a teacher and as an inspiring voice. Statesmen who 
 were repelled by his impatient scolding found in his work 
 an inspiration they found nowhere else. Leaders of the 
 Broad Church movement, though receiving little sympa- 
 thy from him, looked upon Sartor Resartus, along with 
 Tennyson's In Memoriam, as an artistic setting forth of 
 the essential points in which they believed. Even the 
 most intense believers in democracy are now seeing the 
 truth of Carlyle's criticism, and are fearful that his 
 auguries may be realized. 
 
 Carlyle was not, however, a mere teacher. He was 
 one of the greatest of artists. He is extravagant and 
 eccentric in his language as in his thought. At its worst 
 his style is "barbarous, conceited, uncouth, and mysti- 
 cal/ ' but at its best it is " surcharged with feeling, har- 
 
36 Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
 
 mony, and colour." The permanent justification of it 
 — unusual and eccentric as it may seem — is in the 
 words he wrote to John Sterling, who had remonstrated 
 with him upon it. " A man has but a certain strength ; 
 imperfections cling to him, which if he wait till he 
 have brushed off entirely, he will spin forever on his axis, 
 advancing nowhither. . . . The poor people seem to 
 think a style can be put on or put off, not like a skin, but 
 like a coat." Partly his inheritance from the rude but 
 impressive speech of his Annandale father, partly the re- 
 sult of his reading in German literature and in Swift and 
 Sterne, and yet more than all these, the natural vehicle 
 of his own message, his style must be taken for what it is 
 and not judged by other standards. The strong points 
 of it may be seen by the students of this essay, although 
 it has not all the marks of his later style. The essay is 
 almost entirely free from the mannerisms and extrava- 
 gances which Carlyle caught from Jean Paul Richter. 
 Special attention may be called to his vocabulary and to 
 his figurative language. There are in this essay passages 
 that have the qualities of the best lyrics. The passages 
 setting forth Burns's penetration and imagination are par- 
 ticularly applicable to his own style. Carlyle had an im- 
 agination — the power to realize things vividly — such as 
 no other Victorian writer had. It is this that makes his 
 descriptions of scenes so lifelike, his narrations of inci- 
 dents so dramatic, and his portraits of men so — one 
 almost says — perfect. 
 
Introduction 37 
 
 III. The Essay on Burns 
 
 Carlyle's first work, after getting settled in Craigenput- 
 tock — even while " the premises were still littered with 
 dirt " — was to write the Essay on Burns. In a letter to 
 his brother John (June 10, 1828), he says, " Lockhart 
 had written a kind of Life of Burns, and men in general 
 were making another uproar about Burns. It is this book, 
 a trivial one enough, which I am to pretend reviewing." 
 The essay was finished September 15, 1828, and published 
 in the December number of the Edinburgh Review. In 
 the meantime, Jeffrey had objected to certain features of 
 the essay and Carlyle had given his consent to making a 
 few changes. When the proof came, however, he found 
 "the first part cut all into shreds — the body of a quad- 
 ruped with the head of a bird, a man shortened by cutting 
 out his thighs and fixing the knee-caps on the hips." 
 Jeffrey complained that the article was too long and dif- 
 fuse ; he insisted that it must be cut down — cut down, 
 perhaps, to half its dimensions. He remonstrated with 
 him for the Germanisms. " I wish to God I could per- 
 suade you to fling away these affectations and be content 
 to write like your famous countrymen of all ages." Car- 
 lyle wrote back that the article must stand as he wrote it 
 or be cancelled entirely, and Jeffrey submitted. There 
 are undoubtedly traces of Jeffrey's editing even now, 
 especially in the first part. When Carlyle corrected his 
 essays he added three paragraphs (see Notes), but in 
 the main the essay, as we have it now, is the essay as 
 
38 Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
 
 Carlyle wrote it in the summer of 1828 — the essay 
 in which he gave his first interpretation of a British 
 author, his previous articles having been written upon 
 German authors. 
 
 So much for the literary history of the essay. It may 
 readily be seen from the sketches of their lives that Car- 
 lyle was especially fitted to interpret Burns. They were 
 both lowland Scotch and had been brought up under 
 practically the same circumstances. As Froude says, 
 " The outward circumstances of Burns's life, his origin, 
 his early surroundings, his situation as a man of genius, 
 born in a farmhouse not many miles distant, among the 
 same people and the same associations that were so famil- 
 iar to himself, could not fail to make him think often of 
 himself while he was writing about his countryman." 
 Carlyle undoubtedly took a certain national pride in this 
 essay. It is, as Dr. Garnett says, " the very voice of Scot- 
 land, expressive of all her passionate love and tragic sor- 
 row for her darling son." 
 
 Aside from his national interest in Burns, Carlyle had a 
 genuine admiration for the Scotch poet. Burns was the 
 only eighteenth or nineteenth century writer, with the ex- 
 ception of Dr. Johnson, that he praised highly. In Heroes 
 and Hero- Worship he refers to him as " the greatest soul 
 in Britain in the eighteenth century," and in a letter to 
 Goethe, he said : " Perhaps you have never heard of this 
 Burns ; and yet he was a man of the most decisive genius, 
 but born in the rank of a peasant. We English, especially 
 we Scotch, love Burns more than any other Poet we have 
 
Introduction 39 
 
 had for centuries." In his later life, when he had come 
 to have less and less sympathy with "the thing called 
 poetry," he retained an affectionate interest in Burns ; 
 in their old age he and his wife read his songs out 
 of Thomson's Scottish Airs, He was aware of Burns's 
 faults ; he had a faith such as he says Burns did not have, 
 but despite their differences, he loved him and has given 
 the true interpretation of his fellow-countryman. After 
 seventy-five years this essay remains the best interpre- 
 tation of Burns. Lockhart said in the preface to his Life 
 of Burns, "As to criticism on Burns's poetry, no one can 
 suppose that anything of consequence remains to be added 
 on a subject that has engaged the pens of Mackenzie, 
 Scott, Jeffrey, Walker, Wordsworth, Campbell, and Wil- 
 son," and yet this essay of Carlyle's was to be written that 
 very year. In recent years Robert Louis Stevenson and 
 Mr. Henley have set forth the worst features of Burns's 
 character in all their baldness, but we feel that Carlyle 
 has given the true proportion between Burns's virtues 
 and faults in a way that no other man has done. 
 
 The essay is notable as a type of the best literary criti- 
 cism. Criticism with Carlyle is no "cold business" — it 
 is the genuine and heartfelt appreciation of a man's work ; 
 it is concerned not so much with what is done wrong as 
 with what is done right. He had little use for the 
 judicial criticism that prevailed in contemporary reviews. 
 Furthermore, he has stated clearly his conception of 
 poetry. Later in life he had less and less sympathy 
 with poetry, but here, as in his essays on Goethe and 
 
40 Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
 
 in his lecture on the Hero as Poet, he has given the 
 poet his true place in the life of the world, above that 
 of conquerors and legislators. His interpretation of the 
 poet's need for sincerity, for depth of vision and for vivid 
 imagination, and his strong denunciation of affectation in 
 literature should be definitely fixed in mind. He is one- 
 sided in his views of Keats and Scott, but one forgets that 
 in reading the very carefully wrought out analysis of 
 Burns's songs. 
 
 Significant, also, is the moral teaching of the essay ; it 
 is an expression of Carlyle's own view of human life. " It 
 is subjective as well as objective; it is lyrical as well as 
 demonstrative ; it is Carlyle as well as Burns." " The 
 Essay on Burns" says Mr. John Morley, " had the same 
 effect on us at Oxford as had Cardinal Newman's ser- 
 mons." As has been seen from the biographical sketch 
 of Carlyle, he had just passed through a spiritual crisis in 
 which his fate had become fixed and his grip on things 
 thoroughly established. In interpreting the strong and 
 the weak points in Burns's character he was giving ex- 
 pression — in an indirect rather than in a direct way — to 
 his own newly found faith. Many of the same ideas were 
 to be expressed in his later works, but in this essay they 
 are stated with a " sweet reasonableness " not always 
 characteristic of him. There is a certain poise in his 
 thought, at times a lyrical movement in his style that he 
 did not often attain. 
 
Introduction 41 
 
 IV. Robert Burns 
 
 Carlyle in his essay has given, as he intimates in his 
 introductory paragraphs, "a delineation of the resulting 
 character as a living unity " ; he has painted a portrait of 
 Burns, rather than given the details or even well-defined 
 periods of his life. It is necessary, therefore, as a sup- 
 plement to the essay, to give the most significant facts 
 of Burns's life. 
 
 Robert Burns, the son of William Burness and Agnes 
 Brown, was born near Alloway Kirk — two miles from 
 Ayr and within a hundred yards of the banks of bonny 
 Doon — January 25, 1759. His father was at that time a 
 gardener and a small farmer living in an humble clay-built 
 cottage of his own make. " My father," he says, in a 
 letter to Dr. Moore, " was of the north of Scotland, the 
 son of a farmer, and was thrown by early misfortunes on 
 the world at large, wnere in many years' wanderings and 
 sojournings he picked up a pretty large quantity of obser- 
 vation and experience, to which I am indebted for most 
 of my little pretensions of wisdom." He emphasizes his 
 father's knowledge of men, their manners, and their ways, 
 and his stubborn, ungainly integrity. He was a better 
 educated man than Carlyle's father, though not so indus- 
 trious or so practical. He read books and wrote a good 
 English style and was for several years the only teacher 
 his boys had. Burns has embalmed his memory — as well 
 as that of his mother, sisters, and brothers — in The Cotter's 
 Saturday Night, an idealized version of what was the 
 
42 Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
 
 daily life of Mount Oliphant and Lochlea. His mother, 
 " a patient, virtuous, industrious housewife," had a more 
 equable temper ; her memory was stored with old tradi- 
 tions, songs, and ballads — an influence further stimulated 
 by an old woman who resided in the family and who had 
 " the largest collection in the country of tales and songs 
 concerning the devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, 
 warlocks, . . . enchanted towers, dragons, and other 
 trumpery." 
 
 Burns and his brother Gilbert were fortunate in having 
 as a teacher for two or three years John Murdoch, who, 
 besides being a man of excellent character, had good 
 sense. Two points in his training of boys have come to 
 be stressed in modern schools — his training of pupils to 
 a sense of the meaning and value of words by constant 
 practice in composition, and to a careful study of a col- 
 lection of the best English poems, such as those of Addi- 
 son, Dryden, Thomson, etc. He also interested them in 
 the books of his own library, one of the most inspiring of 
 which was the Life of William Wallace, which, in the 
 language of Burns, poured a Scottish prejudice into his 
 veins which " will boil long there till the flood-gates of 
 life shut in eternal rest." Two and a half years of school- 
 ing under Murdoch was all that the boys had, although 
 they snatched a few weeks now and then from their hard 
 work on the farm to study at some near-by town. Their 
 father, stern though he was, furnished them intellectual 
 companionship. One feature of the family's life is left 
 out of The Cotter's Saturday Night — their eager reading 
 
Introduction 43 
 
 of all books they could get their hands on. Burns men- 
 tions especially Pope's Homer, Addison, Allan Ramsay, 
 Stackhouse's History of the Bible, Shakespeare, and above 
 all a select collection of English songs. " The collection 
 of songs was my vade mecum. I pored over them, driv- 
 ing my cart, or walking to labour, song by song, verse by 
 verse ; carefully noting the true, tender, or sublime, from 
 affectation and fustian." 
 
 In the main, however, his life up to his sixteenth year 
 was one of very plain living and hard work. It was 
 inevitable that there should be a* reaction from the 
 drudgery and sternness of this life. It came through love 
 and poetry. In a piece of prose almost idyllic, he has 
 told of the dawning of these two early passions : " You 
 know," he says, " our country custom of coupling a man 
 and woman together as partners in the labours of the 
 harvest. In my fifteenth summer my partner was a 
 bewitching creature, a year younger than myself. My 
 scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her 
 justice in that language, but you know the Scottish idiom. 
 She was a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass. In short, she, alto- 
 gether unwittingly to herself, initiated* me in that 
 delicious passion, which, in spite of acid disappointment, 
 gin-horse prudence, and book-worm philosophy, I hold to 
 be the first of human joys here below ! How she caught 
 the contagion I cannot tell. . . . Indeed, I did not 
 know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with 
 her when returning in the evening from our labours ; 
 why the tones of her voice made my heartstrings thrill 
 
44 Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
 
 like an ^Eolian harp ; and especially why my pulse beat 
 such a furious ratan when I looked and fingered over her 
 little hand, to pick out the cruel nettle-stings and thistles. 
 Among her love-inspiring qualities, she sung sweetly ; and 
 it was her favourite reel to which I attempted giving an 
 embodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous 
 as to imagine that I could make verses like printed ones, 
 composed by men who read Greek and Latin ; but my 
 girl sung a song which was said to be composed by a 
 country laird's son, on one of his father's maids, with 
 whom he was in love ; and I saw no reason why I might 
 not rhyme as well as he ; for, excepting that he could 
 shear sheep and cast peats, his father living in the moor- 
 lands, he had no more scholar- craft than myself. Thus 
 with me began love and poetry." 
 
 At Mt. Oliphant, where the Burnses lived from 1766 
 to 1777, Robert had little opportunity for social life, 
 but at Lochlea, their next home, he found many jovial 
 companions. He was "in the secret of half the love 
 affairs of the parish of Tarbolton," and was a member 
 of the bachelor's club, — " half debating, half drink- 
 ing club." Later he became an enthusiastic member 
 of the Masonic order, of which he was the laureate 
 throughout the district. The spirit of fun that he 
 speaks of in the Holy Fair was having its full sway, 
 although he still worked with his father and brother on 
 the farm. He determined in 1781 to go to Irvine and 
 learn the flax dressing trade in order that he might find 
 a readier way to support himself in marriage. It was at 
 
Introduction 45 
 
 this place that he entered upon the period of dissipation 
 that Carlyle characterizes as his " mud-bath.' , Here in 
 the midst of a general rout of swaggering and dissipated 
 men he met Richard Brown, who, says Burns, was " the 
 only man I ever knew who was a greater fool than my- 
 self, where woman was the presiding star." Brown spoke 
 of a certain fashionable failing with levity, which hitherto 
 " I had regarded with horror." Up to this time, if we 
 are to take the testimony of his brother Gilbert, his love 
 affairs had been characterized by the strictest rules of 
 modesty and virtue, but henceforth his career is one of 
 mingled glory and dishonour. He returned to Lochlea 
 after disappointment and chagrin in 1782, only to find 
 things on the farm going wrong. His father had become 
 involved in a lawsuit with his landlord and in addition 
 was declining in health. He died February, 1784, of 
 phthisical consumption, not before expressing his grave 
 anxiety for the future career of his son Robert, whose 
 genius he had already discovered and for whose immoral- 
 ity he trembled. 
 
 Three months before the death of their father, Gilbert 
 and Robert rented the farm of Mossgiel, — one hundred 
 and eighteen acres, two miles from the town of Mauchline, 
 — stocking it with implements that they had saved from 
 the wreck of the old farm. They set about their work 
 with much determination. Robert says, "I read farming 
 books, I calculated crops ; I attended markets." But 
 neither of the two brothers was a very successful farmer ; 
 the soil was not good and everything went against them. 
 
46 Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
 
 Robert found refuge from his life of drudgery and his 
 disappointment in the social life of Mauchline. He 
 became "amorist at large." Robert Louis Stevenson, 
 in one of his letters speaking of Burns, says, " I made a 
 kind of chronological table of his various loves and lusts 
 and have been comparatively speechless ever since." 
 The most significant of his love affairs was that with Jean 
 Armour, which led to difficulties with the courts and the 
 church. Partly on this account he became involved in 
 the controversies then waging between the Old and New 
 Lights. He naturally took the side of the New Lights, 
 or the Liberals, because they held a less stern view of 
 life and a more liberal interpretation of religion. 
 
 It is not pleasant, however, to dwell on the external 
 aspects of Burns's life at this period. That is not his true 
 life at Mossgiel. With the decline of his material interests 
 and with the decline of moral life came an outburst of 
 song from the autumn of 1784 to the spring of 1786 that 
 has been rarely equalled in English literature. "The 
 fountains of poetry were unsealed within," and out of 
 the bounding vigour as well as the haunting melancholy 
 of his life came nearly all of the poems that Carlyle 
 especially mentions in this essay. He had at Lochlea 
 written a few notable poems — The Death and Dying 
 Words of Poor Mailie, My Nanie, O, %x\&Mary Morison, 
 But now "he wrote masterpiece after masterpiece with 
 a rapidity and assurance, a command of means, a bril- 
 liancy of effect, which make his achievement one of the 
 most remarkable in English letters." He gradually 
 
Introduction 47 
 
 ibrmed the ideal of becoming a poet who might cele- 
 brate the glories of Scotland. In the poem of The 
 Vision he has described something of the struggle that 
 went on in his mind. To him sitting "lanely by the ingle- 
 cheek," in the " auld, clay biggin'," after a hard day's 
 work, thinking of how he had wasted his time, "half- 
 mad, half-fed, half-sarkit," the Scottish Muse, "a tight, 
 outlandish hizzie," comes. She has " a wildly-witty, rustic 
 grace " and, greeting him as her own inspired bard, she 
 tells him that she has watched him from his childhood 
 and has heard his rudely carolled phrase and uncouth 
 rhyme and that he will live to celebrate the glories of 
 his native land. Before leaving she crowns him with 
 a wreath, and henceforth he is a dedicated spirit. 
 
 Everything about him he turned into materials of poetry 
 — his revels at the Poosie-Nansie tavern are preserved 
 in The Jolly Beggars ; his quarrels with the church in 
 poem after poem of brilliant satire ; the customs of the 
 people in Halloween; his farm life, present and past, in The 
 Cotter's Saturday Night, the Field Mouse, the Mountain 
 Daisy ; while his friends — brother bards and patrons — 
 are remembered in rollicking and brilliant verse. He is 
 in full possession of all his powers — pathos, sympathy, 
 keenness of vision, humour. The poems come to him 
 sometimes as he follows the plough, and he goes to his 
 little garret at night to write them out. He repeats 
 them to his brother as they go about their work. Most 
 of all, they come to him as he walks along the banks of 
 the Ayr in silent meditation and at times religious 
 
48 Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
 
 rapture. The muse was " seldom lazy " in those days at 
 Mossgiel. 
 
 Great as these poems now seem to us, they would 
 perhaps not have been published had not Burns, dis- 
 appointed with his farming project and chagrined at 
 his experiences with Jean Armour, decided to leave 
 the country for the West Indies. At his friend Gavin 
 Hamilton's suggestion, he offered a volume of his poems 
 to a printer in Kilmarnock. He was generously aided 
 by a number of his friends in Mauchline and Ayr in 
 securing enough subscriptions to guarantee the expenses 
 of the volume. While the poems were being printed, 
 during the summer of 1786, he was being pursued by 
 Jean Armour's father and for several days had " to skulk 
 from covert to covert under all the terrors of a fail," 
 as some ill-advised people had uncoupled " the merciless 
 pack of the law "at his heels. In these days of despond- 
 ency and poverty — increased by the death of Highland 
 Mary whom in the meantime he had met and become 
 engaged to — he wrote one of his saddest poems, his 
 Farewell to Scotland. 
 
 His volume of poems was published in July, 1786, and 
 was received at once with much enthusiasm by the peo- 
 ple of that section of Scotland. He still intended to sail, 
 however, and had engaged passage at Greenock, when a 
 letter came from Dr. Blacklock that opened up the pros- 
 pect of a new world to him in Edinburgh. He had 
 before this met Professor Dugald Stewart, a distinguished 
 professor of philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, 
 
Introduction 49 
 
 who had passed a very favourable verdict on his poems. 
 So with the advice of friends and with the full consent of 
 his family, he set out for the Scotch capital on Novem- 
 ber 27. His journey seems to have been something of 
 a triumph, the rude farmers and labourers, at the given 
 signal, crowding around him in some of the villages, 
 through which he passed. This early volume had been 
 read not only by the gentry but by plowboys and maid- 
 servants, who, according to Heron, " gladly bestowed the 
 wages which they earned the most hardly, and which 
 they wanted to purchase necessary clothing, if they might 
 but secure the works of Burns." In Edinburgh he went 
 at once to the humble lodgings of his friend John Rich- 
 mond, who formerly lived at Mauchline, but it was not 
 long before such prominent noblemen as the Earl of Glen- 
 cairn and Henry Erskine and such men of letters as 
 Blair, Robertson, Dugald Stewart, and Mackenzie, and 
 such brilliant women as the Duchess of Gordon, had given 
 him a hearty welcome to the most exclusive and cultured 
 circles of the Scotch capital. He at once arranged on 
 favorable terms for a second edition of his poems, which 
 he dedicated to the noblemen and gentlemen of the 
 Caledonian Hunt, who generously subscribed to one hun- 
 dred copies. There is no doubt of the fact that these 
 poems were received with genuine admiration by many 
 men of that illustrious circle. The review of them in The 
 Lounger by Henry Mackenzie is a notable tribute to the 
 originality and genius of these poems. And yet it was 
 not so much the poetry of Burns as his personality that 
 carlyle's essay on burns — 4 
 
50 Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
 
 excited the admiration of the higher classes. In the 
 accounts given by Professor Walker his conversational 
 powers are spoken of: " In conversation he was powerful. 
 His conceptions and expressions were of corresponding 
 vigour, and on all subjects were as remote as possible from 
 commonplace. ... In no part of his manner was there 
 the slightest degree of affectation, nor could the stranger 
 have suspected from anything in his behaviour or conver- 
 sation that he had been for some months the favourite of 
 all the fashionable circles of the metropolis." The young 
 Scott, in a passage quoted at length in Carlyle's essay, 
 calls attention to the wonderful eye of Burns, which 
 indicated his poetical character and temperament : " It 
 was large, and of a dark cast, which glowed (I say liter- 
 ally glowed) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I 
 never saw such another eye in a human head, though 
 I have seen the most distinguished men of my time." 
 
 But there was another phase of his life that indicates the 
 earthlier side of his character. In taverns and inns, in 
 lodges, and sometimes in the lowest quarters, the con- 
 vivial element in his character came to the surface. 
 This tendency to dissipation, united with a certain spirit 
 of affected independence, caused him to lose the favour of 
 some of those who had hailed him as a prodigy. During 
 the summer of 1787 he took a tour throughout Scotland, 
 first to the regions of the border country, afterwards to 
 be celebrated by Scott, and later, after spending a few 
 weeks at his home in Mossgiel, to the Highlands, where 
 he visited some of the most famous places celebrated in 
 
introduction 51 
 
 Scotch legend and tradition. On these journeys through 
 Scotland, he was interested not so much in the historical 
 and legendary aspects of the country, as in the songs 
 that he picked up here and there from the rudest of 
 people, for he was at this time making a collection of 
 songs for Johnson's Museum. Returning to Edinburgh 
 for a second winter, he found that there had been a re- 
 action against him among the circles in which he had 
 moved. His novelty had worn off, and the main incident 
 of this second winter was his Platonic affair with Mrs. 
 M'Lehose, to whom he wrote some of his most fulsome 
 and least genuine letters, and one of his finest lyrics, Ae 
 Fond Kiss. 
 
 He made out of his Edinburgh edition of the poems 
 about ^500, ^180 of which he gave to his mother. The 
 rest he used to purchase a farm at Ellisland, near Dumfries, 
 where he proposed to settle with Jean Armour as his wife. 
 After some very hard work in getting his house and farm 
 in order, they began their married life with a determina- 
 tion to make the best out of the succeeding years. The 
 choosing of the farm seemed to be, however, as his friend 
 Cunningham said, a poet's rather than a farmer's choice. 
 As at Mossgiel, he was unfortunate and soon decided to 
 supplement his farm work with the income of an excise- 
 man. This position demanded that he should spend 
 much time in travelling throughout a district of two hun- 
 dred miles and brought him in contact with the crudest 
 and most dissipated people. He still, however, as he 
 himself said, met the muses now and then, as he journeyed 
 
52 Carlyle's Essay on Burns 
 
 through the hills of Nithsdale, just as he used to do on 
 the banks of the Ayr. It was in his solitary walks on the 
 banks of the Nith that he composed Tarn O'Shanter and 
 three of his most popular songs, Highlarid Mary, John 
 Anderson My Jo, and Au Id Lang Syne. 
 
