could read French, as the best account of
the relation of the sexes.

Besides, the philosophy of that day, like its criticism, was
altogether mechanical, nay, as it now seems, materialist in its
ultimate and logical results. Criticism was outward, and of the form
merely. The world was not believed to be already, and in itself,
mysterious and supernatural, and the poet was not defined as the man
who could see and proclaim that supernatural element. Before it was
admired, it was to be raised above nature into the region of "the
picturesque," or whatnot; and the poet was the man who gave it this
factitious and superinduced beauty, by a certain "kompsologia" and
"meteoroepeia," called "poetic diction," now happily becoming
extinct, mainly, we believe, under the influence of Burns, although
he himself thought it his duty to bedizen his verses therewith, and
though it was destined to flourish for many a year more in the temple
of the father of lies, like a jar of paper flowers on a Popish altar.

No wonder that in such a time, a genius like Burns should receive not
only no guidance, but no finer appreciation. True; he was admired,
petted, flattered; for that the man was wonderful no one could doubt.
But we question whether he was understood; whether, if that very
flowery and magniloquent style which we now consider his great
failing had been away, he would not have been passed over by the many
as a writer of vulgar doggrel. True, the old simple ballad-muse of
Scotland still dropped a gem from her treasures, here and there, even
in the eighteenth century itself--witness "Auld Robin Gray." But who
suspected that they were gems, of which Scotland, fifty years
afterwards, would be prouder and more greedy than of all the second-
hand French culture which seemed to her then the highest earthly
attainment? The Review of Burns in an early number of the "Edinburgh
Review," said to be from the pen of the late Lord Jeffrey, shows, as
clearly as anything can, the utterly inconsistent and bewildered
feeling with which the world must have regarded such a phenomenon.
Alas! there was inconsistency and bewilderment enough in the
phenomenon itself, but that only made confusion worse confounded; the
confusion was already there, even in the mind of the more practical
literary men, who ought, one would have thought, also to have been
the most deep-sighted. But no. The reviewer turns the strange thing
over and over, and inside out--and