ymen were ready for him;
they could hail him on the instant (just as an Elizabethan audience
could hail Shakespeare) as something familiar and at the same time more
splendid than anything they knew. He spoke in a tongue they could
understand.

It is impossible to judge Burns from his purely English verse; though he
did it as well as any of the minor followers of the school of Pope he
did it no better. Only the weakest side of his character--his
sentimentalism--finds expression in it; he had not the sense of
tradition nor the intimate knowledge necessary to use English to the
highest poetic effect; it was indeed a foreign tongue to him. In the
vernacular he wrote the language he spoke, a language whose natural
force and colour had become enriched by three centuries of literary use,
which was capable, too, of effects of humour and realism impossible in
any tongue spoken out of reach of the soil. It held within it an
unmatched faculty for pathos, a capacity for expressing a lambent and
kindly humour, a power of pungency in satire and a descriptive vividness
that English could not give. How express in the language of Pope or even
of Wordsworth an effect like this:--

"They reeled, they set, they cross'd, they cleekit,
Till ilka carlin swat and reekit,
And coost her duddies to the wark,
And linket at it in her sark."

or this--

"Yestreen when to the trembling string,
The dance gaed thro' the lighted ha'
To thee my fancy took its wing--
I sat but neither heard nor saw:
Tho' this was fair, and that was braw,
And yon the toast of a' the toun,
I sigh'd and said amang them a',
You are na Mary Morison."

It may be objected that in all this there is only one word, and but two
or three forms of words that are not English. But the accent, the
rhythm, the air of it are all Scots, and it was a Burns thinking in his
native tongue who wrote it, not the Burns of

"Anticipation forward points the view ";

or

"Pleasures are like poppies spread,
You grasp the flower, the bloom is shed."

or any other of the exercises in the school of Thomson and Pope.

It is easy to see that though Burns admired unaffectedly the "classic"
writers, his native realism and his melody made him a potent agent in
the cause of naturalism and romance. In his ideas, even more than in his
style, he belongs to the oncoming school. The French Revolution, which
broke upon Europe when he was at the height of his career, found him
already co