 In 1 791 he moved to Dumfries to take a more profitable 
 position in the excise. Carlyle has presented so vividly 
 the conclusion of Burns's life that little need be said here. 
 He worked steadily at times on the songs for Johnson's 
 Museum and Thomson's Scottish Airs, for which he 
 wrote nearly three hundred. More and more, however, 
 he became involved in social life in the taverns. The 
 idlers and travelling gentry were always glad to have a 
 spirit like Burns among them " to enliven them with his 
 wit and eloquence. " He became involved in the polit- 
 ical troubles, both of a local and general nature. Al- 
 though originally a Jacobite, he became intensely 
 interested in the success of the French Revolution, send- 
 ing to the national assembly some guns that he had 
 captured at Dumfries. Indiscreet in his utterances, and 
 sometimes dissipated in his life, he lost the respect of 
 the neighbouring gentry, as he had formerly ceased to be 
 respected by the clergy on account of his irreverent 
 poems. After 1794 his health began to decline, and the 
 last two years of his life were spent in great suffering, 
 physical and mental. On his deathbed he wrote two of 
 the saddest letters ever written, one to his father-in-law, 
 begging him to help his wife, who, during all his last 
 years, had been a genuine heroine, and the other to his 
 
Introduction 53 
 
 friend Thomson : " After all my boasted independence, 
 cursed necessity compels me to implore you for five 
 pounds. A cruel wretch of a haberdasher, to whom I 
 owe an account, taking it into his head that I am dying, 
 has commenced a process, and will infallibly put me into 
 jail. Do, for God's sake, send me that sum, and that by 
 return of post. Forgive me this earnestness, but the 
 horrors of a jail have made me half distracted." A few 
 days after that (July 21, 1796) he died and was buried 
 in Dumfries. 
 
ESSAY ON BURNS 
 
 Edinburgh Review, No. 96. 7^he Life of Robert Burns. By 
 J. G. Lockhart, LL.B. Edinburgh, 1828. 
 
 In the modern arrangements of society, it is no un- 
 common thing that a man of genius must, like Butler, 
 " ask for bread and receive a stone " ; for, in spite of our 
 grand maxim of supply and demand, it is by no means the 
 highest excellence that men are most forward to recognize. 5 
 The inventor of a spinning-jenny is pretty sure of his re- 
 ward in his own day ; but the writer of a true poem, like the 
 apostle of a true religion, is nearly as sure of the contrary. 
 We do not know whether it is not an aggravation of the 
 injustice, that there is generally a posthumous retribution. 10 
 Robert Burns, in the course of Nature, might yet have 
 been living ; but his short life was spent in toil and penury ; 
 and he died, in the prime of his manhood, miserable and 
 neglected : and yet already a brave mausoleum shines over 
 his dust, and more than one splendid monument has been 15 
 reared in other places to his fame ; the street where he lan- 
 guished in poverty is called by his name ; the highest per- 
 sonages in our literature have been proud to appear as his 
 commentators and admirers ; and here is the sixth narra- 
 tive of his Life that has been given to the world ! 20 
 
 55 
 
56 Essay on Burns 
 
 Mr. Lockhart thinks it necessary to apologize for this 
 new attempt on such a subject : but his readers, we 
 believe, will readily acquit him ; or, at worst, will censure 
 only the performance of his task, not the choice of it. 
 5 The character of Burns, indeed, is a theme that cannot 
 easily become either trite or exhausted ; and will probably 
 gain rather than lose in its dimensions by the distance to 
 which it is removed by Time. No man, it has been said, 
 is a hero to his valet ; and this is probably true ; but the 
 
 10 fault is at least as likely to be the valet's as the hero's. 
 For it is certain, that to the vulgar eye few things are 
 wonderful that are not distant. It is difficult for men to 
 believe that the man, the mere man whom they see, nay, 
 perhaps painfully feel, toiling at their side through the 
 
 15 poor jostlings of existence, can be made of finer clay than 
 themselves. Suppose that some dining acquaintance of 
 Sir Thomas Lucy's, and neighbour of John a Combe's, had 
 snatched an hour or two from the preservation of his game, 
 and written us a Life of Shakespeare ! What dissertations 
 
 20 should we not have had, — not on Hamlet and The 
 Tempest, but on the wool-trade, and deer stealing, and 
 the libel and vagrant laws ; and how the Poacher became a 
 Player; and how Sir Thomas and Mr. John had Chris- 
 tian bowels, and did not push him to extremities ! In like 
 
 25 manner, we believe, with respect to Burns, that till the 
 companions of his pilgrimage, the Honourable ExciseCom- 
 missioners, and the Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt, 
 and the Dumfries Aristocracy, and all the Squires and 
 Earls, equally with the Ayr Writers, and the New and Old 
 
Essay on Burns 57 
 
 Light Clergy, whom he had to do with, shall have become 
 invisible in the darkness of the Past, or visible only by 
 light borrowed from his juxtaposition, it will be difficult 
 to measure him by any true standard, or to estimate what 
 he really was and did, in the eighteenth century, for his 5 
 country and the world. It will be difficult, we say ; but 
 still a fair problem for literary historians ; and repeated 
 attempts will give us repeated approximations. 
 
 His former Biographers have done something, no 
 doubt, but by no means a great deal, to assist us. Dr. 10 
 Currie and Mr. Walker, the principal of these writers, 
 have both, we think, mistaken one essentially important 
 thing : Their own and the world's true relation to their 
 author, and the style in which it became such men to 
 think and to speak of such a man. Dr. Currie loved the 15 
 poet truly ; more perhaps than he avowed to his readers, 
 or even to himself; yet he everywhere introduces him with 
 a certain patronizing, apologetic air ; as if the polite public 
 might> think it strange and half unwarrantable that he, 
 a man of science, a scholar and gentleman, should do 20 
 such honour to a rustic. In all this, however, we readily 
 admit that his fault was not want of love, but weakness of 
 faith ; and regret that the first and kindest of all our poet's 
 biographers should not have seen farther, or believed more 
 boldly what he saw. Mr. Walker offends more deeply in 25 
 the same kind : and both err alike in presenting us with a 
 detached catalogue of his several supposed attributes, vir- 
 tues and vices, instead of a delineation of the resulting 
 character as a living unity. This, however, is not paint- 
 
58 Essay on Burns 
 
 ing a portrait ; but gauging the length and breadth of 
 the several features, and jotting down their dimensions in 
 arithmetical ciphers. Nay, it is not so much as that : for 
 we are yet to learn by what arts or instruments the mind 
 5 could be so measured and gauged. 
 
 Mr. Lockhart, we are happy to say, has avoided both 
 these errors. He uniformly treats Burns as the high and 
 remarkable man the public voice has now pronounced 
 him to be : and in delineating him, he has avoided the 
 
 10 method of separate generalities, and rather sought for 
 characteristic incidents, habits, actions, sayings ; in a 
 word, for aspects which exhibit the whole man, as he 
 looked and lived among his fellows. The book accord- 
 ingly, with all its deficiencies, gives more insight, we 
 
 15 think, into the true character of Burns,, than any prior 
 v biography : though, being written on the very popular and 
 condensed scheme of an article for Constable's Miscel- 
 lany, it has less depth than we could have wished and 
 expected from a writer of such power ; and contains 
 
 20 rather more, and more multifarious quotations than be- 
 long of right to an original production. Indeed, Mr. 
 Lockhart's own writing is generally so good, so clear, 
 direct and nervous, that we seldom wish to see it making 
 place for another man's. However, the spirit of the work 
 
 2 5 is throughout candid, tolerant and anxiously conciliating ; 
 compliments and praises are liberally distributed, on all 
 hands, to great and small ; and, as Mr. Morris Birkbeck 
 observes of the society in the backwoods of America, 
 " the courtesies of polite life are never lost sight of for a 
 
Essay on Burns 59 
 
 moment." But there are better things than these in the 
 volume; and we can safely testify, not only that it is 
 easily and pleasantly read a first time, but may even be 
 without difficulty read again. 
 
 Nevertheless, we are far from thinking that the prob- 5 
 lem of Burns's Biography has yet been adequately 
 solved. We do not allude so much to deficiency of 
 facts or documents, - — though of these we are still every 
 day receiving some fresh accession, — as to the limited 
 and imperfect application of them to the great end of 10 
 Biography. Our notions upon this subject may perhaps 
 appear extravagant ; but if an individual is really of con- 
 sequence enough to have his life and character recorded 
 for public remembrance, we have always been of opinion 
 that the public ought to be made acquainted with all the 15 
 inward springs and relations of hio character. How did 
 the world and man's life, from his particular position, 
 represent themselves to his mind? How did coexisting 
 circumstances modify him from without; how did he 
 modify these from within? With what endeavours and 20 
 what efficacy rule over them ; with what resistance and 
 what suffering sink under them? In one word, what f 
 and how produced was the effect of society on him ; what 
 and how produced was his effect on society? He who 
 should answer these questions, in regard to any individ- 25 
 ual, would, as we believe, furnish a model of perfection 
 in Biography. Few individuals, indeed, can deserve 
 such a study ; and many lives will be written, and, for 
 the gratification of innocent curiosity, ought to be writ- 
 
60 Essay on Burns 
 
 ten, and read and forgotten, which are not in this sense 
 biographies. But Burns, if we mistake not, is one of 
 these few individuals; and such a study, at least with 
 such a result, he has not yet obtained. Our own contri- 
 5 butions to it, we are aware, can be but scanty and feeble ; 
 but we offer them with good-will, and trust they may 
 meet with acceptance from those they are intended for. 
 
 Burns first came upon the world as a prodigy; and 
 was, in that character, entertained by it, in the usual 
 
 io fashion, with loud, vague, tumultuous wonder, speedily 
 subsiding into censure and neglect ; till his early and 
 most mournful death again awakened an enthusiasm for 
 him, which, especially as there was now nothing to be 
 done, and much to be spoken, has prolonged itself even 
 
 15 to our own time. It is true, the " nine days " have long 
 since elapsed ; and the very continuance of this clamour 
 proves that Burns was no vulgar wonder. Accordingly, 
 even in sober judgements, where, as years passed by, he 
 has come to rest more and more exclusively on his own 
 
 20 intrinsic merits, and may now be well-nigh shorn of that 
 casual radiance, he appears not only as a true British 
 poet, but as one of the most considerable British men of 
 the eighteenth century. Let it not be objected that he 
 did little. He did much, if we consider where and how. 
 
 25 If the work performed was small, we must remember that 
 he had his very materials to discover ; for the metal he 
 worked in lay hid under the desert moor, where no eye 
 but his had guessed its existence; and we may almost 
 
Essay on Burns 61 
 
 say, that with his own hand he had to construct the tools 
 for fashioning it. For he found himself in deepest obscu- 
 rity, without help, without instruction, without model ; or 
 with models only of the meanest sort. An educated man 
 stands, as it were, in the midst of a boundless arsenal and 5 
 magazine, filled with all the weapons and engines which 
 man's skill has been able to devise from the earliest time ; 
 and he works, accordingly, with a strength borrowed from 
 all past ages. How different is his state who stands on 
 the outside of that storehouse, and feels that its gates 10 
 must be stormed, or remain forever shut against him ! 
 His means are the commonest and rudest; the mere 
 work done is no measure of his strength. A dwarf be- 
 hind his steam-engine may remove mountains; but no 
 dwarf will hew them down with a pickaxe ; and he must 15 
 be a Titan that hurls them abroad with his arms. 
 
 It is in this last shape that Burns presents himself. 
 Born in an age the most prosaic Britain had yet seen, and 
 in a condition the most disadvantageous, where his mind, 
 if it accomplished aught, must accomplish it under the 20 
 pressure of continual bodily toil, nay, of penury and de- 
 sponding apprehension of the worst evils, and with no 
 furtherance but such knowledge as dwells in a poor man's 
 hut, and the rhymes of a Ferguson or Ramsay for his 
 standard of beauty, he sinks not under all these impedi- 25 
 ments : through the fogs and darkness of that obscure 
 region, his lynx eye discerns the true relations of the 
 world and human life ; he grows into intellectual strength, 
 and trains himself into intellectual expertness. Impelled 
 
* 
 
 62 Essay on Burns 
 
 by the expansive movement of his own irrepressible soul, 
 he struggles forward into the general view; and with 
 haughty modesty lays down before us, as the fruit of his 
 labour, a gift, which Time has now pronounced imper- 
 
 5 ishable. Add to all this, that his darksome drudging 
 childhood and youth was by far the kindliest era of his 
 whole life ; and that he died in his thirty-seventh year : and 
 then ask, If it be strange that his poems are imperfect, 
 and of small extent, or that his genius attained no mas- 
 
 lotery in its art? Alas, his Sun shone as through a tropi- 
 cal tornado ; and the pale Shadow of Death eclipsed il 
 at noon ! Shrouded in such baleful vapours, the genius 
 of Burns was never seen in clear azure splendour, en- 
 lightening the world : but some beams from it did, by 
 
 15 fits, pierce through ; and it tinted those clouds with rain- 
 bow and orient colour?- into a glory and stern grandeur, 
 which men silently gazed on with wonder and tears ! 
 
 We are anxious not to exaggerate ; for it is exposition 
 rather than admiration that our readers require of us 
 
 20 here ; and yet to avoid some tendency to that side is no 
 easy matter. We love Burns, and we pity him ; and love 
 and pity are prone to magnify. Criticism, it is sometimes 
 thought, should be a cold business ; we are not so sure of 
 this ; but, at all events, our concern with Burns is not 
 
 25 exclusively that of critics. True and genial as his poetry 
 must appear, it is not chiefly as a poet, but as a man, 
 that he interests and affects us, He was often advised to 
 write a tragedy : time and means were not lent him foi 
 this ; but through life he enacted a tragedy, and one of 
 
Essay on Burns 63 
 
 the deepest. We question whether the world has since 
 witnessed so utterly sad a scene; whether Napoleon 
 himself, left to brawl with Sir Hudson Lowe, and perish 
 on his rock, "amid the melancholy main," presented to 
 the reflecting mind such a " spectacle of pity and fear " 5 
 as did this intrinsically nobler, gentler and perhaps 
 greater soul, wasting itself away in a hopeless struggle 
 with base entanglements, which coiled closer and closer 
 round him, till only death opened him an outlet. Con- 
 querors are a class of men with whom, for most part, the 10 
 world could well dispense ; nor can the hard intellect, 
 the unsympathizing loftiness and high but selfish enthusi- 
 asm of such persons inspire us in general with any affec- 
 tion ; at best it may excite amazement ; and their fall, 
 like that of a pyramid, will be beheld with a certain 15 
 sadness and awe. But a true Poet, a man in whose 
 heart resides some effluence of Wisdom, some tone of the 
 " Eternal Melodies," is the most precious gift that can 
 be bestowed on a generation : we see in him a freer, 
 purer development of whatever is noblest in ourselves ; 20 
 his life is a rich lesson to us ; and we mourn his death as 
 that of a benefactor who loved and taught us. 
 
 Such a gift had Nature, in her bounty, bestowed on 
 us in Robert Burns ; but with queenlike indifference she 
 cast it from her hand, like a thing of no moment ; and it 25 
 was defaced and torn asunder, as an idle bauble, before 
 we recognized it. To the ill-starred Burns was given the 
 power of making man's life more venerable, but that of 
 wisely guiding his own life was not given. Destiny, — 
 
64 Essay on Burns 
 
 for so in our ignorance we must speak, — his faults, the 
 faults of others, proved too hard for him ; and that spirit, 
 which might have soared could it but have walked, soon 
 sank to the dust, its glorious faculties trodden under foot 
 
 5 in the blossom ; and died, we may almost say, without 
 ever having lived. And so kind and warm a soul ; so 
 full of inborn riches, of love to all living and lifeless 
 things ! How his heart flows out in sympathy over uni- 
 versal Nature ; and in her bleakest provinces discerns a 
 
 10 beauty and a meaning ! The " Daisy " falls not unheeded 
 under his ploughshare ; nor the ruined nest of that " wee, 
 cowering, timorous beastie," cast forth, after all its provi- 
 dent pains, to " thole * the sleety dribble 2 and cranreuch 3 
 cauld." The "hoar visage" of Winter delights him; 
 
 15 he dwells with a sad and oft-returning fondness in these 
 scenes of solemn desolation ; but the voice of the tempest 
 becomes an anthem to his ears ; he loves to walk in the 
 sounding woods, for " it raises his thoughts to Him that 
 walketh on the wings of the wind J 1 A true Poet-soul, 
 
 20 for it needs but to be struck, and the sound it yields will 
 be music ! But observe him chiefly as he mingles with 
 his brother men. What warm, all-comprehending fellow- 
 feeling ; what trustful, boundless love ; what generous 
 exaggeration of the object loved ! His rustic friend, his 
 
 25 nut-brown maiden, are no longer mean and homely, but 
 a hero and a queen, whom he prizes as the paragons of 
 Earth. The rough scenes of Scottish life, not seen by 
 
 1 Endure. 2 Drizzle. * Hoarfrost. 
 
Essay on Burns 65 
 
 him in any Arcadian illusion, but in the rude contradic- 
 tion, in the smoke and soil of a too harsh reality, are still 
 lovely to him : Poverty is indeed his companion, but Love 
 also, and Courage ; the simple feelings, the worth, the noble- 
 ness, that dwell under the straw roof, are dear and vener- 5 
 able to his heart: and thus over the lowest provinces of 
 man's existence he pours the glory of his own soul ; and 
 they rise, in shadow and sunshine, softened and brightened 
 into a beauty which other eyes discern not in the highest. 
 He has a just self-consciousness, which too often degen- ic 
 erates into pride ; yet it is a noble pride, for defence, not 
 for offence ; no cold suspicious feeling, but a frank and 
 social one. The Peasant Poet bears himself, we might say, 
 like a King in exile : he is cast among the low, and feels 
 himself equal to the highest ; yet he claims no rank, that 15 
 none may be disputed to him. The forward he can repel, 
 the supercilious he can subdue ; pretensions of wealth or 
 ancestry are of no avail with him ; there is a fire in that 
 dark eye, under which the " insolence of condescension " 
 cannot thrive. In his abasement, in his extreme need, he 20 
 forgets not for a moment the majesty of Poetry and Man- 
 hood. And yet, far as he feels himself above common 
 men, he wanders not apart from them, but mixes warmly 
 in their interests ; nay, throws himself into their arms, and, 
 as it were, entreats them to love him. It is moving to 25 
 see how, in his darkest despondency, this proud being 
 still seeks relief from friendship ; unbosoms himself, often 
 to the unworthy ; and, amid tears, strains to his glowing 
 heart a heart that knows only the name of friendship. 
 carlyle's essay on burns — c 
 
66 Essay on Burns 
 
 And yet he was " quick to learn " ; a man of keen vision, 
 before whom common disguises afforded no concealment. 
 His understanding saw through the hollowness even of 
 accomplished deceivers ; but there was a generous credu- 
 
 5 lity in his heart. And so did our Peasant show himself 
 among us ; "a soul like an iEolian harp, in whose strings 
 the vulgar wind, as it passed through them, changed itself 
 into articulate melody." And this was he for whom the 
 world found no fitter business than quarrelling with smug- 
 
 :o glers and vintners, computing excise-dues upon tallow, and 
 gauging ale-barrels ! In such toils was that mighty Spirit 
 sorrowfully wasted : and a hundred years may pass on, 
 before another such is given us to waste. 
 
 All that remains of Burns, the Writings he has left, 
 15 seem to us, as we hinted above, no more than a poor 
 mutilated fraction of what was in him ; brief, broken 
 glimpses of a genius that could never show itself com- 
 plete ; that wanted all things for completeness : culture, 
 > leisure, true effort, nay, even length of life. His poems are, 
 to with scarcely any exception, mere occasional effusions ; 
 poured forth with little premeditation ; expressing, by 
 such means as offered, the passion, opinion, or humour of 
 the hour. Never in one instance was it permitted him 
 to grapple with any subject with the full collection of his 
 25 strength, to fuse and mould it in the concentrated fire of 
 his genius. To try by the strict rules of Art such imper- 
 fect fragments, would be at once unprofitable and unfair. 
 Nevertheless, there is something in these poems, marred 
 
Essay on Burns 67 
 
 and defective as they are, which forbids the most fastidious 
 student of poetry to pass them by. Some sort of enduring 
 quality they must have : for after fifty years of the wildest 
 vicissitudes in poetic taste, they still continue to be read ; 
 nay, are read more and more eagerly, more and more 5 
 extensively ; and this not only by literary virtuosos, and 
 that class upon whom transitory causes operate most 
 strongly, but by all classes, down to the most hard, unlet- 
 tered and truly natural class, who read little, and espe- 
 cially no poetry, except because they find pleasure in it. 10 
 The grounds of so singular and wide a popularity, which 
 extends, in a literal sense, from the palace to the hut, and 
 over all regions where the English tongue is spoken, are 
 well worth inquiring into. After every just deduction, it 
 seems to imply some rare excellence in these works. 15 
 What is that excellence? 
 
 To answer this question will not lead us far. The 
 excellence of Burns is, indeed, among the rarest, whether 
 in poetry or prose ; but, at the same time, it is plain and 
 easily recognized : his Sincerity, his indisputable air of 20 
 Truth. Here are no fabulous woes or joys ; no hollow 
 fantastic sentimentalities ; no wiredrawn refinings, either 
 in thought or feeling : the passion that is traced before 
 us has glowed in a living heart; the opinion he utters 
 has risen in his own understanding, and been a light to 25 
 his own steps. He does not write from hearsay, but 
 from sight and experience ; it is the scenes that he has 
 lived and laboured amidst, that he describes : those 
 scenes, rude and humble as they are, have kindled beau- 
 
68 Essay on Burns 
 
 tiful emotions in his soul, noble thoughts, and definite 
 
 resolves ; and he speaks forth what is in him, not from 
 
 any outward call of vanity or interest, but because his 
 
 heart is too full to be silent. He speaks it with such 
 
 5 melody and modulation as he can ; " in homely rustic 
 
 jingle " ; but it is his own, and genuine. This is the 
 
 grand secret for finding readers and retaining them : let 
 
 him who would move and convince others, be first moved 
 
 and convinced himself. Horace's rule, Si vis me flere, is 
 
 io applicable in a wider sense than the literal one. To every 
 
 . poet, to every writer, we might say : Be true, if you would 
 
 I be believed. Let a man but speak forth with genuine 
 
 earnestness the thought, the emotion, the actual condition 
 
 of his own heart ; and other men, so strangely are we all 
 
 15 knit together by the tie of sympathy, must and will give 
 
 heed to him. In culture, in extent of view, we may 
 
 stand above the speaker, or below him ; but in either case, 
 
 his words, if they are earnest and sincere, will find some 
 
 response within us ; for in spite of all casual varieties in 
 
 20 outward rank or inward, as face answers to face, so does 
 
 the heart of man to man. 
 
 This may appear a very simple principle, and one 
 which Burns had little merit in discovering. True, the 
 discovery is easy enough : but the practical appliance is 
 25 not easy ; is indeed the fundamental difficulty which all 
 poets have to strive with, and which scarcely one in the 
 hundred ever fairly surmounts. A head too dull to dis- 
 criminate the true from the false ; a heart too dull to love 
 the one at all risks, and to hate the other in spite of all 
 
Essay on Burns 69 
 
 temptations, are alike fatal to a writer. With either, or 
 as more commonly happens, with both of these deficien- 
 cies combine a love of distinction, a wish to be original, 
 which is seldom wanting, and we have Affectation, the ^ 
 bane of literature, as Cant, its elder brother, is of morals. 5 
 How often does the one and the other front us, in poetry, 
 as in life ! Great poets themselves are not always free of 
 this vice ; nay, it is precisely on a certain sort and degree 
 of greatness that it is most commonly ingrafted. A strong 
 effort after excellence will sometimes solace itself with a i< 
 mere shadow of success ; he who has much to unfold, will 
 sometimes unfold it imperfectly. Byron, for instance, was 
 no common man : yet if we examine his poetry with this 
 view, we shall find it far enough from faultless. Generally 
 speaking, we should say that it is not true. He refreshes 15 
 us, not with the divine fountain, but too often with vulgar 
 strong waters, stimulating indeed to the taste, but soon 
 ending in dislike, or even nausea. Are his Harolds and 
 Giaours, we would ask, real men ; we mean, poetically 
 consistent and conceivable men? Do not these charac-ac 
 ters, does not the character of their author, which more 
 or less shines through them all, rather appear a thing put 
 on for the occasion j no natural or possible mode of being, 
 but something intended to look much grander than nature ? 
 Surely, all these stormful agonies, this volcanic heroism, 25 
 superhuman contempt and moody desperation, with so 
 much scowling, and teeth-gnashing, and other sulphurous 
 humour, is more like the brawling of a player in some 
 paltry tragedy, which is to last three hours, than the 
 
70 Essay on Burns 
 
 bearing of a man in the business of life, which is to last 
 threescore and ten years. To our minds there is a taint 
 of this sort, something which we should call theatrical, 
 false, affected, in every one of these otherwise so powerful 
 
 5 pieces. Perhaps Don Juan, especially the latter parts of 
 it, is the only thing approaching to a sincere work, he 
 ever wrote ; the only work where he showed himself, in 
 any measure, as he was ; and seemed so intent on his 
 subject as, for moments, to forget himself. Yet Byron 
 
 io hated this vice ; we believe, heartily detested it : nay, he 
 had declared formal war against it in words. So difficult 
 is it even for the strongest to make this primary attain- 
 ment, which might seem the simplest of all : to read its 
 
 N own consciousness without mistakes, without errors in- 
 
 15 voluntary or wilful ! We recollect no poet of Burns's sus- 
 ceptibility who comes before us from the first, and abides 
 with us to the last, with such a total want of affectation. 
 He is an honest man, and an honest writer. In his suc- 
 cesses and his failures, in his greatness and his littleness, 
 
 20 he is ever clear, simple, true, and glitters with no lustre 
 but his own. We reckon this to be a great virtue ; to 
 be, in fact, the root of most other virtues, literary as 
 well as moral. 
 
