ch has been very much overrated. But the deeper
elements of Burns's mind, those which have especially endeared him to
the working man, reappear very little, or not at all, in Hogg. He
left his class too much below him; became too much of the mere
aesthetic prodigy, and member of a literary clique; frittered away
his great talents in brilliant talk and insincere Jacobite songs,
and, in fine, worked no deliverance on the earth. It is sad to have
to say this: but we had it forced upon us painfully enough a few
days ago, when re-reading "Kilmeny." There may be beautiful passages
in it; but it is not coherent, not natural, not honest. It is
throughout an affectation of the Manichaean sentimental-sublime,
which God never yet put into the heart of any brawny, long-headed,
practical Borderer, and which he therefore probably put into his own
head, or, as we call it, affected, for the time being; a method of
poetry writing which comes forth out of nothing, and into nothing
must return.

This is unfortunate, perhaps, for the world; for we question whether
a man of talents in anywise to be compared with those of the Ettrick
Shepherd has followed in the footsteps of Burns. Poor Tannahill,
whose sad story is but too well known, perished early, at the age of
thirty-six, leaving behind him a good many pretty love-songs of no
great intrinsic value, if the specimens of them given in Mr.
Whitelaw's collection are to be accepted as the best. Like all
Burns's successors, including even Walter Scott and Hogg, we have but
to compare him with his original to see how altogether unrivalled on
his own ground the Ayrshire farmer was. In one feature only
Tannahill's poems, and those later than him, except where
pedantically archaist, like many of Motherwell's, are an improvement
on Burns: namely, in the more easy and complete interfusion of the
two dialects, the Norse Scotch and the Romanesque English, which
Allan Ramsay attempted in vain to unite; while Burns, though not
succeeding by any means perfectly, welded them together into
something of continuity and harmony--thus doing for the language of
his own country very much what Chaucer did for that of England--a
happy union, in the opinion of those who, as we do, look on the
vernacular Norse Scotch as no barbaric dialect, but as an independent
tongue, possessing a copiousness, melody, terseness, and
picturesqueness which makes it, both in prose and verse, a far better
vehicle than the