king to Burns. He is, indeed, anxious to get him out of the
unhallowed clutches of the Edinburgh Reviewers (as a mere matter of
poetical privilege), only to bring him before a graver and higher
tribunal, which is his own; and after repeating and insinuating
ponderous charges against him, shakes his head, and declines giving any
opinion in so tremendous a case; so that though the judgment of the
former critic is set aside, poor Burns remains just where he was, and
nobody gains any thing by the cause but Mr. Wordsworth, in an increasing
opinion of his own wisdom and purity. "Out upon this half-faced
fellowship!" The author of the Lyrical Ballads has thus missed a fine
opportunity of doing Burns justice and himself honour. He might have
shewn himself a philosophical prose-writer, as well as a philosophical
poet. He might have offered as amiable and as gallant a defence of the
Muses, as my uncle Toby, in the honest simplicity of his heart, did of
the army. He might have said at once, instead of making a parcel of wry
faces over the matter, that Burns had written Tam o'Shanter, and that
that alone was enough; that he could hardly have described the excesses
of mad, hairbrained, roaring mirth and convivial indulgence, which are
the soul of it, if he himself had not "drunk full ofter of the ton than
of the well"--unless "the act and practique part of life had been the
mistress of his theorique." Mr. Wordsworth might have quoted such lines
as--

"The landlady and Tam grew gracious,
Wi' favours secret, sweet, and precious";--

or,

"Care, mad to see a man so happy,
E'en drown'd himself among the nappy";--

and fairly confessed that he could not have written such lines from a
want of proper habits and previous sympathy; and that till some great
puritanical genius should arise to do these things equally well without
any knowledge of them, the world might forgive Burns the injuries he had
done his health and fortune in his poetical apprenticeship to
experience, for the pleasure he had afforded them. Instead of this, Mr.
Wordsworth hints, that with different personal habits and greater
strength of mind, Burns would have written differently, and almost as
well as _he_ does. He might have taken that line of Gay's,

"The fly that sips treacle is lost in the sweets,"--

and applied it in all its force and pathos to the poetical character. He
might have argued that poets are men of genius, and