 Here, however, let us say, it is to the Poetry of Burns 
 
 25 that we now allude ; to those writings which he had time 
 to meditate, and where no special reason existed to warp 
 his critical feeling, or obstruct his endeavour to fulfil it. 
 Certain of his Letters, and other fractions of prose com- 
 position, by no means deserve this praise. Here, doubt- 
 
Essay on Burns jt 
 
 less, there is not the same natural truth of style ; but oil 
 the contrary, something not only stiff, but strained and 
 twisted ; a certain high-flown inflated tone ; the stilting 
 emphasis of which contrasts ill with the firmness and 
 rugged simplicity of even his poorest verses. Thus no 5 
 man, it would appear, is altogether unaffected. Does not 
 Shakspeare himself sometimes premeditate the sheerest 
 bombast ! But even with regard to these Letters of Burns, 
 it is but fair to state that he had two excuses. The first 
 was his comparative deficiency in language. Burns, 10 
 though for most part he writes with singular force and 
 even gracefulness, is not master of English prose, as he is 
 of Scottish verse ; not master of it, we mean, in proportion 
 to the depth and vehemence of his matter. These Let- 
 ters strike us as the effort of a man to express something 15 
 which he has no organ fit for expressing. But a second 
 and weightier excuse is to be found in the peculiarity of 
 Burns's social rank. His correspondents are often men 
 whose relation to him he has never accurately ascertained ; 
 whom therefore he is either forearming himself against, 20 
 or else unconsciously flattering, by adopting the style he 
 thinks will please them. At all events, we should remem- 
 ber that these faults, even in his Letters, are not the rule, 
 but the exception. Whenever he writes, as one would 
 ever wish to do, to trusted friends and on real interests, 25 
 his style becomes simple, vigorous, expressive, sometimes 
 even beautiful. His letters to Mrs. Dunlop are uniformly 
 excellent. 
 
 But we return to his Poetry. In addition to its Sin- 
 
72 Essay on Burns 
 
 Verity, it has another peculiar merit, which indeed is but 
 a mode, or perhaps a means, of the foregoing : this dis- 
 plays itself in his choice of subjects ; or rather in his in- 
 difference as to subjects, and the power he has of making 
 5 all subjects interesting. The ordinary poet, like the or- 
 dinary man, is forever seeking in external circumstances 
 the help which can be found only in himself. In what 
 is familiar and near at hand, he discerns no form or 
 comeliness : home is not poetical but prosaic ; it is in 
 
 io some past^ distant, conventional heroic world, that poetry 
 resides ; were he the,re and not here, were he thus and 
 not so, it would be well with him. Hence our innumer- 
 able host of rose-coloured Novels and iron-mailed Epics, 
 with their locality not on the Earth, but somewhere 
 
 15 nearer to the Moon. Hence our Virgins of the Sun, and 
 our Knights of the Cross, malicious Saracens in turbans, 
 and copper-coloured Chiefs in wampum, and so many 
 other truculent figures from the heroic times or the heroic 
 climates, who on all hands swarm in our poetry. Peace 
 
 '20 be with them ! But yet, as a great moralist proposed 
 preaching to the men of this century, so would we fain 
 preach to the poets, " a sermon on the duty of staying at 
 home." Let them be sure that heroic ages and heroic 
 climates can do little for them. That form of life has 
 
 25 attraction for us, less because it is better or nobler than 
 our own, than simply because it is different ; and even 
 this attraction must be of the most transient sort. For 
 will not our own age, one day, be an ancient one ; and 
 have as quaint a costume as the rest ; not contrasted with 
 
Essay on Burns 73 
 
 the rest, therefore, but ranked along with them, in respect 
 of quaintness? Does Homer interest us now, because he 
 wrote of what passed beyond his native Greece, and two 
 centuries before he was born ; or because he wrote what 
 passed in God's world, and in the heart of man, which is 5 
 the same after thirty centuries? Let our poets look to 
 this : is their feeling really finer, truer, and their vision 
 deeper than that of other men, — they have nothing to 
 fear, even from the humblest subject ; is it not so, — they 
 have nothing to hope, but an ephemeral favour, even 10 
 from the highest. 
 
 The poet, we imagine, can never have far to seek for 
 a subject : the elements of his art are in him, and around 
 him on every hand ; for him the Ideal world is not remote 
 from the Actual, but under it and within it : nay, he is a 15 
 poet, precisely because he can discern it there. Wher- 
 ever there is a sky above him, and a world around him, 
 the poet is in his place ; for here too is man's existence, 
 with its infinite longings and small acquirings ; its ever- 
 thwarted, ever-renewed endeavours ; its unspeakable aspi- 20 
 rations, its fears and hopes that wander through Eternity ; 
 and all the mystery of brightness and of gloom that it was 
 ever made of, in any age or climate, since man first began 
 to live. Is there not the fifth act of a Tragedy in every 
 death-bed, though it were a peasant's, and a bed of heath? 25 
 And are wooings and weddings obsolete, that there can be 
 Comedy no longer ? Or are men suddenly grown wise, 
 that Laughter must no longer shake his sides, but be 
 cheated of his Farce ? Man's life and nature is, as it was, 
 
74 Essay on Burns 
 
 and as it will ever be. But the poet must have an eye to 
 read these things, and a heart to understand them ; or 
 they come and pass away before him in vain. He is a 
 vates, a seer ; a gift of vision has been given him. Has 
 5 life no meanings for him, which another cannot equally 
 decipher ; then he is no poet, and Delphi itself will not 
 make him one. 
 
 In this respect, Burns, though not perhaps absolutely 
 a great poet, better manifests his capability, better proves 
 
 io the truth of his genius, than if he had by his own strength 
 kept the whole Minerva Press going, to the end of his 
 literary course. He shows himself at least a poet of 
 Nature's own making ; and Nature, after all, is still the 
 grand agent in making poets. We often hear of this and 
 
 15 the other external condition being requisite for the exist- 
 ence of a poet. Sometimes it is a certain sort of train- 
 ing; he must have studied certain things,' studied for 
 instance " the elder dramatists," and so learned a poetic 
 language ; as if poetry lay in the tongue, not in the heart. 
 
 20 At other times we are told he must be bred in a certain 
 rank, and must be on a confidential footing with the 
 higher classes ; because, above all things, he must see 
 the world. As to seeing the world, we apprehend this 
 will cause him little difficulty, if he have but eyesight to 
 
 25 see it with. Without eyesight, indeed, the task might be 
 hard. The blind or the purblind man " travels from Dan 
 to Beersheba, and finds it all barren." But happily every 
 poet is born in the world ; and sees it, with or against his 
 will, every day and every hour he lives. The mysterious 
 
Essay on Burns 75 
 
 workmanship of man's heart, the true light and the in- 
 scrutable darkness of man's destiny, reveal themselves 
 not only in capital cities and crowded saloons, but in 
 every hut and hamlet where men have their abode. Nay, 
 do not the elements of all human virtues and all human 5 
 vices ; the passions at once of a Borgia and of a Luther, 1 
 lie written, in stronger or fainter lines, in the conscious- ' 
 ness of every individual bosom, that has practised honest 
 self-examination? Truly, this same world may be seen in 
 Mossgiel and Tarbolton, if we look well, as clearly as it 10 
 ever came to light in Crockford's, or the Tuileries itself. 
 But sometimes still harder requisitions are laid on the 
 poor aspirant to poetry ; for it is hinted that he should 
 have been born two centuries ago; inasmuch as poetry, 
 about that date, vanished from the earth, and became no 15 
 longer attainable by men ! Such cobweb speculations 
 have, now and then, overhung the field of literature ; but 
 they obstruct not the growth of any plant there : the 
 Shakspeare or the Burns, unconsciously and merely as he 
 walks onward, silently brushes them away. Is not every 20 
 genius an impossibility till he appear? Why do we call 
 him new and original, if we saw where his marble was 
 lying, and what fabric he could rear from it? It is not 
 the material but the workrrfan that is wanting. It is not 
 the darkfl/ace that hinders, but the dim eye. A Scottish 25 
 peasant's life was the meanest and rudest of all lives, till 
 Burns became a poet in it, and a poet of it ; found it a 
 man's life, and therefore significant to men. A thousand 
 battle-fields remain unsung j but the Wounded Hare has 
 
y6 Essay on Burns 
 
 not perished without its memorial ; a balm of mercy yet 
 breathes on us from its dumb agonies, because a poet was 
 there. Our Halloween had passed and repassed, in rude 
 awe and laughter, since the era of the Druids ; but no The- 
 5 ocritus, till Burns, discerned in it the materials of a Scottish 
 Idyl : neither was the Holy Fair any Council of Trent or 
 Jkomaxi Jubilee ; but nevertheless, Superstition and Hypoc- 
 risy and Fun having been propitious to him, in this man's 
 hand it became a poem, instinct with satire and genuine 
 
 io comic life. Let but the true poet be given us, we repeat 
 
 J it, place him where and how you will, and true poetry 
 will not be wanting. 
 
 Independently of the essential gift of poetic feeling, 
 as we have now attempted to describe it, a certain rugged 
 
 15 sterling worth pervades whatever Burns has written ; a 
 virtue, as of green fields and mountain breezes, dwells in 
 his poetry ; it is redolent of natural life and hardy natural 
 men. There is a decisive strength in him, and yet a 
 sweet native gracefulness : he is tender, he is vehement, 
 
 20 yet without constraint or too visible effort ; he melts the 
 heart, or inflames it, with a power which seems habitual 
 and familiar to him. We see that in this man there was 
 the gentleness, the trembling pity of a woman, with the 
 deep earnestness, the force ami passionate ardour of a 
 
 25 hero. Tears lie in him, and consuming fire ; as lightning 
 lurks in the drops of the summer cloud. He has a reso- 
 nance in his bosom for every note of human feeling; the 
 high and the low, the sad, the ludicrous, the joyful, are 
 welcome in their turns to his " lightly- moved and all- 
 
Essay on Burns 77 
 
 conceiving spirit." And observe with what a fierce prompt 
 force he grasps his subject, be it what it may ! How he 
 fixes, as it were, the full image of the matter in his eye ; 
 full and clear in every lineament ; and catches the real 
 type and essence of it, amid a thousand accidents and 5 
 superficial circumstances, no one of which misleads him ! 
 Is it of reason ; some truth to be discovered ? No 
 sophistry, no vain surface-logic detains him ; quick, 
 resolute, unerring, he pierces through into the marrow of 
 the question ; and speaks his verdict with an emphasis 10 
 that cannot be forgotten. Is it of description ; some 
 visual object to be represented? No poet of any age or 
 nation is more graphic than Burns : the characteristic 
 features disclose themselves to him at a glance ; three 
 lines from his hand, and we have a likeness. And, in that 15 
 rough dialect, in that rude, often awkward metre, so clear 
 and definite' a likeness ! It seems a draughtsman work- 
 ing with a burnt stick ; and yet the burin of a Retzsch is 
 not more expressive or exact. 
 
 Of this last excellence, the plainest and most compre- 20 
 hensive of all, being indeed the root and foundation of 
 every sort of talent, poetical or intellectual, we could pro- 
 duce innumerable instances from the writings of Burns. 
 Take these glimpses of a snow-storm from his Winter 
 Night (the italics are ours) : 25 
 
 When biting Boreas, fell l and doure, 2 
 Sharp shivers thro' the leafless bow'r, 
 And Phoebus gies a short-liv } d g/owr 3 
 
 1 Keen. 2 Stubborn. 8 Stare. 
 
7& Essay on Burns 
 
 Far south the lift, 1 
 
 Dim-dark 1 ning thro' the flaky shoixtr 
 
 Or whirling drift : 
 
 *Ae night the storm the steeples rock'd, 
 5 Poor labour sweet in sleep was lock'd, 
 
 While burns wV snawy wreeths upcho&d 
 
 Wild-eddyiiig swirl. 
 Or thro' the mining outlet bock'd, 2 
 Down headlong hurl. 
 
 io Are there not " descriptive touches " here? The describei 
 saw this thing ; the essential feature and true likeness of 
 every circumstance in it ; saw, and not with the eye only. 
 " Poor labour locked in sweet sleep " ; the dead stillness 
 of man, unconscious, vanquished, yet not unprotected, 
 
 15 while such strife of the material elements rages, and seems 
 to reign supreme in loneliness : this is of the heart as well 
 as of the eye ! — Look also at his image of a thaw, and 
 prophesied fall of the Auld Brig : 
 
 When heavy, dark, continued, a* -day rains 
 
 20 Wi' deepening deluges o'erflow the plains; 
 
 When from the hills where springs the brawling Coil, — 
 Or stately Lugar's mossy fountains boil, 
 Or where the Greenock winds his moorland course, 
 Or haunted Garpal 3 draws his feeble source, 
 
 25 Arous'd by blust'ring winds and spotting thowes, 4 
 
 In mony a torrent down his snaw-broo 5 rowes; 6 
 While crashing ice, borne on the roaring speatf 
 
 1 Sky. 2 Vomited. 8 Fabulosus Hydaspes ! ( CarlyWs note. ) 
 4 Thaws. 5 Melted snow. 6 Rolls. 7 Torrent. 
 
Essay on Burns 79 
 
 Sweeps dams and mills and brigs 1 a 1 to the gate / 2 
 
 And from Glenbuck down to the Rottonkey, 
 
 Auld Ayr is just one lengthen'd tumbling sea; 
 
 Then down ye'll hurl, Deil nor ye never rise ! 
 
 And dash the gumlie jaups 8 up to the pouring skies. # 
 
 The last line is in itself a Poussin-picture of that Deluge ! 
 The welkin has, as it were, bent down with its weight ; 
 the " gumlie jaups " and the " pouring skies " are mingled 
 together ; it is a world of rain a,nd ruin. — In respect of 
 mere clearness and minute fidelity, the Farmer's com- 10 
 mendation of his Auld Mare, in plough or in cart, may 
 vie with Homer's Smithy of the Cyclops, or yoking of 
 Priam's Chariot. Nor have we forgotten stout Burn- 
 the-wind ami his brawny customers, inspired by Scotch 
 Drink : but it is needless to multiply examples. One 15 
 other trait of a much finer sort we select from multitudes 
 of such among his Songs. It gives, in a single line, 
 to the saddest feeling the saddest environment and local 
 habitation : 
 
 The pale Moon is setting beyond the white wave, 20 
 
 And time is setting wV me, O ; 
 
 Farewell, false friends ! false lover, farewell ! 
 
 I'll nae mair trouble them nor thee, O. 
 
 This clearness of sight we have called the foundation 
 of all talent ; for in fact, unless we see our object, how 25 
 shall we know how to place or prize it, in our understand- 
 ing, our imagination, our affections? Yet it is not in it- 
 
 1 Bridges. 2 Out of the way. 3 Muddy splashes. 
 
80 Essay on Burns 
 
 self, perhaps, a very high excellence ; but capable of 
 being united indifferently with the strongest, or with or- 
 dinary power. Homer surpasses all men in this quality : 
 but strangely enough, at no great distance below him are 
 5 Richardson and Defoe. It belongs, in truth, to what is 
 called a lively mind ; and gives n<> sure indication of the 
 higher endowments that niay exist along with it. In all 
 the three cases we have mentioned, it is combined with 
 great garrulity; their descriptions are detailed, ample 
 io and lovingly exact ; Horrer's fire bursts through, from 
 time to time, as if by accident ; but Defoe and Richard- 
 son have no fire. Burns, again, is not more distinguished 
 by the clearness tAan by the impetuous force of his con- 
 ceptions. Of the strength, the piercing em'phasis with 
 *5 which he thought, his emphasis of expression may give 
 a humble but the readiest proof. Who ever uttered 
 sh?.rper sayings than his ; words more memorable, now 
 by their burning vehemence, now by their cool vigour 
 and laconic pith? A single phrase depicts a whole sub- 
 ject, a whole scene. We hear of "a gentleman that de- 
 rived his patent of nobility direct from Almighty God." 
 Our Scottish forefathers in the battle-field struggled for- 
 ward " red-wat-shod" l : in this one word a full vision 
 of horror and carnage, perhaps too frightfully accurate 
 25 for Art ! 
 
 In fact, one of the leading features in the mind of 
 Burns is this vigour of his strictly intellectual perceptions, 
 
 1 See notes. 
 
Essay on Burns 81 
 
 A resolute force is ever visible in his judgments, and in 
 his feelings and volitions. Professor Stewart says of him, 
 with some surprise : " All the faculties of Burns's mind 
 were, as far as I could judge, equally vigorous ; and his 
 predilection for poetry was rather the result of his own 5 
 enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of a genius 
 exclusively adapted to that species of composition. From 
 his conversation I should have pronounced him to be 
 fitted to excel in whatever walk of ambition he had 
 chosen to exert his abilities." But -this, if we mistake 10 
 not, is at all times the very essence of a truly poetical v - 
 endowment. Poetry, except in such cases as that of 
 Keats, where the whole consists in a weak-eyed maudlin 
 sensibility, and a certain vague random tunefulness of 
 nature, is no separate faculty, no organ which can be 15 
 superadded to the rest, or disjoined from them ; but 
 rather the result of their general harmony and comple- 
 tion. The feelings, the gifts that exist in the Poet are 
 those that exist, with more or less development, in every 
 human soul : the imagination, which shudders at the Hell 20 
 of Dante, is the same faculty, weaker in degree, which 
 called that picture into being. How does the Poet speak 
 to men, with power, but by being still more a man than 
 they? Shakespeare, it has been well observed, in the 
 planning and completing of his tragedies, has shown an 25 
 Understanding, were it nothing more, which might have 
 governed states, or indited a Novum Organum. What 
 Burns's force of understanding may have been, we have 
 less means of judging : it had to dwell among the 
 carlyle's essay on burns — 6 
 
8 a Essay on Burns 
 
 humblest objects ; never saw Philosophy ; never rose, 
 except by natural effort and for short intervals, into 
 the region of great ideas. Nevertheless, sufficient in- 
 dication, if no proof sufficient, remains for us in his 
 5 works : we discern the brawny movements of a gigantic 
 though untutored strength; and can understand how, 
 in conversation, his quick sure insight into men and 
 things may, as much as aught else about him, have 
 amazed the best thinkers of his time and country. 
 
 io But, unless we mistake, the intellectual gift of Burns is 
 fine as well as strong. The more delicate relations of 
 things could not well have escaped his eye, for they were 
 intimately present to his heart. The logic of the senate 
 and the forum is indispensable, but not all-sufficient ; nay, 
 
 15 perhaps the highest Truth is that which will the most cer- 
 tainly elude it. For this logic works by words, and " the 
 highest," it has been said, " cannot be expressed in 
 words." We are not without tokens of an openness for 
 this higher truth also, of a keen though uncultivated sense 
 
 20 for it, having existed in Burns. Mr. Stewart, it will be 
 remembered, " wonders,^ in the passage above quoted, 
 that Burns had formed some distinct conception of the 
 " doctrine of association." We rather think that far 
 subtler things than the doctrine of association had from 
 
 25 of old been familiar to him. Here for instance : 
 
 "We knew nothing," thus writes he, "or next to nothing, of 
 the structure of our souls, so we cannot account for those seeming 
 caprices in them, that one should be particularly pleased with this 
 
Essay on Burns 83 
 
 thing, or struck with that, which, on minds of a different cast, 
 makes no extraordinary impression. I have some favourite flowers 
 in spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the harebell, the 
 foxglove, the wild-brier rose, the budding birch, and the hoary 
 hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I 5 
 never hear the loud solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer 
 noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of gray plover in an 
 autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the 
 enthusiasm of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to 
 what can this be owing ? Are we a piece of machinery, which, 10 
 like the ^Eolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing 
 accident ; or do these workings argue something within us above 
 the trodden clod ? I own myself partial to such proofs of those 
 awful and important realities: a God that made all things, man's 
 immaterial and immortal nature, and a world of weal or woe beyond 15 
 death and the grave." 
 
 Force and fineness of understanding are often spoken 
 of as something different from general force and fineness 
 of nature, as something partly independent of them. The 
 necessities of language so' require it ; but in truth these 20 
 qualities are not distinct and independent : except in 
 special cases, and from special causes, they ever go 
 together. A man of strong understanding is generally a 
 man of strong character ; neither is delicacy in the one 
 kind often divided from delicacy in the other. No one, 2^ 
 at all events, is ignorant that in the Poetry of Burns keen- 
 ness of insight keeps pace with keenness of feeling ; that 
 his light is not more pervading than his warmth. He is 
 a man of the most impassioned temper ; with passions 
 not strong only, but noble, and of the sort in which great 3° 
 
84 Essay on Burns 
 
 virtues and great poems take their rise. It is reverence, 
 it is love towards all Nature that inspires him, that opens 
 his eyes to its beauty, and makes heart and voice elo- 
 quent in its praise. There is a true old saying, that 
 3 l * Love furthers knowledge : " but above all, it is the liv- 
 ing essence of that knowledge which makes poets ; the 
 first principle of its existence, increase, activity. Of 
 Burns's fervid affection, his generous all-embracing Love, 
 we have spoken already, as of the grand distinction of 
 
 io htevnature, seen equally in word and deed, in his Life and 
 in his Writings. It were easy to multiply examples. Not 
 man only, but all that environs man in the material and 
 moral universe, is lovely in his sight : " the hoary haw- 
 thorn," the "troop of gray plover," the "solitary cur- 
 
 15 lew," all are dear to him; all live in this Earth along 
 with bim, and to all he is knit as in mysterious brother- 
 hood. How touching is it, for instance, that, amidst the 
 gloom of personal misery, brooding over the wintry deso- 
 lation without him and within him, he thinks of the 
 
 20" ourie * cattle " and " silly sheep," and their sufferings in 
 the pitiless storm ! 
 
 I thought me on the ourie cattle, 
 Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle 2 
 
 O' wintry war, 
 J5 Or thro* the drift, deep-lairing, 3 sprattle,* 
 
 Beneath a scaur. 5 
 Ilk 6 happing bird, wee helpless thing, 
 
 1 Shivering. 2 Noisy onset. 8 Sticking or sinking in mud. 
 * Scramble. 5 Cliff. 6 Every. 
 
Essay on Burns 85 
 
 That in the merry months o' spring 
 Delighted me to hear thee sing, 
 
 What comes o' thee? 
 Where wilt thou cow'r thy chittering l wing, 
 
 And close thy ee? 5 
 
 The tenant of the mean hut, with its " ragged roof and 
 chinky wall," has a heart to pity even these ! This is 
 worth several homilies on Mercy ; for it is the voice of 
 Mercy herself. Burns, indeed, lives in sympathy; his 
 soul rushes forth into all realms of being ; nothing that 10 
 has existence can be indifferent to him. The very Devil 
 he cannot hate with right orthodoxy : 
 
 But fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben ; 
 
 O, wad ye tak a thought and men' ! 
 
 Ye aiblins 2 might, — I dinna ken, — 1$ 
 
 Still hae a stake; 
 I'm wae 3 to think upo' yon den, 
 
 Even for your sake ! 
 
 "He is the father of curses and lies," said Dr. Slop; 
 " and is cursed and damned already." — "I am sorry for 20 
 it," quoth my uncle Toby ! — a Poet without Love were 
 a physical and metaphysical impossibility. 
 
 But has it not been said, in contradiction to this prin- 
 ciple, that " Indignation makes verses "? It has been so 
 said, and is true enough : but the contradiction is appar- 25 
 ent, not real. The Indignation which makes verses is, 
 properly speaking, an inverted Love ; the love of some 
 right, some worth, some goodness, belonging to ourselves 
 
 1 Trembling with cold. 2 Perhaps. 3 Sorrowful. 
 
86 Essay on Burns 
 
 or others, which has been injured, and which this tem- 
 pestuous feeling issues forth to defend and avenge. No 
 selfish fury of heart, existing there as a primary feeling, 
 and without its opposite, ever produced much Poetry : 
 
 5 otherwise, we suppose, the Tiger were the most musical 
 of all our choristers. Johnson said, he loved a good 
 hater ; by which he must have meant, not so much one 
 that hated violently, as one that hated wisely ; hated 
 baseness from love of nobleness However, in spite of 
 
 io Johnson's paradox, tolerable enough for once in speech, 
 but which need not have been so often adopted in print 
 since then, we rather believe that good men deal spar- 
 ingly in hatred, either wise or unwise : nay, that a 
 (i good " hater is still a desideratum in this world. The 
 
 15 Devil, at least, who passes for the chief and best of that 
 class, is said to be nowise an amiable character. 
 
 Of the verses which Indignation makes, Burns has also 
 given us specimens : and among the best that were ever 
 
 "* given. Who will forget his Dweller in yon Dungeon 
 
 20 dark; a piece that might have been chanted by the 
 Furies of ^Eschylus? The secrets of the Infernal Pit are 
 laid bare ; a boundless baleful " darkness visible " ; and 
 streaks of hell-fire quivering madly in its black haggard 
 bosom ! 
 
