some fifteen years after it has
vanished out of the world, having said out its say and done all that
it had to do, he still finds it too utterly abnormal to make up his
mind about in any clear or consistent way, and gets thoroughly cross
with it, and calls it hard names, because it will not fit into any
established pigeon-hole or drawer of the then existing
anthropological museum. Burns is "a literary prodigy," and yet it is
"a derogation" to him to consider him as one. And that we find, not
as we should have expected, because he possessed genius, which would
have made success a matter of course in any rank, but because he was
so well educated--"having acquired a competent knowledge of French,
together with the elements of Latin and Geometry," and before he had
composed a single stanza, was "far more intimately acquainted with
Pope, Shakespeare, and Thomson, than nine-tenths of the youths who
leave school for the university," etc. etc.--in short, because he was
so well educated, that his becoming Robert Burns, the immortal poet,
was a matter of course and necessity. And yet, a page or two on, the
great reason why it was more easy for Robert Burns the cottar to
become an original and vigorous poet, rather than for any one of "the
herd of scholars and academical literati," who are depressed and
discouraged by "perusing the most celebrated writers, and conversing
with the most intelligent judges," is found to be, that "the
literature and refinement of the age do not exist for a rustic and
illiterate individual; and consequently the present time is to him
what the rude times of old were to the vigorous writer who adorned
them." In short the great reason of Robert Burns's success was that
he did not possess that education the possession of which proves him
to be no prodigy, though the review begins by calling him one, and
coupling him with Stephen Duck and Thomas Dermody.

Now if the best critic of the age, writing fifteen years after
Burns's death, found himself between the horns of such a dilemma'--
which indeed, like those of an old Arnee bull, meet at the points,
and form a complete circle of contradictions--what must have been the
bewilderment of lesser folk during the prodigy's very lifetime? what
must, indeed, have been his own bewilderment at himself, however
manfully he may have kept it down? No wonder that he was unguided,
either by himself or by others. We do not blame them; him we must
deeply blame; yet no