nds for a
moment's space holding high revel in Poosie Nansie's; but in that brief
glance we see them from their birth to their death. They are flung into
the world, and go zigzagging through it, chaffering and cheating,
swaggering and swearing; kicked and cuffed from parish to parish; their
only joy of existence an occasional night like this, a carnival of drink
and all sensuality; snapping their fingers in the face of the world, and
as they have lived so going down defiantly to death, a laugh on their
lips and a curse in their heart. Every character in it is individual and
distinct from his neighbour; the language from first to last simple,
sensuous, musical. Of this poem Matthew Arnold says: 'It has a breadth,
truth, and power which make the famous scene in Auerbach's cellar of
Goethe's _Faust_ seem artificial and tame beside it, and which are only
matched by Shakspeare and Aristophanes.'

_The Cotter's Saturday Night_ has usually, in Scotland, been the most
lauded of his poems. Many writers give it as his best. It is a pious
opinion, but is not sound criticism. Burns handicapped himself, not only
by the stanza he selected for this poem, but also by the attitude he
took towards his subject. He is never quite himself in it. We admire its
many beauties; we see the life of the poor made noble and dignified; we
see, in the end, the soul emerging from the tyranny of time and
circumstance; but with all that we feel that there is something
awanting. The priest-like father is drawn from life, and the picture is
beautiful; not less deftly drawn is the mother's portrait, though it be
not so frequently quoted:

'The mother, wi' a woman's wiles, can spy
What makes the youth so bashfu' and so grave;
Weel pleased to think her bairn's respected like the lave.'

The last line gives one of the most natural and most subtle touches in
the whole poem. The closing verses are, I think, unhappy. The poet has
not known when to stop, keeps writing after he has finished, and so
becomes stilted and artificial.

It is in his songs, however, more than in his poems, that we find Burns
most regularly at his best. And excellence in song-writing is a rare
gift. The snatches scattered here and there throughout the plays of
Shakspeare are perhaps the only collection of lyrics that can at all
stand comparison with the wealth of minstrelsy Burns has left behind
him. This was his undying legacy to the world. Song-writing was a labour
of l