 25 Dweller in yon Dungeon dark, 
 
 Hangman of Creation, mark ! 
 
 Who in widow's weeds appears, 
 
 Laden with unhonoured years. 
 
 Noosing with care a bursting purse, 
 30 Baited with many ?. deadly curse I 
 
Essay on Burns 87 
 
 Why should we speak of Scots wha hae wP Wallace 
 bled ; since all know of it, from the king to the meanest 
 of his subjects? This dithyrambic was composed on 
 horseback ; in riding in the middle of tempests, over the 
 wildest Galloway moor, in company with a Mr. Syme, 5 
 who, observing the poet's looks, forbore to speak, — ju- 
 diciously enough, for a man composing Bruce' s Address 
 might be unsafe to trifle with. Doubtless this stern hymn 
 was singing itself, as he formed it, through the soul of 
 Burns : but to the external ear, it should be sung with the 10 
 throat of the whirlwind. So long as there is warm blood 
 in the heart of Scotchman or man, it will move in fierce 
 thrills under this war-ode ; the best, we believe, that was 
 ever written by any pen. 
 
 Another wild stormful Song, that dwells in our ear and 15 
 mind with a strange tenacity, is Macphersori *s Farewell. 
 Perhaps there is something in the tradition itself that 
 co-operates. For was not this* grim Celt, this shaggy 
 Northland Cacus, that " lived a life of sturt 1 and strife, 
 and died by treacherie," — was not he too one of the 20 
 Nimrods and Napoleons of the earth, in the arena of his 
 own remote misty glens, for want of a clearer and wider 
 one? Nay, was there not a touch of grace given him? 
 A fibre of love and softness, of poetry itself, must have 
 lived in his savage heart : for he composed that air the 25 
 night before his execution ; on the wings of that poor 
 melody his better soul would soar away above oblivion, 
 
 1 Worry. 
 
1 88 Essay on Burns 
 
 pain, and all the ignominy and despair, which, like an 
 avalanche, was hurling him to the abyss ! Here also, as 
 at Thebes, and in Pelops' line, was material Fate matched 
 against man's Free-will ; matched in bitterest though 
 5 obscure duel ; and the ethereal soul sank not, even in its 
 blindness, without a cry which has survived it. But 
 who, except Burns, could have given words to such a 
 soul; words that we never listen to without a strange 
 half- barbarous, half-poetic fellow-feeling? 
 
 10 Sae rantingly, 1 sae wantonly^ 
 
 Sae dauntingly gaed he ; 
 He play\i a spring, and danced it round) 
 Below the gallows-tree. 
 
 Under a lighter disguise, the same principle of Love, 
 
 15 which we have recognized as the great characteristic of 
 
 "v Burns, and of all true poets, occasionally manifests itself in 
 
 the shape of Humour. Everywhere, indeed, in his sunny 
 
 moods, a full buoyant flood of mirth rolls through the 
 
 mind of Burns ; he rises to the high, and stoops to the 
 
 20 low, and is brother and playmate to all Nature. We 
 
 speak not of his bold and often irresistible faculty of 
 
 caricature ; for this is Drollery rather than Humour : but 
 
 a much tenderer sportfulness dwells in him ; and comes 
 
 forth here and there, in evanescent and beautiful touches ; 
 
 '25 as in his Address to the Mouse, or the Farmer's Mare, or 
 
 in his Elegy on poor Mailie, which last may be reckoned 
 
 his happiest effort of this kind. In these pieces there are 
 
 1 Gleefully. 
 
Essay on Burns 89 
 
 traits of a Humour as fine as that of Sterne ; yet alto- 
 gether different, original, peculiar, — the Humour of Burns, 
 
 Of the tenderness, the playful pathos, and many other 
 kindred qualities of Burns's Poetry, much more might be 
 said ; but now, with these poor outlines of a sketch, we 5 
 must prepare to quit this part of our subject. To speak 
 of his individual Writings, adequately and with any detail, 
 would lead us far beyond our limits. As already hinted, 
 we can look on but few of these pieces as, in strict critical v 
 language, deserving the name of Poems : they are rhymed 10 
 eloquence, rhymed pathos, rhymed sense ; yet seldom 
 essentially melodious, aerial, poetical. Tam c? 1 Shanter 
 itself, which enjoys so high a favour, does not appear to. 
 us at all decisively to come under this last category. It 
 is not so much a poem, as a piece of sparkling rhetoric ; 15 
 the heart and body of the story still lies hard and dead. 
 He has not gone back, much less carried us back, into 
 that dark, earnest, wondering age, when the tradition was 
 believed, and when it took its rise ; he does not attempt, 
 by any new-modelling of his supernatural ware, to strike 20 
 anew that deep mysterious chord of human nature, which 
 once responded to such things ; and which lives in us too, 
 and will forever live, though silent now, or vibrating with 
 far other notes, and to far different issues. Our German 
 readers will understand us, when we say, that he is not 25 
 the Tieck but the Musaus of this tale. Externally it is 
 all green and living ; yet look closer, it is no firm growth, 
 but only ivy on a rock. The piece does not properly co- 
 
90 Essay on Burns 
 
 here : the strange chasm which yawns in our incredulous 
 imaginations between the Ayr public-house and the gate 
 of Tophet, is nowhere bridged over, nay, the idea of 
 such a bridge is laughed at ; and thus the Tragedy of the 
 
 5 adventure becomes a mere drunken phantasmagoria, or 
 many-coloured spectrum painted on ale-vapours, and the 
 Farce alone has any reality. We do not say that Burns 
 should have made much more of this tradition ; we 
 rather think that, for strictly poetical purposes, not much 
 
 to was to be made of it. Neither are we blind to the deep, 
 varied, genial power displayed in what he has actually 
 accomplished ; but we find far more " Shakespearean " 
 qualities, as these of Tam o* Shanter have been fondly 
 named, in many of his other pieces ; nay, we incline to 
 
 15 believe that this latter might have been written, all but 
 quite as well, by a man who, in place of genius, had 
 only possessed talent. 
 
 Perhaps we may venture to say, that the most strictly 
 \ poetical of all his u poems " is one which does not appear 
 
 20 in Currie's Edition ; but has been often printed before 
 and since, under the humble title of The Jolly Beggars. 
 The subject truly is among the lowest in nature ; but it 
 only the more shows our Poet's gift in raising it into the 
 domain of Art. To our minds, this piece seems 
 
 25 thoroughly compacted ; melted together, refined ; and 
 
 poured forth in one flood of true liquid harmony. It is 
 
 light, airy, soft of movement ; yet sharp and precise in its 
 
 details; every face is a portrait: that raucle 1 carlin? 
 
 1 Sturdy. 2 Beldam. 
 
Essay on Burns 91 
 
 that wee Apollo, that Son of Mars, are Scottish, yet 
 ideal ; the scene is at once a dream, and the very Rag- 
 castle of " Poosie-Nansie." Farther, it seems in a con- 
 siderable degree complete, a real self-supporting Whole, 
 which is the highest merit in a poem. The blanket of 5 
 the Night is drawn asunder for a moment \ in full, ruddy, 
 flaming light, these rough tatterdemalions are seen in their 
 boisterous revel ; for the strong pulse of Life vindicates 
 its right to gladness even here; and when the curtain 
 closes, we prolong the action, without effort ; the next 10 
 day as the last, our Caird 1 and our Ballad?nonger are 
 singing and soldiering ; their " brats and callets " 2 are 
 hawking, begging, cheating ; and some other night, in 
 new combinations, they will wring from Fate another hour 
 of wassail and good cheer. Apart from the universal 15 
 sympathy with man which this again bespeaks in Burns, 
 a genuine inspiration and no inconsiderable technical 
 talent are manifested here. There is the fidelity, hu- 
 mour, warm life, and accurate painting and grouping of 
 some Teniers, for whom hostlers and carousing peasants 20 
 are not without significance. It would be strange, 
 doubtless, to call this the best of Burns's writings : we 
 mean to say only, that it seems to us the most perfect 
 of its kind, as a piece of poetical composition, strictly 
 so called. In the Beggars' Opera, in the Beggars' 25 
 Bush, as other critics have already remarked, there 
 is nothing which, in real poetic vigour, equals this 
 
 1 Tinker, 2 Loose women. 
 
92 Essay on Burns 
 
 Cantata; nothing, as we think, which comes within 
 many degrees of it. . 
 
 But by far the most finished, complete and truly 
 inspired pieces of Burns are, without dispute, to be found 
 
 5 among his Songs. It is here that, although through 
 a small aperture, his light shines with least obstruction; 
 in its highest beauty and pure sunny clearness. The 
 reason may be, that Song is a brief simple species of 
 composition ; and requires nothing so much for its per- 
 
 10 fection as genuine poetic feeling, genuine music of heart. 
 Yet the Song has its rules equally with the Tragedy; 
 rules which in most cases are poorly fulfilled, in many 
 cases are not so much as felt. We might write a long 
 essay on the Songs of Burns ; which we reckon by far the 
 
 15 best that Britain has yet produced : for indeed, since the 
 
 s era of Queen ■ Elizabeth, we know not that, by any other 
 
 hand, aught truly worth attention has been accomplished 
 
 in this department. True, we have songs enough " by 
 
 persons of quality "; we have tawdry, hollow, wine- bred 
 
 ic madrigals; many a rhymed speech " in the flowing and 
 watery vein of Ossorius the Portugal Bishop," rich in 
 sonorous words, and, for moral, dashed perhaps with 
 some tint of a sentimental sensuality ; all which many 
 persons cease not from endeavouring to sing ; though for 
 
 25 most part, we fear, the music is but from the throat out- 
 wards, or at best from some region far enough short of 
 the Soul; not in which, but in a certain inane Limbo of 
 the Fancy, or even in some vaporous debatable-land on 
 
Essay on Burns g$ 
 
 the outskirts of the Nervous System, most of such madri- 
 gals and rhymed speeches seem to have originated. 
 
 With the Songs of Burns we must not name these 
 things. Independently of the clear, manly, heartfelt sen- 
 timent that ever pervades his poetry, his Songs are honest 5 
 in another point of view : in form, as well as in spirit. 
 They do not affect to be set to music, but they actually 
 and in themselves are music \ they have received their \ 
 life, and fashioned themselves together, in the medium of 
 Harmony, as Venus rose from the bosom of the sea. The ic 
 story, the feeling, is not detailed, but suggested ; not said, 
 or spouted, in rhetorical completeness and coherence ; 
 but sung, in fitful gushes, in glowing hints, in fantastic 
 breaks, in warblings not of the voice only, but of the 
 whole mind. We consider this to be the essence of a 15 
 song ; and that no songs since the little careless catches, 
 and as it were drops of song, which Shakespeare has here 
 and there sprinkled over his plays, fulfil this condition in 
 nearly the same degree as most of Burns's do. Such grace 
 and truth of external movement, too, presupposes in gen- 20 
 sral a corresponding force and truth of sentiment and in- 
 ward meaning. The Songs of Burns are not more perfect * 
 in the former quality than in the iatter. With what ten- 
 derness he sings, yet with what vehemence and entireness ! 
 There is a piercing wail in his sorrow, the purest rapture 25 
 in his joy ; he burns with the sternest ire, or laughs with 
 the loudest or sliest mirth ; and yet he is sweet and soft, 
 " sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet, and soft as 
 their parting tear." If we farther take into account the 
 
94 Essay on Burns 
 
 immense variety of his subjects; how, from the loud 
 flowing revel in Willie brew'd a Peck o 1 Maut, to the still, 
 rapt enthusiasm of sadness for Mary in Heaven; from 
 the glad kind greeting of Aula 7 Lang Syne, or the comic 
 5 archness of Duncan Gray, to the fire-eyed fury of Scots 
 wha hae wi 1 Wallace bled, he has found a tone and words 
 for every mood of man's heart, — it 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 being second to him. 
 
 io It is on his Songs, as we believe, that Burns's chief in- 
 fluence as an author will ultimately be found to depend : 
 nor, if our Fletcher's aphorism is true, shall we account 
 this a small influence. " Let me make the songs of a 
 people,'' said he, "and you shall make its laws." Surely, 
 
 15 if ever any Poet might have equalled himself with Legis- 
 lators on this ground, it was Burns. His Songs are already 
 part of the mother-tongue, not of Scotland only but of 
 Britain, and of the millions that in all ends of the earth 
 speak a British language. In hut and hall, as the heart 
 
 20 unfolds itself in many-coloured joy and woe of existence, 
 the name, the voice of that joy and that woe, is the name 
 and voice which Burns has given them. Strictly speaking, 
 perhaps no British man has so deeply affected the thoughts 
 and feelings of so many men, as this solitary and altogether 
 
 25 private individual, with means apparently the humblest. 
 
 In another point of view, 'moreover, we incline to think 
 
 that Burns's influence may have been considerable : we 
 
 mean, as exerted specially on the Literature of his country, 
 
 at least on the Literature of Scotland. Among the great 
 
Essay on Burns 95 
 
 changes which British, particularly Scottish literature, has 
 undergone since that period, one of the greatest will be 
 found to consist in its remarkable increase of nationality. v 
 Even the English writers, most popular in Burns's time, 
 were little distinguished for their literary patriotism, in this 5 
 its best sense. A certain attenuated cosmopolitanism had, in 
 good measure, taken place of the old insular home-feeling ; 
 literature was, as it were, without any local environment ; 
 was not nourished by the affections which spring from a 
 native soil. Our Grays and Glovers seemed to write al- 10 
 most as if in vacuo ; the thing written bears no mark of 
 place ; it is not written so much for Englishmen, as for 
 men ; or rather, which is the inevitable result of this, for 
 certain Generalizations which philosophy termed men. 
 Goldsmith is an exception : not so Johnson ; the scene of 15 
 his Rambler is little more English than that of his Rasselas. 
 But if such was, in some degree, the case with Eng- 
 land, it was, in the highest degree, the case with Scotland. 
 In fact, our Scottish literature had, at that period, a very 
 singular aspect ; unexampled, so far as we know, except 20 
 perhaps at Geneva, where the same state of matters ap- 
 pears still to continue. For a long period after Scotland 
 became British, we had no literature : at the date when 
 Addison and Steele were writing their Spectators, our good 
 John Boston was writing, with the noblest intent, but 25 
 alike in defiance of grammar and philosophy, his Fourfold 
 State of Man. Then came the schisms in our National 
 Church, and the fiercer schisms in our Body Politic ; 
 Theologic ink, and Jacobite blood, with gall enough in 
 
g6 Essay on Burns 
 
 both cases, seemed to have blotted out the intellect of 
 the country : however, it was only obscured, not oblit- 
 erated. Lord Karnes made nearly the first attempt at 
 writing English ; and ere long, Hume, Robertson, Smith, 
 5 and a whole host of followers, attracted hither the eyes 
 of all Europe. And yet in this brilliant resuscitation of 
 our " fervid genius," there was nothing truly Scottish, 
 nothing indigenous ; except, perhaps, the natural impetu- 
 
 * osity of intellect, which we sometimes claim, and are 
 
 io sometimes upbraided with, as a characteristic of our 
 nation. It is curious to remark that Scotland, so full of 
 writers, had no Scottish culture, nor indeed any English ; 
 our culture was almost exclusively French. It was by 
 studying Racine and Voltaire, Batteux and Boileau, that 
 
 15 Karnes had trained himself to be a critic and philosopher ; 
 it was the light of Montesquieu and Mably that guided 
 Roberston in his political speculations ; Quesnay's lamp 
 that kindled the lamp of Adam Smith. Hume was too 
 rich a man to borrow ; and perhaps he reacted on the 
 
 20 French more than he was acted on by them : but neither 
 had he aught to do with Scotland ; Edinburgh, equally 
 with La Fleche, was but the lodging and laboratory, in 
 which he not so much morally lived, as metaphysically 
 investigated. Never, perhaps, was there a class of writers 
 
 25 so clear and well-ordered, yet so totally destitute, to all 
 appearance, of any patriotic affection, nay, of any human 
 affection whatever. The French wits of the period were as 
 unpatriotic : but their general deficiency in moral princi- 
 ple, not to say their avowed sensuality and unbelief in all 
 
Essay on Burns 97 
 
 virtue, strictly so called, render this accountable enough. 
 We hope there is a patriotism founded on something 
 better than prejudice ; that our country may be dear to 
 us, without injury to our philosophy ; that in loving and 
 justly prizing all other lands, we may prize justly, and yet 5 
 love before all others, our own stern Motherland, and the 
 venerable Structure of social and moral Life, which Mind 
 has through long ages been building up for us there. 
 Surely there is nourishment for the better part of man's 
 heart in all this : surely the roots, that have fixed them- ig 
 selves in the very core of man's being, may be so culti- 
 vated as to grow up not into briers, but into roses, in the 
 field of his life ! Our Scottish sages have no such pro- 
 pensities : the field of their life shows neither briers nor 
 roses ; but only a flat, continuous thrashing-floor for 15 
 Logic, whereon all questions, from the " Doctrine of Rent " 
 to the u Natural History of Religion, " are thrashed and 
 sifted with the same mechanical impartiality ! 
 
 With Sir Walter Scott at the head of our literature, it 
 cannot be denied that much of this evil is past, or 20 
 rapidly passing away : our chief literary men, whatever 
 other faults they may have, no longer live among us like 
 a French Colony, or some knot of Propaganda Mission- 
 aries ; but like natural-born subjects of the soil, partaking 
 and sympathizing in all our attachments, humours, and 25 
 habits. Our literature no longer grows in water but in 
 mould, and with the true racy virtues of the soil and cli- 
 mate. How much of this change may be due to Burns, 
 or to any other individual, it might be difficult to estimate. 
 caklyle's essay on burns — 7 
 
98 Essay on Burns 
 
 Direct literary imitation of Burns was not to be looked for. 
 But his example, in the fearless adoption of domestic sub- 
 jects, could not but operate from afar ; and certainly in 
 no heart did the love of country ever burn with a warmer 
 5 glow than in that of Burns : " a tide of Scottish prejudice," 
 as he modestly calls this deep and generous feeling, " had 
 been poured along his veins ; and he felt that it would 
 boil there till the flood-gates shut in eternal rest." It 
 seemed to him, as if he could do so little for his country, 
 
 10 and yet would so gladly have done all. One small prov- 
 ince stood open for him, — that of Scottish Song ; and 
 how eagerly he entered on it, how devotedly he laboured 
 there ! In his toilsome journeyings, this object never 
 quits him ; it is the little happy-valley of his careworn 
 
 15 heart. In the gloom of his own affliction, he eagerly 
 searches after some lonely brother of the muse, and re- 
 joices to snatch one other name from the oblivion that, 
 was covering it ! These were early . feelings, and they 
 abode with him to the end : 
 
 «o • . . A wish (I mind its power), 
 
 A wish, that to my latest hour 
 Will strongly heave my breast, — 
 That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake, 
 Some useful plan or bock could make, 
 
 te Or sing a sang at least. 
 
 The rough bur Thistle spreading wide 
 
 Amang the bearded bear, 1 
 I turn'd my weeding-clips 2 aside, 
 
 And spared the symbol dear. 
 
 1 Barley. 2 Shears. 
 
Essay on Burns 99 
 
 But to leave the mere literary character of Burns, 
 which has already detained us too long. Far more inter- 
 esting than any of his written works, as it appears to us, 
 are his acted ones : the Life he willed and was fated to 
 lead among his fellow-men. These Poems are but like 5 
 little rhymed fragments scattered here and there in the 
 grand unrhymed Romance of his earthly existence ; and it 
 is only when intercalated in this at their proper places, 
 that they attain their full measure of significance. And 
 this, too, alas, was but a fragment ! The plan of a mighty 10 
 edifice had been sketched ; some columns, porticos, firm 
 masses of building, stand completed j the rest more or 
 less clearly indicated ; with many a far-stretching ten- 
 dency, which only studious and friendly eyes can now 
 trace towards the purposed termination. For the work is 15 
 broken off in the middle, almost in the beginning ; and 
 rises among us, beautiful and sad, at once unfinished and a 
 ruin ! If charitable judgement was necessary in estimating 
 his Poems, and justice required that the aim and the 
 manifest power to fulfil it must often be accepted for the 20 
 fulfilment ; much more is this the case in regard to his 
 Life, the sum and result of all his endeavours, where his 
 difficulties came upon him not in detail only, but in 
 mass ; and so much has been left unaccomplished, nay, 
 was mistaken,, and altogether marred. 25 
 
 Properly speaking, there is but one era in the life of 
 Burns, and that the earliest. We have not youth and 
 manhood, but only youth : for, to the end, we discern no 
 decisive change in the complexion of his character ; in his 
 
ioo Essay on Burns 
 
 thirty-seventh year, he is still, as it were in youth. With 
 all that resoluteness of judgment, that penetrating insight, 
 and singular maturity of intellectual power, exhibited in 
 his writings, he never attains to any clearness regarding 
 5 himself; to the last, he never ascertains his peculiar aim, 
 even with such distinctness as is common among ordinary 
 men ; and therefore never can pursue it with that single- 
 ness of will, which insures success and some contentment 
 to such men. To the last, he wavers between two pur- 
 
 io poses : glorying in his talent, like a true poet, he yet can- 
 not consent to make this his chief and sole glory, and to 
 follow it as the one thing needful, through poverty or 
 riches, through good or evil report. Another far meaner 
 ambition still cleaves to him ; he must dream and 
 
 15 struggle about a certain " Rock of Independence " ; 
 which, natural and even admirable as it might be, was 
 still but a warring with the world, on the comparatively 
 insignificant ground of his being more completely or less 
 completely supplied with money than others ; of his 
 
 20 standing at a higher or at a lower altitude in a general 
 estimation than others. For the world still appears to 
 him, as to the young, in borrowed colours : he expects 
 from it what it cannot give to any man ; seeks for con- 
 tentment, not within himself, in action and wise effort, but 
 
 25 from without, in the kindness of circumstances, in love, 
 friendship, honour, pecuniary ease. He would be happy, 
 not actively and in himself, but passively and from some 
 ideal cornucopia of Enjoyments, not earned by his own 
 labour, but showered on him by the beneficence of 
 
Essay on Burns. tori 
 
 Destiny. Thus, like a young man; he^eatfno^ircl Iim.sdf S 
 up for any worthy well-calculated goal, but swerves to and 
 fro, between passionate hope and remorseful disappoint- 
 ment : rushing onwards with a deep tempestuous force, 
 he surmounts or breaks asunder many a barrier ; travels, 5 
 nay, advances far, but advancing only under uncertain 
 guidance, is ever and anon turned from his path ; and to 
 the last cannot reach the only true happiness of a man, 
 that of clear decided Activity in the sphere for which, by 
 nature and circumstances, he has been fitted and appointed. 10 
 
 We do not say these things in dispraise of Burns ; nay, 
 perhaps, they but interest us the more in his favour. 
 This blessing is not given soonest to the best ; but rather, 
 it is often the greatest minds that are latest in obtaining 
 it ; for where most is to be developed, most time may be 15 
 required to develop it. A complex condition had been 
 • assigned him from without ; as complex a condition from 
 within: no " pre-established harmony" existed between 
 the clay soil of Mossgiel and the empyrean soul of Robert 
 Burns ; it was not wonderful that the adjustment between 20 
 them should have been long postponed, and his arm long 
 cumbered, and his sight confused, in so vast and discord- ' 
 ant an economy as he had been appointed steward over. 
 Byron was, at his death, but a year younger than Burns ; 
 and through life, as it might have appeared, far more 25 
 simply situated : yet in him too we can trace no such ad- 
 justment, no such moral manhood ; but at best, and only 
 a little before his end, the beginning of what seemed such. 
 
