e plough
or the pen with the same firm, manly grasp; nor did he cut out poetry as
we cut out watch-papers, with finical dexterity, nor from the same
flimsy materials. Burns was not like Shakspeare in the range of his
genius; but there is something of the same magnanimity, directness, and
unaffected character about him. He was not a sickly sentimentalist, a
namby-pamby poet, a mincing metre ballad-monger, any more than
Shakspeare. He would as soon hear "a brazen candlestick tuned, or a dry
wheel grate on the axletree." He was as much of a man--not a twentieth
part as much of a poet as Shakspeare. With but little of his imagination
or inventive power, he had the same life of mind: within the narrow
circle of personal feeling or domestic incidents, the pulse of his
poetry flows as healthily and vigorously. He had an eye to see; a heart
to feel:--no more. His pictures of good fellowship, of social glee, of
quaint humour, are equal to any thing; they come up to nature, and they
cannot go beyond it. The sly jest collected in his laughing eye at the
sight of the grotesque and ludicrous in manners--the large tear rolled
down his manly cheek at the sight of another's distress. He has made us
as well acquainted with himself as it is possible to be; has let out the
honest impulses of his native disposition, the unequal conflict of the
passions in his breast, with the same frankness and truth of
description. His strength is not greater than his weakness: his virtues
were greater than his vices. His virtues belonged to his genius: his
vices to his situation, which did not correspond to his genius.

It has been usual to attack Burns's moral character, and the moral
tendency of his writings at the same time; and Mr. Wordsworth, in a
letter to Mr. Gray, Master of the High School at Edinburgh, in
attempting to defend, has only laid him open to a more serious and
unheard-of responsibility. Mr. Gray might very well have sent him back,
in return for his epistle, the answer of Holofernes in Love's Labour's
Lost:--"_Via_ goodman Dull, thou hast spoken no word all this while."
The author of this performance, which is as weak in effect as it is
pompous in pretension, shews a great dislike of Robespierre, Buonaparte,
and of Mr. Jeffrey, whom he, by some unaccountable fatality, classes
together as the three most formidable enemies of the human race that
have appeared in his (Mr. Wordsworth's) remembrance; but he betrays very
little li