 By much the most striking incident in Burns's Life 
 
iC2 Essay on Burns 
 
 is His journey lo* Edinburgh ; but perhaps a still more 
 important one is his residence at Irvine, so early as in his 
 twenty-third year. Hitherto his life had been poor and 
 toilworn ; but otherwise not ungenial, and, with all its 
 5 distresses, by no means unhappy. In his parentage, de- 
 ducting outward circumstances, he had every reason to 
 reckon himself fortunate. His father was a man of 
 thoughtful, intense, earnest character, as the best of our 
 peasants are ; valuing knowledge, possessing some, and 
 
 io what is far better and rarer, open-minded for more : a man 
 with a keen insight and devout heart ; reverent towards 
 God, friendly therefore at once, and fearless towards all 
 that God has made : in one word, though but a hard- 
 handed peasant, a complete and fully unfolded Man, 
 
 15 Such a father is seldom found in any rank in society ; and 
 was worth descending far in society to seek. Unfortu- 
 nately, he was very poor ; had he been even a little 
 richer, almost never so little, the whole might have issued 
 far otherwise. Mighty events turn on a straw ; the cross- 
 
 20 ing of a brook decides the conquest of the world. Had 
 this William Burns's small seven acres of nursery-ground 
 anywise prospered, the boy Robert had been sent to 
 school ; had struggled forward, as so many weaker men 
 do, to some university ; come forth not as a rustic wonder, 
 
 25 but as a regular well-trained intellectual workman, and 
 changed the whole course of British Literature, — for it 
 lay in him to have done this ! But the nursery did not 
 prosper ; poverty sank his whole family below the help of 
 even our cheap school-system : Burns remained a hard- 
 
Essay on Burns 103 
 
 worked ploughboy, and British literature took its own 
 course. Nevertheless, even in this rugged scene there 
 is much to nourish him. If he drudges, it is with his 
 brother, and for his father and mother, whom he loves, 
 and would fain shield from want. Wisdom is not banished 5 
 from their poor hearth, nor the balm of natural feeling : 
 the solemn words, Let us worship God, are heard there 
 from a " priest-like father " ; if threatenings of unjust 
 men throw mother and children into tears, these are tears 
 not of grief only, but of holiest affection ; every heart in 10 
 that humble group feels itself the closer knit to every 
 other ; in their hard warfare they are there together, a 
 " little band of brethren." Neither are such tears, and 
 the deep beauty that dwells in them, their only portion. 
 Light visits the hearts as it does the eyes of all living : 15 
 there is a force, too, in this youth, that enables him to 
 trample on misfortune ; nay, to bind it under his feet to 
 make him sport. For a bold, warm, buoyant humour of 
 character has been given him ; and so the thick-coming 
 shapes of evil are welcomed with a gay, friendly irony, and 2c 
 in their closest pressure he bates no jot of heart or hope. 
 Vague yearnings of ambition fail not, as he grows up ; 
 dreamy fancies hang like cloud-cities around him ; the 
 curtain of Existence is slowly rising, in many-coloured 
 splendour and gloom : and the auroral light of first love 25 
 is gilding his horizon, and the music of song is on his 
 path ; and so he walks 
 
 .... in glory and in joy, 
 Behind his plough, upon the mountain side. 
 
104 Essay on Burns 
 
 We ourselves know, from the best evidence, that up to 
 this date Burns was happy ; nay, that he was the gayest, 
 brightest, most fantastic, fascinating being to be found in 
 the world ; more so even than he ever afterwards ap- 
 5 peared. But now, at this early age, he quits the pater- 
 nal roof; goes forth into looser, louder, more exciting 
 society; and becomes initiated in those dissipations, 
 those vices, which a certain class of philosophers have 
 asserted to be a natural preparative for entering on active 
 
 to life ; a kind of mud-bath, in which the youth is, as it 
 were, necessitated to steep, and, we suppose, cleanse 
 himself, before the real toga of Manhood can be laid on 
 him. We shall not dispute much with this class of 
 philosophers ; we hope they are mistaken : for Sin and 
 
 15 Remorse so easily beset us at all stages of life, and are 
 always such indifferent company, that it seems hard we 
 should, at any stage, be forced and fated not only to 
 meet but to yield to them, and even serve for a term in 
 their leprous armada. We hope it is not so. Clear we 
 
 20 are, at all events, it cannot be the training one receives 
 in this Devil's service, but only our determining to desert 
 from it, that fits us for true manly Action. We become 
 men, not after we have been dissipated, and disappointed 
 in the chase of false pleasure ; but after we have ascer- 
 
 r.5 tained, in any way, what impassable barriers hem us in 
 through this life ; how mad it is to hope for contentment 
 to our infinite soul from the gifts of this extremely finite 
 world; that a man must be sufficient for himself; and 
 that for suffering and enduring there is no remedy but 
 
Essay on Burns 105 
 
 striving and doing. Manhood begins when we have in 
 any way made truce with Necessity ; begins even when 
 we have surrendered to Necessity, as the most part only 
 do ; but begins joyfully and hopefully only when we have 
 reconciled ourselves to Necessity ; and thus, in reality, 5 
 triumphed over it, and felt that in Necessity we are free. 
 Surely, such lessons as this last, which, in one shape or 
 other, is the grand lesson for every mortal man, are bet- 
 ter learned from the lips of a devout mother, in the looks 
 and actions of a devout father, while the heart is yet soft 10 
 and pliant, than in collision with the sharp adamant of 
 Fate, attracting us to shipwreck us, when the heart is 
 grown hard, and may he broken before it will become 
 contrite. Had Burns continued to learn this, as he was 
 already learning it, in his father's cottage, he would have 15 
 learned it fully, which he never did ; and been saved 
 many a lasting aberration, many a bitter hour and year 
 of remorseful sorrow. 
 
 It seems to us another circumstance of fatal import in 
 Burns's history, that at this time too he became involved 20 
 in the religious quarrels of his district ; that he was en- 
 listed and feasted, as the fighting man of the New-Light 
 Priesthood, in their highly unprofitable warfare. At the 
 tables of these free-minded clergy he learned much more 
 than was needful for him. Such liberal ridicule of fa- 25 
 naticism awakened in his mind scruples about Religion 
 itself; and a whole world of Doubts, which it required 
 quite another set of conjurors than these men to exorcise. 
 We do not say that such an intellect as his could have 
 
io6 Essay on Burns 
 
 escaped similar doubts at some period of his history ; 01 
 even that he could, at a later period, have come through 
 them altogether victorious and unharmed : but it seems 
 peculiarly unfortunate that this time, above all others, 
 5 should have been fixed for the encounter. For now, with 
 principles assailed by evil example from without, by 
 "passions raging like demons" from within, he had little 
 need of skeptical misgivings to whisper treason in the 
 heat of the battle, or to cut off his retreat if he were 
 
 io already defeated. He loses his feeling of innocence ; his 
 mind is at variance with itself; the old divinity no longer 
 presides there \ but wild Desires and wild Repentance 
 alternately oppress him. Ere long, too, he has commit- 
 ted himself before the world ; his character for sobriety, 
 
 J 5 dear to a Scottish peasant as few corrupted worldlings can 
 even conceive, is destroyed in the eyes of men ; and his 
 only refuge consists in trying to disbelieve his guiltiness, 
 and is but a refuge of lies. The blackest desperation 
 now gathers over him, broken only by red lightnings of 
 
 20 remorse. The whole fabric of his life is blasted asun- 
 der; for now not only his character, but his personal 
 liberty, is to be lost ; men and Fortune are leagued for 
 his hurt; "hungry Ruin has him in the wind." He 
 sees no escape but the saddest of all : exiled from 
 
 25 his loved country, to a country in every sense inhospi- 
 table and abhorrent to him. While the "gloomy 
 night is gathering fast," in mental storm and solitude, 
 as well as in physical, he sings his wild farewell to 
 Scotland : 
 
Essay on Burns 107 
 
 Farewell, my friends ; farewell, my foes ! 
 My peace with these, my love with those : 
 The bursting tears my heart declare ; 
 Adieu, my native banks of Ayr ! 
 
 Light breaks suddenly in on him in floods ; but still a 5 
 false transitory light, and no real sunshine. He is invited 
 to Edinburgh ; hastens thither with anticipating heart ; is 
 welcomed as in a triumph, and with universal blandish- 
 ment and acclamation ; whatever is wisest, whatever is 
 greatest or loveliest there, gathers round him, to gaze on 10 
 his face, to show him honour, sympathy, affection. Burns's 
 appearance among the sages and nobles of Edinburgh 
 must be regarded as one of the most singular phenomena 
 in modern Literature ; almost like the appearance of 
 some Napoleon among the crowned sovereigns of mod- 15 
 ern Politics. For it is nowise as " a mockery king," set 
 there by favour, transiently and for a purpose, that he will 
 let himself be treated ; still less is he a mad Rienzi, whose 
 sudden elevation turns his too weak head : but he stands 
 there on his own basis ; cool, unastonished, holding his 20 
 equal rank from Nature herself; putting forth no claim 
 which there is not strength in him, as well as about him, 
 to vindicate. Mr. Lockhart has some forcible observa- 
 tions on this point : 
 
 " It needs no effort of imagination," says he, " to conceive what 25 
 the sensations of an isolated set of scholars (almost all either clergy- 
 men or professors) must have been in the presence of this big- 
 boned, black-browed, brawny stranger, with his great flashing eyes, 
 who, having forced his way among them from the plough-tail at a 
 
108 Essay on Burns 
 
 single stride, manifested in the whole strain of his bearing and con- 
 versation a most thorough conviction, that in the society of the 
 most eminent men of his nation he was exactly where he was 
 entitled to be ; hardly deigned to flatter them by exhibiting even 
 5 an occasional symptom of being flattered by their notice ; by turns 
 calmly measured himself against the most cultivated understandings 
 of his time in discussion ; overpowered the bon-mots of the most 
 celebrated convivialists by broad floods of merriment, impregnated 
 with all the burning life of genius ; astounded bosoms habitually 
 
 10 enveloped in the thrice-piled folds of social reserve, by compelling 
 them to tremble, — nay, to tremble visibly, — beneath the fearless 
 touch of natural pathos ; and all this without indicating the small- 
 est willingness to be ranked among those professional ministers of 
 excitement, who are content to be paid in money and smiles for 
 
 15 doing what the spectators and auditors would be ashamed of doing 
 m their own persons, even if they had the power of doing it ; and 
 last, and probably worst of all, who was known to be in the habit 
 of enlivening societies which they would have scorned to approach, 
 still more frequently than their own, with eloquence no less mag- 
 
 20 nificent ; with wit, in all likelihood still more daring ; often enough, 
 as the superiors whom he fronted without alarm might have guessed 
 from the beginning, and had ere long no occasion to guess, with 
 wit pointed at themselves." 
 
 t j The farther we remove from this scene, the more singu- 
 £5 lar will it seem to us : details of the exterior aspect of it 
 
 are already full of interest. Most readers recollect Mr. 
 
 Walker's personal interviews with Burns as among the 
 
 best passages of his Narrative : a time will come wher. 
 
 this reminiscence of Sir Walter Scott's, slight though it is, 
 30 will also be precious : 
 
 " As for Burns," writes Sir Walter, " I may truly say, Virgilium 
 vidi tantum. I was a lad of fifteen in 1 786-7, when he came first 
 
Essay on Burns 109 
 
 to Edinburgh, but had sense and feeling enough to be much inter- 
 ested in his poetry, and would have given the world to know him : 
 but I had very little acquaintance with any literary people, and still 
 less with the gentry of the west country, the two sets that he most 
 frequented. Mr. Thomas Grierson was at that time a clerk of my 5 
 father's. He knew Burns, and promised to ask him to his lodgings 
 to dinner ; but had no opportunity to keep his word ; otherwise I 
 might have seen more of this distinguished man. As it was, I saw 
 him one day at the late venerable Professor Ferguson's, where there 
 were several gentlemen of literary reputation, among whom I remem- 10 
 ber the celebrated Mr. Dugald Stewart. Of course, we youngsters 
 sat silent, looked and listened. The only thing I remember which 
 was remarkable in Burns's manner, was the effect produced upon 
 him by a print of Bunbury's, representing a soldier lying dead on 
 the snow, his dog sitting in misery on one side, — on the other, his 15 
 widow, with a child in her arms. These lines were written beneath : 
 
 "' Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain, 
 Perhaps that mother wept her soldier slain ; 
 Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew, 
 The big drops mingling with the milk he drew, 20 
 
 Gave the sad presage of his future years, 
 The child of misery baptized in tears.' 
 
 "Burns seemed much affected by the print, or rather by the 
 ideas which it suggested to his mind. He actually shed tears. He 
 asked whose the lines were ; and it chanced that nobody but my- 25 
 self remembered that they occur in a half-forgotten poem of Lang- 
 horne's called by the unpromising title of 'The Justice of Peace.' 
 I whispered my information to a friend present ; he mentioned it 
 to Burns, who rewarded me with a look and a word, which, though 
 of mere civility, I then received and still recollect with very great 30 
 pleasure. 
 
 " His person was strong and robust ; his manners rustic, not 
 
no Essay on Burns 
 
 clownish ; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity, which re- 
 ceived part of its effect perhaps from one's knowledge of his extra- 
 ordinary talents. His features are represented in Mr. Nasmyth's 
 picture : but to me it conveys the idea that they are diminished, as 
 5 if seen in perspective. I think his countenance was more massive 
 than it looks in any of the portraits. I should have taken the poet, 
 had I not known what he was, for a very sagacious country farmer 
 of the old Scotch school, i.e. none of your modern agriculturists who 
 keep labourers for their drudgery, but the douce l gudeman 2 who 
 
 io held his own plough. There was a strong expression of sense and 
 shrewdness in all his lineaments ; the eye alone, I think, indicated 
 the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a 
 dark cast, which glowed (I say literally glowed) when he spoke 
 with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human 
 
 15 head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time. 
 His conversation expressed perfect self-confidence, without the 
 slightest presumption. Among the men who were the most learned 
 of their time and country, he expressed himself with perfect firm- 
 ness, but without the least intrusive forwardness ; and when he 
 
 20 differed in opinion, he did not hesitate to express it firmly, yet at 
 the same time with modesty. I do not remember any part of his 
 conversation distinctly enough to be quoted ; nor did I ever see 
 him again, except in the street, w T here he did not recognise me, as 
 I could not expect he should. He was much caressed in Edin- 
 
 25 burgh : but (considering what literary emoluments have been since 
 his day) the efforts made for his relief were extremely trifling. 
 
 " I remember, on this occasion I mention, I thought Burns's 
 acquaintance with English poetry was rather limited ; and also 
 that, having twenty times the abilities of Allan Ramsay and of 
 
 30 Ferguson, he talked of them with too much humility as his models : 
 there was doubtless national predilection in his estimate. 
 
 " This is all I can tell you about Burns. I have only to add^ 
 
 1 Sedate. 2 Man of the house. 
 
Essay on Burns 1 1 1 
 
 that his dress corresponded with his manner. He was like a farmer 
 dressed in his best to dine with the laird. I do not speak in maiam 
 partem, when I say, I never saw a man in company with his supe- 
 riors in station or information more perfectly free, from either the 
 reality or the affectation of embarrassment. I was told, but did not 5 
 observe it, that his address to females was extremely deferential, and 
 always with a turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which en- 
 gaged their attention particularly. I have heard the late Duchess 
 of Gordon remark this. — I do not know anything I can add to 
 these recollections of forty years since." ic 
 
 The conduct of Burns under this dazzlingblaze of favour ; 
 the calm, unaffected, manly manner in which he not only 
 bore it, but estimated its value, has justly been regarded 
 as the best proof that could be given of his real vigour 
 and integrity of mind. A little natural vanity, some 15 
 touches of hypocritical modesty, some glimmerings of 
 affectation, at least some fear of being thought affected, 
 we could have pardoned in almost any man ; but no such 
 indication is to be traced here. In his unexampled situa- 
 tion the young peasant is not a moment perplexed ; so 20 
 many strange lights do not confuse him, do not lead him 
 astray. Nevertheless, we cannot but perceive that this 
 winter did him great and lasting injury. A somewhat 
 clearer knowledge of men's affairs, scarcely of their char- 
 acters, it did afford him ; but a sharper feeling of For- 25 
 tune's unequal arrangements in their social destiny is 
 also left with him. He had seen the gay and gorgeous 
 arena, in which the powerful are born to play their parts ; 
 nay, had himself stood in the midst of it ; and he felt more 
 bitterly than ever, that here he was but a looker-on, and 3° 
 
112 Essay on Burns 
 
 had no part or lot in that splendid game. From this 
 time a jealous indignant fear of social degradation takes 
 possession of him ; and perverts, so far as aught could 
 pervert, his private contentment, and his feelings towards 
 5 his richer fellows. It was clear to Burns that he had 
 talent enough to make a fortune, or a hundred fortunes, 
 could he but have rightly willed this ; it was clear also that 
 he willed something far different, and therefore could not 
 make one. Unhappy it was that he had not power to 
 
 io choose the one, and reject the other ; but must halt for- 
 ever between two opinions, two objects ; making ham- 
 pered advancement towards either. But so it is with many 
 men : we " long for the merchandise, yet would fain keep 
 the price ; " and so stand chaffering with Fate, in vexa- 
 
 15 tious altercation, till the night come, and our fair is 
 over ! 
 
 The Edinburgh Learned of that period were in gen- 
 eral more noted for clearness of head than for warmth 
 of heart : with the exception of the good old Blacklock, 
 
 20 whose help was too ineffectual, scarcely one among them 
 seems to have looked at Burns with any true sympathy, 
 or indeed much otherwise than as at a highly curious 
 thing. By the great also he is treated in the customary 
 fashion ; entertained at their tables and dismissed : cer- 
 
 25 tain modica of pudding and praise are, from time to 
 time, gladly exchanged for the fascination of his pres- 
 ence ; which exchange once effected, the bargain is 
 finished, and each party goes his several way. At the 
 end of this strange season, Burns gloomily sums up his 
 
Essay on Burns 113 
 
 gains and losses, and meditates on the chaotic future. 
 In money he is somewhat richer ; in fame and the show 
 of happiness, infinitely richer ; but in the substance of it, 
 as poor as ever. Nay, poorer; for his heart is now mad- 
 dened still more with the fever of worldly Ambition ; and 5 
 through long years the disease will rack him with un- 
 profitable sufferings, and weaken his strength for all true 
 and nobler aims. 
 
 What Burns was next to do or to avoid ; how a man 
 so circumstanced was now to guide himself towards his 10 
 true advantage, might at this point of time have been a 
 question for the wisest. It was a question too, which 
 apparently he was left altogether to answer for himself: 
 of his learned or rich patrons it had not struck any indi- 
 vidual to turn a thought on this so trivial matter. With- 15 
 out claiming for Burns the praise of perfect sagacity, 
 we must say, that his Excise and Farm scheme does not 
 seem to us a very unreasonable one ; that we should be 
 at a loss, even now, to suggest one decidedly better. 
 Certain of his admirers have felt scandalized at his ever 20 
 resolving to gauge; and would have had him lie at the 
 pool, till the spirit of Patronage stirred the waters, that 
 iso, with one friendly plunge, all his sorrows might be 
 healed. Unwise counsellors ! They know not the man- 
 ner of this spirit ; and how, in the lap of most golden 25 
 dreams, a man might have happiness, were it not that 
 in the interim he must die of hunger ! It reflects credit 
 on the manliness and sound sense of Burns, that he felt 
 so early on what ground he was standing ; and preferred 
 
 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS — 8 
 
ii4 Essay on Burns 
 
 self-help, on the humblest scale, to dependence and in- 
 action, though with hope of far more splendid possibili- 
 ties. But even these possibilities were not rejected in 
 his scheme : he might expect, if it chanced that he had 
 5 any friend, to rise, in no long period, into something even 
 like opulence and leisure ; while again, if it chanced that 
 he had no friend, he could still live in security ; and for 
 the rest, he " did not intend to borrow honour from any 
 profession." We reckon that his plan was honest and 
 
 io well-calculated : all turned on the execution of it. 
 Doubtless it failed; yet not, we believe, from any vice 
 inherent in itself. Nay, after all, it was no failure of 
 external means, but of internal, that overtook Burns. 
 His was no bankruptcy of the purse, but of the soul ; to 
 
 15 his last day, he owed no man anything. 
 
 Meanwhile he begins well : with two good and wise 
 actions. His donation to his mother, munificent from a 
 man whose income had lately been seven pounds a-year, 
 was worthy of him, and not more than worthy. Gen 
 
 20 erous also, and worthy of him, was the treatment of the 
 woman whose life's welfare now depended on his pleasure. 
 A friendly observer might have hoped serene days for 
 him: his mind is on the true road to peace with itself: 
 what clearness he still wants will be given as he proceeds ; 
 
 25 for the best teacher of duties, that still lie dim to us, is 
 the Practice of those we see and have at hand. Had the 
 "patrons of genius," who could give him nothing, but 
 taken nothing from him, at least nothing more ! The 
 wounds of his heart would have healed, vulgar ambition 
 
Essay on Burns 1 1 5 
 
 would have died away. Toil and Frugality would have 
 been welcome, since Virtue dwelt with them ; and Poetry 
 would have shone through them as of old : and in her 
 clear ethereal light, which was his own by birthright, he 
 might have looked down on his earthly destiny, and all 5 
 its obstructions, not with patience only, but with love. 
 
 But the patrons of genius would not have it so. 
 Picturesque tourists, 1 all manner of fashionable danglers 
 after literature, and, far worse, all manner of convivial 
 Maecenases, hovered round him in his retreat ; and his ic 
 good as well as his weak qualities secured them influence 
 over him. He was flattered by their notice ; and his 
 warm social nature made it impossible for him to shake 
 them off, and hold on his way apart from them. These 
 
 1 There is one little sketch by certain "English gentlemen "of 15 
 this class, which, though adopted in Currie's Narrative, and since 
 then repeated in most others, we have all along felt an invincible 
 disposition to regard as imaginary : " On a rock that projected into 
 the stream, they saw a man employed in angling, of a singular ap- 
 pearance. He had a cap made of fox-skin on his head, a loose 20 
 greatcoat fixed round him by a belt, from which depended an 
 enormous Highland broad-sword. It was Burns." Now, we rather 
 think, it was not Burns. For, to say nothing of the fox-skin cap, 
 the loose and quite Hibernian watchcoat with the belt, what are 
 we to make of this " enormous Highland broad-sword " depending 25 
 from him? More especially, as there is no word of parish con- 
 stables on the outlook to see whether, as Dennis phrases it, he had 
 an eye to his own midriff or that of the public ! Burns, of all men, 
 had the least need, and the least tendency, to seek for distinction, 
 either in his own eyes, or those of others, by such poor mum- 30 
 meries. — ■ (Carlyle's note.*) 
 
1 1 6 Essay on Burns 
 
 men, as we believe, were proximately the means of his 
 ruin. Not that they meant him any ill ; they only meant 
 themselves a little good ; if he suffered harm, let him look 
 to it ! But they wasted his precious time and his pre- 
 5 cious talent ; they disturbed his composure, broke down 
 his returning habits of temperance and assiduous con- 
 tented exertion. Their pampering was baneful to him ; 
 their cruelty, which soon followed, was equally baneful. 
 The old grudge against Fortune's inequality awoke with 
 
 io new bitterness in their neighbourhood ; and Burns had 
 no retreat but to " the Rock of Independence," which 
 is but an air-castle after all, that looks well at a distance, 
 but will screen no one from real wind and wet. Flushed 
 with irregular excitement, exasperated alternately by con- 
 
 15 tempt of others, and contempt of himself, Burns was no 
 longer regaining his peace of mind, but fast losing it for- 
 ever. There was a hollowness at the heart of his life, 
 for his conscience did not now approve what he was 
 doing. 
 
 20 Amid the vapours of unwise enjoyment, of bootless re- 
 morse, and angry discontent with Fate, his true loadstar, 
 a life of Poetry, with Poverty, nay with Famine if it must 
 be so, was too often altogether hidden from his eyes. And 
 yet he sailed a sea, where without some such loadstar there 
 
 25 was no right steering. Meteors of French Politics rise 
 before him, but these were not his stars. An accident 
 this, which hastened, but did not originate, his worst dis- 
 tresses. In the mad contentions of that time, he comes 
 in collision with certain official Superiors ; is wounded by 
 
Essay on Burns 117 
 
 them ; cruelly lacerated, we should say, could a dead me- 
 chanical implement, in any case, be called cruel : and 
 shrinks, in indignant pain, into deeper self-seclusion, into 
 gloomier moodiness than ever. His life has now lost its 
 unity : it is a life of fragments ; led with little aim, be- 5 
 yond the melancholy one of securing its own continu- 
 ance, — in fits of wild false joy when such offered, and ot 
 black despondency when they passed away. His charac- 
 ter before the world begins to suffer : calumny is busy with 
 him ; for a miserable man makes more enemies than ia 
 friends. Some faults he has fallen into, and a thousand 
 misfortunes ; but deep criminality is what he stands ac- 
 cused of, and they that are not without sin cast the first 
 stone at him ! For is he not a well-wisher to the French 
 Revolution, a Jacobin, and therefore in that one act guilty 15 
 of all? These accusations, political and moral, it has since 
 appeared, were false enough : but the world hesitated little 
 to credit them. Nay, his convivial Maecenases themselves 
 were not the last to do it. There is reason to believe that, 
 in his later years, the Dumfries Aristocracy had partly with- 20 
 drawn themselves from Burns, as from a tainted person, no 
 longer worthy of their acquaintance. That painful class, 
 stationed, in all provincial cities, behind the outmost 
 breastwork of Gentility, there to stand siege and do battle 
 against the intrusions of Grocerdom and Grazierdom, 25 
 had actually seen dishonour in the society of Burns, and 
 branded him with their veto ; had, as we vulgarly say, 
 cut him ! We find one passage in this Work of Mr. Lock- 
 hart's, which will not out of our thoughts : 
 
1 1 8 Essay on Burns 
 
 " A gentleman of that county, whose name I have already more 
 than once had occasion to refer to, has often told me that he was 
 seldom more grieved, than when riding into Dumfries one tine 
 summer evening about this time to attend a county ball, he saw 
 5 Burns walking alone, on the shady side of the principal street of 
 the town, while the opposite side was gay with successive groups of 
 gentlemen and ladies, all drawn together for the festivities of the 
 night, not one of whom appeared willing to recognize him. The 
 horseman dismounted, and joined Burns, who on his proposing to 
 10 cross the street said : ■ Nay, nay, my young friend, that's all over 
 now;' and quoted, after a pause, some verses of Lady Grizzel Bail- 
 lie's pathetic ballad : 
 
 " ■ His bonnet stood ance fu' fair on his brow, 
 His auld ane look'd better than mony ane's new; 
 je But now he lets 't wearony way it will hing, 
 
 And casts himsell dowie 1 upon the corn-bing. 2 
 
 " ' O, were we young as we ance hae been, 
 
 We sud hae been galloping down on yon green, 
 And linking 3 it ower the lily-white lea! 
 20 And werena my heart light, I wad die? 
 
 It was little in Burns's character to let his feelings on certain sub- 
 jects escape in this fashion. He, immediately after reciting these 
 verses, assumed the sprightliness of his most pleasing manner; and 
 taking his young friend home with him, entertained him very agree- 
 25 ably till the hour of the ball arrived." 
 
 Alas ! when we think that Burns now sleeps " where 
 bitter indignation can no longer lacerate his heart," 4 and 
 
 1 Mournfully. 2 Corn-heap. 3 Trip or dance. 
 
 4 Ubi sceva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit. Swift's 
 Epitaph. — ( Carlyle's note.) 
 
Essay on Bums 119 
 
 that most of those fair dames and frizzled gentlemen al- 
 ready lie at his side, where the breastwork of gentility is 
 quite thrown down, — who would not sigh over the thin 
 delusions and foolish toys that divide heart from heart, 
 and make man unmerciful to his brother ! 5 
 
 It was not now to be hoped that the genius of Burns 
 would ever reach maturity, or accomplish aught worthy 
 of itself. His spirit was jarred in its melody ; not the 
 soft breath of natural feeling, but the rude hand of Fate, 
 was now sweeping over the strings. And yet what 10 
 harmony was in him, what music even in his discords ! 
 How the wild tones had a charm for the simplest and 
 the wisest ; and all men felt and knew that here also was 
 one of the Gifted ! " If he entered an inn at midnight, 
 after all the inmates were in bed, the news of his arrival 15 
 circulated from the cellar to the garret ; and ere ten 
 minutes had elapsed, the landlord and all his guests were 
 assembled ! " Some brief, pure moments of poetic life 
 were yet appointed him, in the composition of his Songs. 
 We can understand how he grasped at this employ- 20 
 ment ; and how, too, he spurned all other reward for it 
 but what the labour itself brought him. For the soul of 
 Burns, though scathed and marred, was yet living in its 
 full moral strength, though sharply conscious of its errors 
 and abasement : and here, in his destitution and degra- 25 
 dation, was one act of seeming nobleness and self devot- 
 edness left even for him to perform. He felt too, that 
 with all the " thoughtless follies " that had " laid him low," 
 the world was unjust and cruel to him \ and he silently 
 
120 Essay on Burns 
 
 appealed to another and calmer time. Not as a hired 
 soldier, but as a patriot, would he strive for the glory of 
 his country : so he cast from him the poor sixpence 
 a-day, and served zealously as a volunteer. Let us not 
 5 grudge him this last luxury of his existence ; let him not 
 have appealed to us in vain ! The" money was not neces- 
 sary to him ; he struggled through without it : long 
 since, these guineas would have been gone, and now the 
 high-mindedness of refusing them will plead for him in 
 
 10 all hearts forever. 
 
 We are here arrived at the crisis of Burns's life ; for 
 matters had now taken such a shape with him as could 
 not long continue. If improvement was not to be looked 
 for, Nature could only for a limited time maintain this 
 
 15 dark and maddening warfare against the world and itself. 
 .We are not medically informed whether any continu- 
 ance of years was, at this period, probable for Burns ; 
 whether his death is to be looked on as in some sense 
 an accidental event, or only as the natural consequence 
 
 20 of the long series of events that had preceded. The 
 latter seems to be the likelier opinion ; and yet it is by 
 no means a certain one. At all events, as we have said, 
 some change could not be very distant. Three gates of 
 deliverance, it seems to us, were open for Burns : clear 
 
 25 poetical activity; madness; or de^ath. The first, with 
 longer life, was still possible, though not probable ; for 
 physical causes were beginning to be concerned in it : 
 and yet Burns had an iron resolution ; could he but 
 have seen and felt, that not only his highest glory, but 
 
Essay on Burns 121 
 
 his first duty, and the true medicine for all his woes, 
 lay here. The second was still less probable ; for his 
 mind was ever among the clearest and firmest. So the 
 milder third gate was opened for him : and he passed, not 
 softly yet speedily, into that still country, where the hail- 5 
 storms and fire-showers do not reach, and the heaviest- 
 laden wayfarer at length lays down his load ! 
 
 Contemplating this sad end of Burns, and how he sank 
 unaided by any real help, uncheered by any wise sym- 
 pathy, generous minds have sometimes figured to them- 10 
 selves, with a reproachful sorrow, that much might have 
 been done for him ; that by counsel, true affection and 
 friendly ministrations, he might have been saved to him- 
 self and the world. We question whether there is not 
 more tenderness of heart than soundness of judgment in 15 
 these suggestions. It seems dubious to us whether the 
 richest, wisest, most benevolent individual could have 
 lent Burns any effectual help. Counsel, which seldom 
 profits any one, he did not need ; in his understanding, 
 he knew the right from the wrong, as well perhaps as any 20 
 man ever did ; but the persuasion, which would have 
 availed him, lies not so much in the head as in the heart, 
 where no argument or expostulation could have assisted 
 much to implant it. As to money again, we do not be- 
 lieve that this was his essential want ; or well see how any 25 
 private man could, even presupposing Burns's consent, 
 have bestowed on him an independent fortune, with much 
 prospect of decisive advantage. It is a mortifying truth, 
 
122 Essay on Burns 
 
 that two men, in any rank of society, could hardly be 
 found virtuous enough to give money, and to take it as a 
 necessary gift, without injury to the moral entireness of 
 one or both. But so stands the fact : Friendship, in the 
 5 old heroic sense of that term, no longer exists ; except in 
 the cases of kindred or other legal affinity, it is in reality 
 no longer expected, or recognized as a virtue among men. 
 A close observer of manners has pronounced " Patron- 
 age," that is, pecuniary or other economic furtherance, 
 
 io to be "twice cursed"; cursing him that gives, and him 
 that takes ! And thus, in regard to outward matters also, 
 it has become the rule, as in regard to inward it always 
 was and must be the rule, that no one shall look for 
 effectual help to another ; but that each shall rest con- 
 
 15 tented with what help he can afford himself. Such, we 
 say, is the principle of modern Honour ; naturally enough 
 growing out of that sentiment of Pride, which we inculcate 
 and encourage as the basis of our whole social morality. 
 Many a'poet has been poorer than Burns; but no one 
 
 20 was ever prouder : we may question whether, without great 
 
 precautions, even a pension from Royalty would not have 
 
 galled and encumbered, more than actually assisted him. 
 
 Still less, therefore, are we disposed to join with another 
 
 class of Burns's admirers, who accuse the higher ranks 
 
 25 among us of having ruined Burns by their selfish neglect 
 of him. We have already stated our doubts whether di- 
 rect pecuniary help, had it been offered, would have been 
 accepted, or could have proved very effectual. We shall 
 readily admit, however, that much was to be done for 
 
Essay on Burns 123 
 
 Burns ; that many a poisoned arrow might have been 
 warded from his bosom ; many an entanglement in his 
 path cut asunder by the hand of the powerful ; and light 
 and heat, shed on him from high places, would have 
 made his humble atmosphere more genial ; and the soft- 5 
 est heart then breathing might have lived and died with 
 some fewer pangs. Nay, we shall grant farther, and for 
 Burns it is granting much, that, with all his pride, he 
 would have thanked, even with exaggerated gratitude, any 
 one who had cordially befriended him : patronage, unless ic 
 once cursed, needed not to have been twice so. At all 
 events, the poor promotion he desired in his calling might 
 have been granted : it was his own scheme, therefore 
 likelier than any other to be of service. All this it 
 might have been a luxury, nay, it was a duty, for our 15 
 nobility to have done. No part of all this, however, did 
 any of them do ; or apparently attempt, or wish to do : 
 so much is granted against them. But what then is the 
 amount of their blame ? Simply that they were men of 
 the world, and walked by the principles of such men ; 20 
 that they treated Burns, as other nobles and other com- 
 moners had done other poets ; as the English did Shake- 
 speare ; as King Charles and his Cavaliers did Butler, as 
 King Philip and his Grandees did Cervantes. Do men 
 gather grapes of thorns ; or shall we cut down our thorns 25 
 for yielding only a. fence and haws ? How, indeed, could the 
 " nobility and gentry of his native land " hold out any help 
 to this" Scottish Bard, proud of his name and country " ? 
 Were the nobility and gentry so much as able rightly to 
 
124 Essay on Burns 
 
 help themselves ? Had they not their game to preserve 5 
 their borough interests to strengthen ; dinners, therefore, 
 of various kinds to eat and give ? Were their means more 
 than adequate to all this business, or less than adequate ? 
 
 5 Less than adequate, in general ; few of them in reality 
 were richer than Burns ; many of them were poorer ; for 
 sometimes they had to wring their supplies, as with thumb- 
 screws, from the hard hand ; and, in their need of guineas, 
 to forget their duty of mercy ; which Bums was never re- 
 
 10 duced to do. Let us pity and forgive them. The game 
 they preserved and shot, the dinners they ate and gave, 
 the borough interests they strengthened, the little Babylons 
 they severally builded by the glory of their might, are all 
 melted or melting back into the primeval Chaos, as man's 
 
 15 merely selfish endeavours are fated to do : and here was 
 an action, extending, in virtue of its worldly influence, we 
 may say, through all time ; in virtue of its moral nature, 
 beyond all time, being immortal as the Spirit of Goodness 
 itself; this action was offered them to do, and light was 
 
 20 not given them to do it.' Let us pity and forgive theim 
 But better than pity, let us go and do otherwise. Human 
 suffering did not end with the life of Burns; neither 
 was the solemn mandate, " Love one another, bear one 
 another's burdens," given to the rich only, but to all men. 
 
 25 True, we shall find no Burns to relieve, to assuage by our 
 aid or our pity ; but celestial natures, groaning under the 
 fardels of a weary life, we shall still find ; and that wretch- 
 edness which Fate has rendered voiceless and- tuneless is 
 not the least wretched, but the most. 
 
Essay on Burns 125 
 
 Still, we do not think that the blame of Burns's fail- 
 are lies chiefly with the world. The world, it seems to 
 us, treated him with more rather than with less kindness 
 than it usually shows to such men. It has ever, we fear, 
 shown but small favour to its Teachers : hunger and 5 
 nakedness, perils and revilings, the prison, the cross, the 
 poison-chalice have, in most times and countries, been 
 the market-price it has offered for Wisdom, the welcome 
 with which it has greeted those who have come to en- 
 lighten and purify it. Homer and Socrates, and the 10 
 Christian Apostles, belong to old days ; but the world's 
 Martyrology was not completea with these, Roger 
 Bacon and Galileo languish in priestly dungeon ; Tasso 
 pines in the cell of a madhouse ; Camoens dies begging 
 on the streets of Lisbon. So neglected, so " persecuted 15 
 they the Prophets," not in Judea only, but in all places 
 where men have been. We reckon that every poet of J 
 Burns's order is, or should be, a prophet and teacher to , 
 his age ; that he has no right to expect great kindness ' 
 from it, but rather is bound to do it great kindness; that 20 
 Burns, in particular, experienced fully the usual propor- 
 tion of the world's goodness ; and that the blame of his 
 failure, as we have said, lies not chiefly with the world. 
 
 Where, then, does it lie? We are forced to answer: 
 With himself; it is his inward, not his Outward, misfor-25 
 tunes that bring him to the dust. Seldom, indeed, is it 
 otherwise ; seldom is a life morally wrecked but the 
 grand cause lies in some internal mal-arrangement, some 
 want less of good fortune than of good guidance. Nature 
 
126 Essay on Burns 
 
 fashions no creature without implanting in it the strength 
 needful for its action and duration ; least of all does she 
 so neglect her masterpiece and darling, the poetic soul. 
 Neither can we believe that it is in the power of any ex- 
 5 fernal circumstances utterly to ruin the mind of a man ; 
 nay, if proper wisdom be given him, even so much as to 
 affect its essential health and beauty. The sternest sum- 
 total of all worldly misfortunes is Death ; nothing more 
 can lie in the cup of human woe : yet many men, in all 
 
 io ages, have triumphed over Death, and led it captive ; 
 converting its physical victory into a moral victory for 
 themselves, into a seal and immortal consecration for all 
 that their past life had achieved. What has been done, 
 may be done again : nay, it is but the degree and not the 
 
 15 kind of such heroism that differs in different seasons ; for 
 without some portion of this spirit, not of boisterous dar- 
 ing, but of silent fearlessness, of Self-denial in all its forms, 
 no good man, in any scene or time, has ever attained to 
 be good. 
 
 20 We have already stated the error of Burns; and 
 mourned over it, rather than blamed it. It was the want 
 of unity in his purposes, of consistency in his aims ; the 
 hapless attempt to mingle in friendly union the common 
 spirit of the world with the spirit of poetry, which is of a 
 
 '25 far different and altogether irreconcilable nature. Burns 
 was nothing wholly, and Burns could be nothing, no man 
 formed as he was can be anything, by halves. The heart, 
 not of a mere hot-blooded, popular Versemonger, or 
 poetical Restaurateur, but of a true Poet and Singer, 
 
Essay on Burns 127 
 
 worthy of the old religious heroic times, had been given 
 him : and he fell in an age, not of heroism and religion, 
 but of scepticism, selfishness and triviality, when true No- 
 bleness was little understood, and its place supplied by a 
 hollow, dissocial, altogether barren and unfruitful prin- 5 
 ciple of Pride. The influences of that age, his open, 
 kind, susceptible nature, to say nothing of his highly un- 
 toward situation, made it more than usually difficult for 
 him to cast aside, or rightly subordinate ; the better spirit 
 that was within him ever sternly demanded its rights, its 10 
 supremacy : he spent his life in endeavouring to reconcile 
 these two ; and lost it, as he must lose it, without recon- 
 ciling them. 
 
 Burns was born poor ; and born also to continue poor, 
 for he would not endeavour to be otherwise : this it had 15 
 been well could he have once for all admitted, and con- 
 sidered as finally settled. He was poor, truly; but hun- 
 dreds even of his own class and order of minds have been 
 poorer, yet have suffered nothing deadly from it : nay, 
 his own Father had a far sorer battle with ungrateful 20 
 destiny than his was ;. and he did not yield to it, but died 
 courageously warring, and to all moral intents prevailing, 
 against it. True, Burns had little means, had even little 
 time for poetry, his only real pursuit and vocation ; but 
 so much the more precious was what little he had. In 25 
 all these external respects his case was hard; but very 
 far from the hardest. Poverty, incessant drudgery and 
 much worse evils, it has often been the lot of Poets and 
 wise men to strive with, and their glory to conquer. 
 
128 Essay on Burns 
 
 Locke was banished as a traitor ; and wrote his Essay on 
 the Human Understanding sheltering himself in a Dutch 
 garret. Was Milton rich or at his ease when he composed 
 Paradise Lost ? Not only low, but fallen from a height ; 
 
 5 not only poor, but impoverished ; in darkness and with 
 dangers compassed round, he sang his immortal song, 
 and found fit audience, though few. Did not Cervantes 
 finish his work, a maimed soldier and in prison ? Nay, 
 was not the Araucana, which Spain acknowledges as its 
 
 io Epic, written without even the aid of paper ; on scraps 
 of leather, as the stout fighter and voyager snatched any 
 moment from that wild warfare ? 
 
 And what, then, had these men, which Burns wanted? 
 Two things ; both which, it seems to us, are indispensable 
 
 15 for such men. They had a true, religious principle of 
 morals ; and a single, not a double aim in their activity. 
 They were not self-seekers and self-worshippers ; but 
 seekers and worshippers of something far better than Self. 
 Not personal enjoyment was their object ; but a high, 
 
 20 heroic idea of Religion, of Patriotism, of heavenly Wis- 
 dom, in one or the other form, ever hovered before 
 them ; in which cause they neither shrank from suffering, 
 or called on the earth to witness it as something wonder- 
 ful ; but patiently endured, counting it blessedness enough 
 
 »5 so to spend and be spent. Thus the " golden-calf of Self- 
 love/ ' however curiously carved, was not their Deity ; but 
 the invisible Goodness, which alone is man's reasonable 
 service. This feeling was as a celestial fountain, whose 
 streams refreshed into gladness and beauty all the prov- 
 
Essay on Burns 129 
 
 inces of their otherwise too desolate existence. In a 
 word, they willed one thing, to which all other things 
 were subordinated and made subservient; and there- 
 fore they accomplished it. The wedge will rend 
 rocks ; but its edge must be sharp and single : if it be 5 
 double, the wedge is bruised in pieces and will rend 
 nothing. 
 
 Part of this superiority these men owed to their age ; 
 in which heroism and devotedness were still practised, or 
 at least not yet disbelieved in : but much of it likewise 10 
 they owed to themselves. With Burns, again, it was dif- 
 ferent. His morality, in most of its practical points, is 
 that of a mere worldly man ; enjoyment, in a finer or 
 coarser shape, is the only thing he longs and strives for. 
 A noble instinct sometimes raises him above this; but an 15 
 instinct only, and acting only for moments. He has no 
 Religion; in the shallow age, where his days were cast, 
 Religion was not discriminated from the New and Old 
 Light forms of Religion ; and was, with these, becoming 
 obsolete in the minds of men. His heart, indeed, is 20 
 alive with a trembling adoration, but there is no temple 
 in his understanding. He lives in darkness and in the 
 .shadow of doubt. His religion, at best, is an anxious 
 wish ; like that of Rabelais, " a great Perhaps." 
 
 He loved Poetry warmly, and in his heart ; could he 25 
 but have loved it purely, and with his whole undivided 
 heart, it had been well. For Poetry, as Burns could 
 have followed it, is but another form of Wisdom, of Reli- 
 gion ; is itself Wisdom and Religion. But this also was 
 
 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS — 9 
 
130 Essay on Burns 
 
 denied him. His poetry is a stray vagrant gleam, whicti 
 will not be extinguished within him, yet rises not to be the 
 true light of his path, but is often a wildfire that misleads 
 him. It was not necessary for Burns to be rich, to be, 
 5 or to seem, " independent " ; but it was necessary for 
 him to be at one with his own heart ; to place what was 
 highest in his nature highest also in his life ; "to seek 
 within himself for that consistency and sequence, which 
 external events would forever refuse him." He was born 
 
 10 a poet ; poetry was the celestial element of his being, 
 and should have been the soul of his whole endeav- 
 ours. Lifted into that serene ether, whither he had 
 wings given him to mount, he would have needed no 
 other elevation: poverty, neglect, and all evil, save the 
 
 15 desecration of himself and his Art, were a small matter 
 to him ; the pride and the passions of the world lay far 
 beneath his feet ; and he looked down alike on noble 
 and slave, on prince and beggar, and all that wore the 
 stamp of man, with clear recognition, with brotherly 
 
 *o affection, with sympathy, with pity. Nay, we question 
 
 ; whether for his culture as a Poet poverty and much suf- 
 fering for a season were not absolutely advantageous. 
 Great men, in looking back over their lives, have testified 
 to that effect. " I would not for much," says Jean Paul, 
 
 25 " that I had been born richer." And yet Paul's birth was 
 poor enough ; for, in another place, he adds : " The 
 prisoner's allowance is bread and water ; and I had often 
 only the latter." . But the gold that is refined in the hot- 
 test furnace comes out the purest ; or, as he has himself 
 
Essay on Burns x 3 r 
 
 expressed it, u the canary-bird sings sweeter the longer it 
 has been trained in a darkened cage." 
 
 A man like Burns might have divided his hours be- 
 tween poetry and virtuous industry ; industry which all 
 true feeling sanctions, nay, prescribes, and which has as 
 beauty, for that cause, beyond the pomp of thrones : but 
 to divide his hours between poetry and rich men's ban- 
 quets was an ill-starred and inauspicious attempt. How 
 could he be at ease at such banquets? What had he to 
 do there, mingling his music with the coarse roar of alto- 10 
 gether earthly voices ; brightening the thick smoke of 
 intoxication with fire lent him from heaven? Was it his 
 aim to enjoy life? To-morrow he must go drudge as an 
 Exciseman ! We wonder not that Burns became moody, 
 indignant, and at times an offender against certain rules 15 
 of society ; but rather that he did not grow utterly frantic, 
 and run amuck against them all. How could a man, so 
 falsely placed, by his own or others' fault, ever know con- 
 tentment or peaceable diligence for an hour? What he 
 did, under such perverse guidance, and what he forbore 20 
 to do, alike fill us with astonishment at the natural 
 strength and worth of his character. 
 
 Doubtless there was a remedy for this perverseness ; 
 but not in others ; only in himself; least of all in simple 
 increase of wealth and worldly "respectability." We 25 
 hope we have now heard enough about the efficacy of 
 wealth for poetry, and to make poets happy. Nay, have 
 we not seen another instance of it in these very days? 
 Byron, a man of an endowment considerably less ethereal 
 
132 Essay on Burns 
 
 than that of Burns, is born in the rank not of a Scottish 
 ploughman, but of an English peer : the highest worldly 
 honours, the fairest worldly career, are his by inheritance ; 
 the richest harvest of fame he soon reaps, in another prov- 
 5 ince, by his own hand. And what does all this avail him ? 
 Is he happy, is he good, is he true ? Alas, he has a poet's 
 soul, and strives towards the Infinite and the Eternal ; 
 and soon feels that all this is but mounting to the house- 
 top to reach the stars ! Like Burns, he is only a proud 
 
 so man ; might, like him, have " purchased a pocket-copy of 
 Milton to study the character of Satan ; " for Satan also is 
 Byron's grand exemplar, the hero of his poetry, and the 
 model apparently of his conduct. As in Burns's case too, 
 the celestial element will not mingle with the clay 
 
 15 of earth ; both poet and man of the world he must 
 not be ; vulgar Ambition will not live kindly with poetic 
 Adoration ; he cannot serve God and Mammon. Byron, 
 like Burns, is not happy ; nay, he is the most wretched of 
 all men. His life is falsely arranged : the fire that is in 
 
 20 him is not a strong, still, central fire, warming into beauty 
 the products of a world ; but it is the mad fire of a 
 volcano; and now — we look sadly into the ashes of a 
 crater, which ere long will fill itself with snow ! 
 
 Byron and Burns were sent forth as missionaries to 
 
 25 their generation, to teach it a higher Doctrine, a purer 
 Truth; they had a message to deliver, which left them 
 no rest till it was accomplished ; in dim throes of pain, 
 this divine behest lay smouldering within them ; for they 
 knew not what it meant, and felt it only in mysterious 
 
Essay on Burns 133 
 
 anticipation, and they had to die without articulately 
 uttering it. They are in the camp of the Unconverted ; 
 yet not as high messengers of rigorous though benignant 
 truth, but as soft flattering singers, and in pleasant fellow- 
 ship will they live there : they are first adulated, then i 
 persecuted ; they accomplish little for others ; they find 
 no peace for themselves, but only death and the peace 
 of the grave. We confess, it is not without a certain 
 mournful awe that we view the fate of these noble souls, 
 so richly gifted, yet ruined to so little purpose with all 10 
 their gifts. It seems to us there is a stern moral taught 
 in this piece of history, — twice told us in our own time ! 
 Surely to men of like genius, if there be any such, it 
 carries with it a lesson of deep impressive significance. 
 Surely it would become such a man, furnished for the 15 
 highest of all enterprises, that of being the Poet of his 
 Age, to consider well what it is that he attempts, and in 
 what spirit he attempts it. For the words of Milton are 
 true in all times, and were never truer than in this : " He 
 who would write heroic poems must make his whole life a 20 
 heroic poem." If he cannot first so make his life, then 
 let him hasten from this arena; for neither its lofty 
 glories, nor its fearful perils, are fit for him. Let him 
 dwindle into a modish balladmonger ; let him worship 
 and be-sing the idols of the time, and the time will not 25 
 fail to reward him. If, indeed, he can endure to live in 
 that capacity ! Byron and Burns could not live as idol- 
 priests, but the fire of their own hearts consumed them ; 
 and better it was for them that they could not. For it is 
 
134 Essay on Burns 
 
 not in the favour of the great or of the small, but in a life 
 of truth, and in the inexpugnable citadel of his own soul, 
 that a Byron's or a Burns's strength must lie. Let the 
 great stand aloof from him, or know how to reverence 
 5 him. Beautiful is the union of wealth with favour and 
 furtherance for literature ; like the costliest flower-jar 
 enclosing the loveliest amaranth. Yet let not the rela- 
 tion be mistaken. A true poet is not one whom they can 
 hire by money or flattery to be a minister of their pleas- 
 
 io ures, their writer of occasional verses, their purveyor of 
 table-wit ; he cannot be their menial, he cannot even he 
 their partisan. At the peril of both parties, let no such 
 union be attempted ! Will a Courser of the Sun work 
 softly in the harness of a Dray-horse ? His hoofs are of 
 
 15 fire, and his path is through the heavens, bringing light 
 to all lands ; will he lumber on mud highways, dragging 
 ale for earthly appetites from door to door? 
 
 But we must stop short in these considerations, which 
 would lead us to boundless lengths. We had something 
 
 20 to say on the public moral character of Burns ; but this 
 also we must forbear. We are far from regarding him as 
 guilty before the world, as guiltier than the average ; nay, 
 from doubting that he is less guilty than one of ten thou- 
 sand. Tried at a tribunal far more rigid than that where 
 
 25 the Plebiscita of common civic reputations are pronounced, 
 he has seemed to us even there less worthy of blame than 
 of pity and wonder. But the world is habitually unjust 
 in its judgments of such men ; unjust on many grounds, 
 of which this one may be stated as the substance : It 
 
Essay on Burns 135 
 
 decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes ; and not 
 positively but negatively, less on what is done right, than 
 on what is or is not done wrong. Not the few inches of 
 deflection from the mathematical orbit, which are so 
 easily measured, but the ratio of these to the whole 5 
 diameter, constitutes the real aberration. This orbit may 
 be a planet's, its diameter the breadth of the solar sys- 
 tem ; or it may be a city hippodrome ; nay, the circle of 
 a ginhorse, its diameter a score of feet or paces. But the 
 inches of deflection only are measured : and it is assumed 10 
 that the diameter of the ginhorse, and that of the planet, 
 will yield the same ratio when compared with them ! 
 Here lies the root of many a blind, cruel condemnation 
 of Burnses, Swifts, Rousseaus, which one never listens to 
 with approval. Granted, the ship comes into harbour 15 
 with shrouds and tackle damaged ; the pilot is blame- 
 worthy ; he has not been all-wise and all-powerful : but 
 to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage 
 has been round the Globe, or only to Ramsgate and the 
 Isle of Dogs. 20 
 
 With our readers in general, with men of right feeling 
 anywhere, we are not required to plead for Burns. In 
 pitying admiration he lies enshrined in all our hearts, in 
 a far nobler mausoleum than that one of marble ; neither 
 will his Works, even as they are, pass away from the 25 
 memory of men. While the Shakespeares and Miltons 
 roll on like mighty rivers through the country of Thought, 
 bearing fleets of traffickers and assiduous pearl-fishers on 
 their waves ; this little Valclusa Fountain will also arrest 
 
136 Essay on Burns 
 
 our eye : for this also is of Nature's own and most cun- 
 ning workmanship, bursts from the depths of the earth, 
 with a full gushing current, into the light of day; and 
 often will the traveller turn aside to drink of its clear 
 5 waters, and muse among its rocks and pines 1 
 
NOTES 
 
 The heavy marginal figures stand for page, and the lighter ones for lin«. 
 
 55 : I. It is no uncommon thing, etc. When Carlyle wrote this 
 essay he was thirty-three years old, and had won but little recogni- 
 tion, nor did he until nine years later. The most striking recent 
 illustration of the tardy recognition of men of genius is the case of 
 Browning, who for fifty years was ridiculed by the great majority 
 of readers. 
 
 55 : 2. Butler. Samuel Butler '(i 612-1680) after the Restora- 
 tion wrote a brilliant satire on the Puritans that greatly amused the 
 court of Charles II. He was promised patronage by the king, but 
 seventeen years later died in poverty. Hudibras was one of Car- 
 lyle's favorite books while at the University of Edinburgh. 
 
 55 : 6. The inventor of a spinning-jenny. Carlyle refers to 
 James Hargreaves, who, however, did not reap his reward in his 
 own. day, for he was driven from his home in Lancashire by a mob 
 of labourers who did not wish his machine to supplant their work. 
 
 55 : 14. Brave mausoleum. The citizens of Dumfries began in 
 1813 the collection of funds that led in 1815 to the erection of this 
 mausoleum in which Burns and his family are buried. Brave, used 
 in the old sense of fine, splendid, is evidently ironical, for the mau- 
 soleum, with its tin dome and somewhat showy statuary, has excited 
 the ridicule of critics and visitors. In the Introduction to the New 
 Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, Carlyle is reported 
 to have said to the Duke of Rutland, who told him that he had just 
 returned from Dumfries, and was sorry to notice that the stones in 
 the Burns mausoleum were crumbling away from exposure to the 
 
 137 
 
i3* 
 
 Notes 
 
 weather : " Sorry ! " exclaimed Carlyle, " I am very glad to hear it. 
 I hope they will go on crumbling till there is no one stone left upon 
 another. To think of it, that a man whose name was Turner, and 
 who called himself Turnerelli, should have been employed to make 
 a monument to the greatest genius that ever lived ! " 
 
 55 : 19. The sixth narrative. Carlyle probably refers to Lives 
 by Heron (1797), Currie (1800), Irving (1804), Walker (181 1), 
 and Peterkin (181 5). There had been critical articles and poems 
 by Jeffrey, Wilson, Wordsworth, Mackenzie, etc. 
 
 56 : 1. Lockhart. John Gibson Lockhart (1 794-1854) is better 
 known as the son-in-law and biographer of Sir Walter Scott. His 
 life of Burns, though still readable, lacks the genius that has made 
 his biography of Scott second only to BoswelVs Johnson, His life, 
 written by Andrew Lang, reveals the fact that the relations between 
 him and Carlyle were more intimate than had been generally 
 supposed. . < 
 
 56:17. Sir Thomas Lucy. The tradition is that Shakespeare, 
 along with some gay companions, was prosecuted for stealing deer 
 on Sir Thomas's estate, and that the former, after writing a satirical 
 ballad and posting it on the latter's gate, fled to London and became 
 an actor. A similar tradition connects him with John a Combe, a 
 wealthy neighbour of Stratford, for whom he wrote a doggerel epitaph. 
 
 56 : 26. Excise Commissioners. His associates in the excise 
 business — some of them his superiors with whom he got in trouble 
 on account of his sympathy with the French Revolution. 
 
 56 : 27. Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt. See Introduc- 
 tion, page 49. 
 
 56 : 29. Ayr Writers. The lawyers, solicitors, and possibly the 
 chief clerks, of the town of Ayr, notably Robert Aiken, to whom 
 Burns dedicated the Cotter's Saturday Night. 
 
 56 : 29. The New and Old Light Clergy. The radicals and the 
 conservatives in the religious life of that day. See Introduction, 
 page 46. 
 
 57 : 9. His former Biographers, etc. Carlyle says elsewhere, 
 
Notes 139 
 
 •'A well written life is almost as rare as a well spent one." While 
 the criticism with regard to Dr. Currie's Life must stand, it is to be 
 remembered that from the edition of Burns's poems which he 
 supervised ;£8oo went to Mrs. Burns and her family and none to 
 himself. He was a Scotch physician (1 756-1805). That which 
 Carlyle complains of as lacking in former biographers — a delinea- 
 tion of the resulting character as a living unity — is his own strong 
 point in this essay and others of his works. Emerson speaks of his 
 " devouring eyes and portrait-painting hands." 
 
 58 : 17. Constable's Miscellany. Constable was the original 
 publisher of the Edinburgh Review in which this essay appeared. 
 In his prosperity he projected a Miscellany of Original and Se- 
 lected Publications in Literature, Science, and the Arts, — a great 
 scheme for popularizing literature. Lockhart's Life of Burns ap- 
 peared in this series after Constable's death in 1827. Constable 
 was the personal friend of Sir Walter Scott, and the publisher of 
 his novels. 
 
 58 : 27. Mr. Morris Birkbeck. An English tourist who wrote 
 Notes on a Journey to America from the Coast of Virginia to the 
 Territory of Illinois, London, 181 8. 
 
 59 : 11. Our notions upon this subject, etc. See Introduction 
 for Carlyle's conception of criticism. Contrast the questions here 
 asked by Carlyle with the judicial tone of criticism adopted by Jeffrey 
 in his famous saying about Wordsworth, "This won't do." 
 
 60 : 26. Had his very materials to discover . . . without 
 instruction, without model. Carlyle here, as throughout the 
 essay, underrates the influence of the early Scotch singers on 
 Burns. He always magnified the individual at the expense of 
 " movements " and " tendencies " and " environment." Is he right? 
 See Introduction for the influence of the book of Songs, and of 
 Ramsay and Fergusson in awakening Burns to a life of poetry. It 
 is not detracting from the genius of Burns to say, with Andrew 
 Lang, that he was " not an innovator, but a continuator." Recent 
 critics, notably Mr. Henley, have pointed out in detail his obliga- 
 
140 Notes 
 
 tions to the verse and sentiment of his predecessors. " Pie passed 
 the folk song of his nation through the mint of his mind, and he 
 reproduced it, stamped with his image and lettered with his super- 
 scription : so that for the world at large it exists and will go on 
 existing, not as he found but as he left it. Burns's knowledge of 
 the old minstrelsy was unique; he was saturate with its tradition, 
 as he was absolute master of its emotions and effects; no such 
 artist in folk-song as he (so in other words Sir Walter said) has 
 ever worked in literature. But a hundred forgotten singers went 
 to the making of his achievement and himself." And again: 
 "He was the last of a school . . . [he was] more largely de- 
 pendent upon his exemplars than any other great poet has ever 
 been." 
 
 61 : 18. An age the most prosaic. Carlyle severely criticized 
 the eighteenth century; in passage after passage he has expressed 
 his abhorrence of its atheism, its materialism, its intellectualism, its 
 lack of vision. Cf. Matthew Arnold : " Gray, a born poet, fell upon 
 an age of prose. . . . Gray, with the qualities of mind and scul of 
 a genuine poet, was isolated in his century." 
 
 61:24. Ferguson or Ramsay. Robert Fergusson (1 750-1 774), 
 the author of The Farmer's Ingle^ which was the " model " of Cotter's 
 Saturday Night When Burns first went to Edinburgh he looked up 
 the grave of Fergusson in the Cannongate churchyard, and finding 
 no memorial stone, asked permission to erect one. Robert Louis 
 Stevenson, commenting on this incident says, " Burns knew best 
 whence he drew fire — from the poor, white-faced, drunken, vicious 
 boy that raved himself to death in the Edinburgh madhouse." 
 " And the old Robin, who was before Burns and the flood, died in 
 his acute, painful youth and left the models of the great things that 
 were to come." Burns also visited the shop of Allan Ramsay 
 ( 1 686-1 758), author of the Gentle Shepherd — a pastoral poem — 
 and the Tea- Table Miscellany — a collection of Scotch poems that 
 had considerable influence over both Burns and Scott. These 
 two poets kept alive a genuine appreciation of nature and of rural 
 
Notes 141 
 
 life, while English literature was altogether under the dominance 
 of classical ideals. 
 
 62 : 22. Criticism ... a cold business. In an essay on the 
 state of German literature Carlyle says that a critic is an interpreter 
 between the inspired and the uninspired. He believed that the 
 business of the critic was to make readers and not to drive them 
 away from an author. Sympathy was an element in criticism quite 
 as important as insight. 
 
 63 : 3. Sir Hudson Lowe. Governor of St. Helena during the 
 captivity of Napoleon on that island (1815-1821). 
 
 64 : 10. The " Daisy." See the poem To a Mountain Daisy. 
 64 : 11. Wee, cowering, etc. See the poem To a Mouse. 
 
 64 : 15. He dwells with a sad and oft- returning fondness, 
 etc. Compare for the inspiration of this passage the words from 
 Burns's Commonplace Book, April, 1784: "There is scarcely any 
 earthly object gives me more — I don't know if I should call it 
 pleasure, but something which exalts me, something which en- 
 raptures me — than to walk in the sheltered side of a wood or high 
 plantation, in a cloudy, winter day, and hear a stormy wind howl- 
 ing among the trees and raving o'er the plain. It is my best sea- 
 son for devotion; my mind is rapt up in a kind of enthusiasm to 
 Him who, in the pompous language of Scripture, * Walks on the 
 wings of the wind.' " It was under such circumstances, Burns tells 
 us, that he composed the dirge Winter. The italicized words of 
 the passage are from Psalm civ. 
 
 64 : 21. Observe him chiefly, etc. They are not so often read, 
 but the student will best appreciate Burns's genial comradeship by 
 reading his epistles to Sillar, Lapraik, Simpson, Gavin Hamilton, 
 etc. 
 
 65 : 21. The majesty of Poetry and Manhood. Cf. what 
 Carlyle says of the " Rock of Independence," page 100. 
 
 66 : 6. A soul like an iEolian harp. A favourite figure not 
 Only with Burns and Carlyle but with other English poets, notably 
 Shelley and Coleridge. 
 
142 Notes 
 
 66 : 9. No fitter business. Carlyle seems to blame the world 
 here more than in the latter part of the essay. In Past and Present 
 he says : " We English find a Poet, as brave a man as has been 
 made for a 100 years or so anywhere under the sun ; and do we 
 kindle bonfires, or thank the gods? Not at all. We, taking due 
 counsel of it, set the man to gauge ale-barrels in the Burgh of 
 Dumfries, and pique ourselves on our * patronage of genius.' " 
 
 66 : 19. His poems are . . . mere occasional effusions. At 
 Mossgiel, while Burns was writing his most famous poems, he was 
 working hard as a day-labourer. He wrote his poems generally as a 
 result of some sudden feeling. His wife has left a description of 
 his writing Tarn O 1 Shanter. While walking by the river side with 
 her two children, she noted that Burns was crooning to himself. 
 Directly she noticed strange and wild gesticulations of the bard as 
 he was reciting very loud, and " with tears rolling down his cheeks, 
 some of the rhymes of the poem." This is the best possible way in 
 which genuine lyrical poetry can be written, not with the strain and 
 stress of one who, like Carlyle, writes extended histories or, like 
 Milton, writes a sustained epic. 
 
 67 : 13. Over all regions. "They appeal to all ranks, they 
 search all ages, they cheer toilworn men under every clime. 
 Wherever the English tongue is heard, beneath the suns of India, 
 amid African deserts, on the western prairies of America, among 
 the squatters of Australia, whenever men of British blood would 
 give vent to their deepest, kindliest, most genial feelings, it is to 
 the songs of Burns they spontaneously turn, and find in them at 
 once a perfect utterance and a fresh tie of brotherhood." 
 
 — John Campbell Shairp. 
 
 67 : 20. His Sincerity. That which gives unity to Heroes and 
 Hero- Worship, and which lies at the basis of every study Carlyle 
 ever made, is this element of sincerity. He talked about it so 
 much that it became almost a bit of cant. 
 
 68 : 3. His heart is too full to be silent. Compare In Me* 
 moriam .*— 
 
Notes 143 
 
 •' I do but sing because I must, 
 And pipe but as the linnets singe" 
 
 68 : 9. Si vis me flere, dolendum est primum ipse tibi„ "K 
 thou wouldst have me weep, thou must first feel grief thyself." 
 
 69 : 12. Byron. Byron had died four years before this essay 
 was written ; in Carlyle's mind he best represented the mood of 
 contemporary thought in England — a mood of sentimentalism and 
 discontent. His advice in Sartor Resartus was, "Close thy Byron. 
 Open thy Goethe" In the same book he has much to say of the 
 Sorrows of Lord George. He undoubtedly puts his finger upon the 
 weak point in Byron's character; for as an acute French critic has 
 said, " he posed all his life long." Byron's objection to a certain 
 portrait was that it did not make him look sad enough. Matthew 
 Arnold was right, however, in calling attention to a fact, equally as 
 significant in Byron's character — his undoubted strength " When 
 he had fairly warmed to his work, then he became another man; 
 then the theatrical personage passed away; then a higher power 
 took possession of him and filled him." The poems to which 
 Carlyle refers are Childe Harold (the third and fourth cantos of 
 which contain some of the most eloquent passages in English 
 poetry), the Giaour (one of his sensational Eastern tales), and 
 Don Juan (a satire on the human race),, 
 
 70 : 28. Certain of his letterSo The principal letters referred 
 to are those written to Dr. Moore, Mr. Murdoch, Mrs. M'Lehose 
 (Clarinda), G. Thomson, Dr. Blair, and others. The probable 
 explanation of the style in which Burns wrote his letters is the 
 influence of eighteenth-century letter-writers, a collection of whose 
 letters he read while a voung man. 
 
 71 : 27. Mrs. Dunlop. A very estimable woman of high rank 
 who, on reading the first edition of Burns's poems, was so attracted, 
 especially by his Cotter's Saturday Night, that she immediately sent 
 a messenger fifteen miles away to congratulate the poet and to bring 
 back other copies of the poems, She wrote encouragingly to Burn? 
 
144 Notes 
 
 and was his steadfast friend until his death. To her he wrote one 
 of his last letters : " An illness which has long hung about me, in 
 all probability will speedily send me beyond that bourn whence no 
 traveller returns. Your friendship, with which for many years you 
 honoured me, was a friendship dearest to my soul. Your conversa- 
 tion, and especially your correspondence, were at once highly enter- 
 taining and instructive. With what pleasure did I use to break 
 up the seal ! The remembrance yet adds one pulse more to my 
 poor palpitating heart." 
 
 72 : 3. His choice of subjects. Wordsworth, to whom the 
 words of this paragraph might well apply, recognized Burns as his 
 master : — 
 
 " He showed my youth 
 How verse may build a princely throne 
 On humble truth." 
 
 72 : 13-19. Rose-coloured Novels . . . swarm in our poetry. 
 
 In this passage Carlyle refers especially to Scott, Southey, Moore, 
 and Cooper, who at that time were all in the ascendency. He had 
 but little use for what he called the "innumerable progeny of 
 chivalry plays, feudal delineations, political antiquarian perform- 
 ances." Speaking of Goethe, he says: "Neither does he bring 
 his heroes from remote oriental climates or periods of chivalry or 
 any section, either of Atlantis or the Age of Gold." The revival of 
 interest in the Middle Ages had but little interest for Carlyle, 
 although, strangely enough, he himself, in Past and Present t 
 brought to life one of the strangest bits of mediaeval life. He 
 was not just to literature that merely amused people and that was 
 not full of moral ideas. His essay on Scott affords a striking contrast 
 to the essay on Burns. 
 
 73 : 14. The Ideal world is not remote from the Actual. 
 We have here a touch of idealism which is so characteristic of 
 Sartor Resai'tus, 2l chapter in which on Natural Supernaturalism is 
 perhaps the best expression in English prose of idealism or tran- 
 scendentalism. 
 
Notes 145 
 
 74 : 11. Minerva Press. A printing house in London which was 
 noted in the eighteenth century for the publication of trashy, senti- 
 mental novels. 
 
 74 : 12. A poet of Nature's own making. In the Epistle II 
 
 John Lapraik, Burns says : — 
 
 " Gie me ae spark o' Nature's fire, 
 That's a* the learning I desire ; 
 Then, tho' I drudge thro 8 dub an' mire 
 
 At pleugh or cart, 
 My Muse, though hamely in attire, 
 May touch the heart." 
 
 74: 18. "The elder dramatists." Charles Lamb had a few 
 years before this time aroused considerable interest in Shakespeare's 
 contemporaries. His letter to Wordsworth, urging him to read 
 these poets, Carlyle might well have had in mind. 
 
 75 : 6. Borgia. Probably Caesar Borgia, one of the most emi- 
 nent and most wicked of a very prominent Italian family from 
 which came cardinals and popes. 
 
 75 : 10. Mossgiel and Tarbolton. See Introduction. Burns 
 says, " I felt as much pleasure in being in the secret of half the 
 loves of the parish of Tarbolton as ever did statesman in knowing 
 the intrigues of the courts of Rome." 
 
 75 : 11. Crockford's. A famous gaming club-house in London,' 
 built in 1827. 
 
 75 : 11. Tuileries. A royal residence in Paris adjoining the 
 Louvre; it was burned in 187 1. 
 
 75 : 13. It is hinted, etc. In 1825 Macaulay had written his 
 essay on Milton for the Edinburgh Review — an essay that brought 
 him immediate fame. His one main contention in it is that Milton 
 was born too late to be a great poet, that " as civilization advances 
 poetry almost necessarily declines." Carlyle, no doubt, took much 
 delight in demolishing this thesis. He once referred to Macaulay's 
 " Niagara of commonplace talk." 
 
 carlyle's essay on burns — 10 
 
146 Notes 
 
 75 : 20. Is not every genius an impossibility till he appear ? 
 " Show our critics a great man, Luther, for example, they begin to 
 what they call 'account * for him; not to worship him, but to take 
 the dimensions of him, — and bring him out to be a little kind of 
 man. He was the creature of the time, they say; the time called 
 him forth, the time did everything, he nothing — but what we the 
 little critics could have done, too! The time called forth? Alas, 
 we have known time to call loudly enough for their great man, but 
 not find him when they called! He was not there; Providence 
 had not sent him; the time calling its loudest had to go down in 
 confusion and wreck because he would not come when called." — 
 Heroes and Hero- Worship, 
 
 75 : 24. It is not the dark place, etc. Cf. Browning's Fra Lippo 
 Uppi:- 
 
 " For, don't you mark ? We're made so that we love 
 First when we see them painted, things we have passed 
 Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see ; 
 And so they are better, painted — better to us, 
 Which is the same thing. Art was given for that ; 
 God uses us to help each other so, 
 Lending our minds out." 
 
 75 : 29. The Wounded Hare. See poem To a Mouse, 
 
 76 : 3. Hallowe'en. See poem by that name. 
 
 76 : 4. Theocritus. A Greek pastoral poet of the third century 
 B.C. who lived in Sicily, and brought to Greek poetry a fresh feeling 
 for rural life. 
 
 76 : 6. Council of Trent. A council held at Trent (1545-1563), 
 which condemned the leading doctrines of the Reformation. 
 
 76 : 7. Roman Jubilee. A solemn festival of the Catholic 
 Church, usually held once in twenty-five or fifty years. At such 
 times men may obtain absolution of sin by acts of penance. 
 
 76 : 7. Superstition .... Fun. Characters in The Holy Fair. 
 
 77 : 1. And observe with what a fierce prompt force. The 
 words of this paragraph are truer even of Carlyle than of Burns. 
 
Notes 147 
 
 Cf. what Ruskin says of the penetrative power of the imagination. 
 "It never stops at crusts or ashes, or outward images of any kind; 
 it ploughs them all aside, and plunges into the very central fiery 
 heart." 
 
 77 : 18. Retzsch (Moritz, 1 779-1857). A German etcher and 
 painter, who illustrated the works of Goethe, Schiller, and Shake- 
 speare, and was therefore interesting to Carlyle. 
 
 78 n 18. Auld Brig. A reference to the Brigs of Ayr, in which, 
 however, it is the fall of the new bridge rather than of the old that 
 is prophesied. 
 
 79 : 6. Poussin-picture. Nicholas Poussin, a French painter 
 (1594-1665), who painted the Deluge, to which Carlyle may refer. 
 
 79 : 12. Smithy of the Cyclops. See Odyssey > Book ix. 
 
 79 : 12. Yoking of Priam's Chariot. See Iliad, Book xxiv. 
 (Pope's translation may be accessible to the student.) 
 
 79 : 13. Burn-the-wind. The blacksmith in the poem Scotch 
 Drink is called Burnewin. 
 
 79 : 20. The pale moon, etc. This passage is inaccurately 
 quoted, and should read (Cambridge edition of the poems) : — 
 
 " The wan moon sets behind the white wave, 
 And Time is setting with me, O ! 
 False friends, false love, farewell ! for mair 
 I'll ne'er trouble them nor thee, O ! " 
 
 80 : 5. Richardson. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), author 
 of the first English novel, Pamela (1740), and later of Clarissa 
 Harlowe. 
 
 80 : 5. Defoe. Daniel Defoe (1661-1731), author of Robinson 
 Crusoe. 
 
 80 : 20. s " A gentleman that derived his patent," etc. Cap- 
 tain Matthew Henderson is referred to in the sub-title of an elegy 
 on him as " a gentleman who held the patent for his honours imme- 
 diately from Almighty God." 
 
148 Notes 
 
 80 : 23. " Red-wat-shod." Red-wet-shod, wading in blood. See 
 
 Epistle to William Simpson : — 
 
 " At Wallace' name, what Scottish blood 
 But boils up in a springtide flood ? 
 Oft have our fearless fathers strode 
 
 By Wallace' side, 
 Still pressing onward, red-wat-shod. 
 
 Or glorious dy'd ! 
 
 81 : 2. Professor Stewart. Dugald Stewart (1753-1828), pro- 
 fessor of Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. He gen- 
 erally spent his summers at Cartrine on the Ayr, not far from 
 Burns's farm. See Introduction for his connection with Burns's 
 life in Edinburgh. 
 
 81 : 13. Keats. In the original version of this essay, as it 
 appeared in the Edinburgh Review, Jeffrey changed " weak-eyed 
 maudlin " into M extreme," and " random " into " pervading," but 
 Carlyle, in editing his essays, changed it to its present form. He 
 is thoroughly unfair to one of the greatest English poets, largely 
 because he had little sympathy with the aesthetic ideals of one who 
 wrote, " A thing of beauty is a joy forever." Tennyson was far 
 nearer right when he said that in Keats's early death English poetry 
 suffered an irreparable loss. 
 
 81 : 17. The result of their general harmony and comple- 
 tion. Cf. Matthew Arnold's definition of culture as the harmonious 
 expansion of all our powers, and Edward Dowden's characterization 
 of Wordsworth : " All diverse energies blended in Wordsworth's 
 nature into a harmonious whole. The senses were informed by the 
 soul and became spiritual; passion was conjoined with reason and 
 with conscience; knowledge was vivified by emotion; a calm pas- 
 sivity was united with a creative energy; peace and excitation were 
 harmonized; and over all brooded the imagination." 
 
 81 : 20. The Hell of Dante. Dante's Divina Commedia is 
 divided into three parts, Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio, and Paradiso. 
 
Notes 
 
 149 
 
 81 : 27. Novum Organum. Bacon's greatest work in philoso- 
 phy, in which he outlines the inductive philosophy which was to 
 play such an important part in the scientific work of the seventeenth 
 century. 
 
 82 : 13. The logic of the senate and the forum. Carlyle is 
 constantly making light of the logical faculty as compared with 
 intuition or insight. He calls it " Attorney logic " in Sartor 
 Resartus. "Foolish Word-monger and Motive-grinder, who in 
 thy Logic-mill hast an earthly mechanism for the godlike itself and 
 would fain grind me out virtue from the husk of Pleasure, — I tell 
 thee nay." 
 
 84 : 22 I thought me, etc. See the poem A Winter Night. 
 
 85 : 19. Dr. Slop . . . uncle Toby. Characters in Sterne's 
 Tristram Shandy, a book much liked by both Burns and Carlyle. 
 
 85 : 23. But has it not been said, etc. The two following 
 paragraphs were not in the essay as printed in the Edinburgh 
 Review. 
 
 85 : 24. " Indignation makes verses " (Facit indignatio versus), 
 Juvenal. Cf. Tennyson's Poet : — 
 
 " Dower'd with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, 
 The love of love." 
 
 86 : 6. A good hater. Dr. Johnson is reported to have said s 
 " Dear Bathurst was a man to my very heart's content : he hated a 
 fool and he hated a rogue, and he hated a Whig : he was a very 
 good hater." 
 
 86 : 19. Dweller in yon Dungeon dark. A poem written under 
 circumstances thus related by Burns : " In January last, on my road 
 to Ayrshire, I had to put up at Bailie Whigham's, in Sanquhar, the 
 only tolerable inn in the place. The frost was keen, and the grim 
 evening and howling wind were ushering in a night of snow and 
 drift. My horse and I were both much fatigued with the labours of 
 the day, and just as my friend the Bailie and I were bidding defiance 
 to the storm, over a smoking bowl, in wheels the funeral pageantry 
 
1 50 Notes 
 
 of the late great Mrs. Oswald; and poor I am forced to brave all 
 the horrors of a tempestuous night and jade my horse, my young 
 horse, whom I had just christened Pegasus, twelve miles further on 
 through the wildest moors and hills of Ayrshire to New Cumnock, 
 to the next inn ! The powers of poesy and prose sink under me 
 when I would describe what I felt. Suffice it to say, that when a 
 good fire at New Cumnock had so far recovered my frozen sinews, 
 I sat down and wrote the enclosed ode." 
 
 86 : 21. Furies of -ffischylus. In the Eumenides of ^Eschylus 
 the Furies are introduced in the chorus. ^Eschylus was one of the 
 greatest of Greek tragedians. 
 
 87 : 1. Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled.' There is a contra- 
 diction as to the circumstances under which the poem was written. 
 Carlyle accepts the statement of Syme, who says that after visiting 
 Mr. Gordon at Kenmure, he and the poet passed over the moors to 
 Gatehouse in a wild storm : " The sky was sympathetic with the 
 wretchedness of the soil. It became lowering and dark, the winds 
 sighed hollow, the lightning gleamed, the thunders rolled. The 
 poet enjoyed the awful scene. He spoke not a word, but seemed 
 rapt in meditation. In a little while the rain began to fall. It 
 poured in floods upon us, and what do you think Burns was about ? 
 He was charging the English army along with Bruce at Bannock- 
 burn." Two days later, when they were returning from St. Mary's 
 Isle to Dumfries, " he was engaged in the same manner, and pro- 
 duced me the address of Bruce to his troops." Burns himself, in a 
 letter to Thomson (August or September, 1793), gives a different 
 account of the origin of the poem : " This thought [Bruce's victory 
 at Bannockburn], in my yesternight's evening walk, roused me to a 
 pitch of enthusiasm on the theme of liberty and independence, 
 which I threw into a kind of Scot's ode, fitted to the air, that one 
 might suppose to be the gallant, royal Scot's address to his heroic 
 followers on that eventful morning." It is difficult to reconcile 
 these two statements, although one would prefer to believe the 
 first, especially as some of the finest lines in Marmion were said to 
 
Notes 151 
 
 be composed in the same way. It is evident from the conclusion 
 of Burns's letter that the thought of the French Revolution was also 
 in his mind, and that in this poem, as in A Man's a Alan for a' 
 That, he was chanting the battle-song of modern democracy. 
 
 87 : 19. Cacus. A giant in Virgil's ALneid, slain by Hercules 
 for stealing cattle. 
 
 88 : 3. At Thebes, and in Pelops' line. Milton, in summariz- 
 ing the tragedies of Greek literature, says in // Penseroso : — 
 
 " Sometime let gorgeous Tragedy 
 In sceptred pall come sweeping by, 
 Presenting Thebes, or Pelops' line, 
 Or the tale of Troy divine." 
 
 88 : 17. Humour. "And if with an eye for words and effects in 
 words, that student have also the faculty of laughter, then are his 
 admiration and his pleasure multiplied tenfold. For the master- 
 quality of Burns, the quality which has gone, and will ever go, the 
 furtherest to make him universally and perennially acceptable — 
 acceptable in Melbourne (say) a hundred years hence as in Mauch- 
 line syne — is humour. . . . But his humour — broad, rich, prevail- 
 ing, now lascivious or gargantuan and now fanciful or jocose, now 
 satyrical and brutal and now instinct with sympathy, — is ever 
 irresistible." — Henley. 
 
 89 : 1. Sterne. Laurence Sterne (171 3-1 768), an English nov- 
 elist, author of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. 
 Cf. 85 : 19. 
 
 89 : 26. Tieck . . . Musaus. For the sake of those who are 
 not German readers, it may be said that Ludwig Tieck (1 773-1853) 
 and Johann Karl August Musaus (1 735-1 787) worked with mate- 
 rials drawn from popular legend, but that Musaus treated his 
 material in a satirical vein rather than in the spirit of the original. 
 Carlyle had translated from both of these authors. 
 
 90 : 21. The Jolly Beggars. Henley, commenting on Lock- 
 hart's preference for the Cotter's Saturday Nighty says : " I, for my 
 
152 Notes 
 
 part, would not give my Holy Fair, still less my Hallowe'en 01 my 
 Jolly Beggars — observed, selected, excellently reported — for a 
 wilderness of Saturday Nights" He quotes, with evident disgust, 
 a letter from a friend stating that the old Poosie-Nansie Tavern 
 has a large room, on the walls of which is hung in the place of 
 honour — printed and framed and glazed — not the Jolly Beggars, 
 as one might suppose, but the Cotter's Saturday Night. 
 
 91 : 20. Teniers. David Teniers (1 582-1 649) a Flemish artist 
 who painted mostly peasants with landscapes. 
 
 91 : 25. The Beggars' Opera. A play written by John Gay 
 (1685-1732) at the suggestion of Swift. It ran for a hundred 
 nights. The Beggars' Bush was written by John Fletcher (1579- 
 1625). 
 
 92 : 14. The Songs of Burns. He wrote in all nearly three 
 hundred for Johnson's Museum and Thomson's Scottish Airs. As 
 has been seen in the sketch of Burns's life, most of these songs 
 were written at Ellisland and Dumfries, while many of them are 
 simply adaptations of older songs, and nearly all of them are words 
 written for tunes already in existence. There are at least a dozen 
 that rank with the great lyrics of the world's literature. It is inter- 
 esting to compare with the verdict of Carlyle that of Tennyson and 
 others, as given in a bit of reminiscence by Aubrey de Vere: 
 *' Tennyson exclaimed to me one day, 'Read the exquisite songs of 
 Burns. In shape, each of them has the perfection of the berry; in 
 light the radiance of the dewdrop; you forget for its sake those 
 stupid things, his serious pieces.' The same day I met Wordsworth, 
 and named Burns to him. Wordsworth praised him, even more 
 vehemently than Tennyson had done, as the great genius who 
 brought Poetry back to nature ; but ended, ' Of course I refer to 
 his serious efforts, such as the Cotter's Saturday Night; those fool- 
 ish little amatory songs of his one has to forget.' I told the tale to 
 Henry Taylor that evening, and his answer was : ' Burns' exquisite 
 songs and Burns' serious efforts are to me alike tedious, and dis- 
 agreeable reading.' " 
 
Notes 1 53 
 
 92 : 15. Since the era of Queen Elizabeth, etc. Carlyle either 
 did not know about, or did not care at all for, the lyrics of the seven- 
 teenth century, such as those of Herrick, Vaughan, Herbert, Cra- 
 shaw, and Carew, which from the standpoint of pure melody and 
 beauty must always have a high rank in English lyric poetry. 
 
 92 : 21. Ossorius the Portugal Bishop. Noyes quotes the 
 words of Bacon in his Advancement of Learning concerning this 
 " Cicero of Portugal." They express so well the exact opposite of 
 all Carlyle's views of art that they should be quoted : " Men began 
 to hunt more after words than matter; more after the choiceness 
 of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sen- 
 tence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and 
 illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the 
 weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of 
 invention, or depth of judgment. Then grew the flowing and 
 watery vein of Ossorius the Portugal bishop, to be in price." 
 
 93 : 7. They actually and in themselves are music. Allan 
 Cunningham has given an account of the circumstances under 
 which Burns's songs were composed, showing that the musical 
 element was the most notable feature : " When he lived in Dum- 
 fries he had three favourite walks — on the dock-green by the river- 
 side; among the ruins of Lincluden College; and towards the 
 Martingdon-Ford, on the north side of the Nith. This latter place 
 was secluded, commanded a view of the distant hills and the roman- 
 tic towers of Lincluden, and afforded soft greensward banks to rest 
 upon, and the sight and sound of the stream. As soon as he was 
 heard to hum to himself, his wife saw that he had something in his 
 mind, and was quite prepared to see him snatch up his hat, and set 
 silently off for his musing-ground. When by himself, and in the 
 open air, his ideas arranged themselves in their natural order — 
 words came at will, and he seldom returned without having finished 
 a song. . . . When the verses were finished, he passed them 
 through the ordeal of Mrs. Burns's voice; listened attentively when 
 she sang; asked her if any of the words were difficult, — and when 
 
154 Notes 
 
 one happened to be too rough, he readily found a smoother; but 
 he never, save at the resolute entreaty of a scientilic musician, sacri- 
 ficed sense to sound. The autumn was his favourite season, and 
 the twilight his favourite hour of study." 
 
 94 : 12. Our Fletcher. A Scotch political writer, Andrew 
 Fletcher (i 655-1 716), who, in his account of a conversation con- 
 cerning a Right Regulation of Cover 'nment for the Common good of 
 Mankind, says : " I knew a very wise man " who " believed if a 
 man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care who 
 should make the laws of a nation." 
 
 95 : 10-16. Grays and Glovers. Is it not strange that Glover 
 (171 2-1 785), an obscure poet, the author of a forgotten epic, 
 Leonidas, should be coupled with Gray (1716-1771), one of the 
 most popular of English poets? No one who has ever read the 
 Elegy writte7t in a Country Churchyard can fail to see the strong 
 local color in this poem. Goldsmith is excepted from the general 
 statement on account of his Deserted Village and the Vicar of Wake- 
 field, which are full of the charm of rural life. While writing in the 
 form of the eighteenth century, he had something of the spirit of the 
 nineteenth. Carlyle is right in his characterization of the Rambler, 
 one of the many successors of the Spectator, and of Rasselas, a 
 romance of the East, although Johnson himself is one of the best 
 types of the English race, with all its prejudice and its common- 
 sense way of doing things. 
 
 95 : 21. At Geneva. Just as Swiss soldiers have fought as mer- 
 cenaries in the armies of all the nations of Europe, so leading citi- 
 zens of France, Germany, and Italy have made their homes in the 
 Swiss capital. There is still little national feeling. 
 
 95 : 22. For a long period, etc. The union between Scotland 
 and England was perfected in 1709, and undoubtedly had much to 
 do with the suppression of patriotism in Scotland. It is hardly just 
 to say that there was no literature, for in Scotland something of the 
 genuine folk-song remained, while England was in the grip of classic 
 ideals. See page 140 for references to Fergusson and Ramsay. 
 
Notes 155 
 
 g5 : 24. Addison and Steele. Joseph Addison (1672-1719) 
 and Sir Richard Steele (1672- 1729) were intimate friends from 
 their boyhood. They had much to do with the development of 
 periodical literature. The 7W/?r was established in 1709 and the 
 Spectator in 171 1. See Thackeray's English Humorists. 
 
 95 : 2 5- John Boston. Thomas Boston (1677-1732), the name 
 of whose book is Human Nature in its Fourfold State, a work 
 setting forth the theology of Calvinism. 
 
 95 : 27. Schisms in our National Church. Such struggles as 
 those of the Covenanters and that of the Old Lights and the New 
 Lights. 
 
 95 : 28. The fiercer schisms in our Body Politic. The long 
 struggle between the adherents of the Stuarts (called Jacobites) 
 and theygovernment of William III, Anne, and the Georges. Even 
 Sir Walter Scott was at heart something of an adherent of the 
 Stuarts. 
 
 96:3. Lord Karnes. Henry Home Karnes (1 696-1 782), author 
 of the Elements of Criticism, and also a distinguished judge. 
 
 96 : 4. Hume. David Hume (1711-1776), a very acute phi- 
 losopher and author of a well-known history of England. 
 
 96 : 4. Robertson. William Robertson (1721-1793), author of 
 History of Charles V and a History of Scotland. 
 
 96:4. Smith. Adam Smith ( 1 723-1 790), author of the Wealth 
 of Nations, the first scientific treatment of economic science. 
 
 96 : 14. Racine. Jean Racine (1639-1699), a famous French 
 dramatist. 
 
 96 : 14. Voltaire. Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694- 
 1778), one of the greatest of French writers, a poet, dramatist, and 
 historian. He is especially known as the enemy of Christianity. 
 
 96 : 14. Batteux. Charles Batteux (1713-1780), a French man 
 of letters, chiefly noted as a writer on aesthetics. 
 
 96:14. Boileau. Nicholas Boileau-Despreaux (1636-1 711), the 
 most famous of French critics of the classical period. He had much 
 influence over Pope. 
 
156 Notes 
 
 g6 : 16. Montesquieu. Charles de Secondat, Baron de Mon- 
 tesquieu ( 1 689-1 755), a French jurist and political philosopher, 
 author of V Esprit des Lois, 
 
 96 : 16. Mably. Gabriel Bonnot, Abbe de Mably (1 709-1785), 
 a French publicist. 
 
 96 : 17. Quesnay. Francois Quesnay (1694-1774), a" French 
 political economist and physician. 
 
 g6 : 22. La Fldche. A town on the Loire River in France, 
 at which Hume spent several years. 
 
 07 : 16. "Doctrine of Rent." The subject of one of the chap- 
 ters in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, a book that Carlyle had 
 a contempt for, because it had brought into the thought of England 
 the idea of " the economic man," against which he struggled ear- 
 nestly in his Past and Present The Natural History of Religion 
 is a work in which Hume endeavours to treat religion from a 
 thoroughly natural standpoint, which of course is directly contrary 
 to the natural supernaturalism of Carlyle. 
 
 98 : 15. He eagerly searches after some lonely brother, etc. 
 Burns, in his epistles to John Lapraik and David Sillar, shows an 
 eagerness to find companions in verse that is altogether out of 
 proportion to the poetical achievements of these men. The fact 
 that Burns erected a memorial stone over Fergusson's grave has 
 already been referred to. 
 
 98 : 20. A wish, etc. Quoted from Answer to Verses Addressed 
 to the Poet by the Guidwife of Wauchope House, written in 1787. 
 Cf. the conclusion of the Cotter's Saturday Night, stanzas 19-21; 
 Epistle to William Simpson. 
 
 " But, Willie, set your fit to mine, 
 An' cock your crest ! 
 We'll gar our streams and burnies shine 
 Up wi' the best. 
 
 " We'll sing auld Coila's plains an' fells, 
 Her moors red-brown wi* heather bells, 
 Her banks and braes, her dens an' dells, 
 
Notes 157 
 
 Where glorious Wallace 
 Aft bure the gree, as story tells, 
 Frae Suthron billies." 
 
 102 : 22. The boy Robert ... to some university. What 
 influence did the university have on Carlyle ? As to the point that 
 Burns might have changed the whole course of British literature, 
 Aiton quotes a passage from Andrew Lang: "I have not made 
 much lament for the poverty of Burns. He had, probably, about 
 as much schooling as Shakespeare; he had the best education for 
 his genius. Better Scots poetry he could not have written had he 
 been an Ireland scholar; and his business was to write Scots poetry. 
 The people of whom he came he could not have represented as he 
 did, if a long classical education and many academic years had 
 come between him and the clay bigging of his birth. He could not 
 have bettered Tarn O'Shanter, or Hallowe'en, or the Jolly Beggars, 
 if he had been steeped in Longinus and Quintilian, Dr. Blair his 
 rhetoric, and the writings of Boileau. A man's work, after all, is 
 what he could do and had to do. One fails to see how any 
 change of worldly circumstance could have bettered the true work 
 of Burns." 
 
 103 : 7. Let us worship God. See Cotter's Saturday Night 
 
 103 : 28. In glory and in joy. From Wordsworth's Leech Gath- 
 erer, stanza 7. This is the sole reference in the essay to Words- 
 worth, for whom Carlyle had little admiration, although many of 
 their ideas are similar. 
 
 104 : 2. The gayest, brightest, most fantastic, etc. Henley, 
 after referring to the mental and physical suffering of Burns's early 
 life, — a life described by Burns himself as the " cheerless gloom of 
 a hermit with the unceasing toil of a galley slave," — says that the 
 poet escaped with a lifelong tendency to vapours and melancholia. 
 " William Burness is indeed a pathetic figure; but to me the Robert 
 of Mount Oliphant is a figure more pathetic still." 
 
 104 : 10. A kind of mud-bath. Cf. Tennyson's In Memoriatr^ 
 canto liii : — 
 
158 Notes 
 
 " And dare we to this fancy give, 
 
 That had the wild oat not been sown, 
 The soil, left barren, scarce had grown 
 The grain by which a man may live ? 
 
 " Or, if we held the doctrine sound 
 
 For life outliving heats of youth, 
 Yet who would preach it as a truth 
 To those that eddy round and round ? M 
 
 106 : 23. " Hungry Ruin has him in the wind." An expres* 
 sion used by Burns in a letter to Dr. Moore. 
 
 106 : 28. Wild farewell to Scotland. The Gloomy Night is 
 gathering Fast. The last line should read, — 
 
 " Farewell my bonie banks of Ayr." 
 
 107 : 18. Rienzi, a Roman patriot of the fourteenth century, 
 who revived the title of Tribune of the People. His great power 
 turned his head, however, and he became a tyrant. 
 
 109 : 9. Professor Ferguson's. Adam Ferguson (1 723-1816), 
 professor of Philosophy at Edinburgh prior to Dugald Stewart. 
 
 109 : 14. Bunbury ( 1 750-181 1). An amateur artist and cari- 
 caturist. 
 
 109 : 26. Langhorne. John Langhorne C I 735~ I 779)» author 
 of the poem The Count?y Justice (so the poem is called in 
 Chalmers's British Poets) and, with his brother William, the 
 translator of Plutarch's Lives. 
 
 no : 3. Mr. Nasmyth's picture. Alexander Nasmyth (1758- 
 1840), painted the well-known portrait of Burns now in the 
 National Gallery in London. 
 
 112 : 19. The good old Blacklock. Thomas Blacklock. 
 (1721-1791), a blind poet of Edinburgh. In the autobiographical 
 letter to Dr. Moore, Burns says, referring to his projected passage 
 to the West Indies : " A letter from Dr. Blacklock to a friend of 
 mine, overthrew all my schemes by opening new 'prospects to my 
 poetic ambition. The doctor belonged to a set of critics for 
 
Notes 159 
 
 whose applause I had not dared to hope. His opinion, that I 
 would meet with encouragement in Edinburgh for a second edi- 
 tion, fired me so much, that away I posted for that city, without 
 a single acquaintance or a single letter of introduction." 
 
 114 : 20. The treatment of the woman. Henley says: 
 "Against this panorama of tumult and variety and adventure, 
 enlarged in Edinburgh, and enriched at Ellisland and in Dumfries, 
 there are to be set the years of simple abnegation, magnanimity, 
 and devotion with which * the facile and empty-headed girl ' [as 
 she is called by some writers] repaid the husband of her choice." 
 
 117 : 25. Grocerdom and Grazierdom. Trading class and 
 farmers. 
 
 118 : 11. Lady Grizzel Baillie (1 665-1 746). "A Loyalist 
 lady, one of the heroic figures in Scotch history." 
 
 122 : 4. Friendship ... no longer exists. During the very 
 year that Carlyle wrote these words Arthur Hallam and Alfred 
 Tennyson began a friendship, the most notable in English literary 
 history, immortalized in In Memoriam. 
 
 123 : 24. Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, and at one time a- 
 slave in Algiers. 
 
 125 : 12. Roger Bacon (1 214-1294), an English philosopher, 
 who wrote Opus Majus. 
 
 125 : 13. Galileo. Galileo Galilei (1 564-1 642), an Italian 
 physicist and astronomer. 
 
 125:13. Tasso. Torquato Tasso ( 1 544-1 595), an Italian poet, 
 author of Jerusalem Delivered. 
 
 125 : 14. Camoens. Luiz de Camoens (1524 (?)-i58o), a Por- 
 tuguese poet, author of the Lusiad. 
 
 126 : 29. Restaurateur. A restaurant keeper ; perhaps, as 
 Noyes suggests, Carlyle had in view a man like Scott, who 
 simply affords entertainment for people. 
 
 128 : 1. Locke. John Locke (1632-1704), one of the greatest 
 of English philosophers; he advocated reason, toleration, and com- 
 mon sense in all things. 
 
160 Notes 
 
 128 : 9. Araucana. An heroic poem written by Alonso de 
 Ercilla, a Spanish soldier and poet of the sixteenth century. 
 
 129 : 16. He has no Religion. Can this be said of one who 
 wrote the Cotter* s Saturday Night? Burns had reverence, had a 
 genuine sorrow for his many sins, but he had no fixed faith. The 
 point that Carlyle makes against Burns is the one he made often 
 with regard to his own age. He says in Heroes and Hero- Worship, 
 " A man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him. A man's 
 or a nation of men's. By religion I do not mean here the Church- 
 creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign, 
 and, in words or otherwise, assert. . . . But the thing a man does 
 practically believe, the thing a man does practically lay to heart, 
 and know for certain; concerning his vital relations to this myste- 
 rious universe and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the 
 primary thing for him." In Signs of the Times he defines religion 
 as a "thousand-voiced song from the heart of Man to his Invisible 
 Father, fountain of all goodness, beauty, truth." 
 
 129 : 24. Rabelais. Francois Rabelais (1495— 1553), a cele- 
 brated French humorist of the sixteenth century, creator of Pan- 
 tagruel and Gargantua. 
 
 130 : 24. Jean Paul. The pseudonym of Jean Paul Friedrich 
 Richter (1 763-1825), a famous German writer who is said to have 
 influenced the formation of Carlyle's style. 
 
 135 : 14. Swift. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), the keenest of 
 English satirists, author of Gulliver's Travels, Tale of a Tub, etc. 
 
 135 : 14. Rousseau. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), a 
 Swiss-French writer whose radical ideas had much to do with 
 bringing on the French Revolution. His best known books are 
 La nouvelle Heloise, Le contrat social, £mile, and Confessions. 
 
 135:29. Valclusa Fountain. The Italian poet Petrarch (1304- 
 1374) lived at Vaucluse, near Avignon, and wrote many poems 
 about the fountain there. 
 
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