llow themselves to be influenced by something more substantial
than the roses and lilies of the muse. Burns had other claims to their
regard then those arising from poetic skill: he was tall, young,
good-looking, with dark, bright eyes, and words and wit at will: he
had a sarcastic sally for all lads who presumed to cross his path, and
a soft, persuasive word for all lasses on whom he fixed his fancy: nor
was this all--he was adventurous and bold in love trystes and love
excursions: long, rough roads, stormy nights, flooded rivers, and
lonesome places, were no letts to him; and when the dangers or labours
of the way were braved, he was alike skilful in eluding vigilant
aunts, wakerife mothers, and envious or suspicions sisters: for rivals
he had a blow as ready us he had a word, and was familiar with snug
stack-yards, broomy glens, and nooks of hawthorn and honeysuckle,
where maidens love to be wooed. This rendered him dearer to woman's
heart than all the lyric effusions of his fancy; and when we add to
such allurements, a warm, flowing, and persuasive eloquence, we need
not wonder that woman listened and was won; that one of the most
charming damsels of the West said, an hour with him in the dark was
worth a lifetime of light with any other body; or that the
accomplished and beautiful Duchess of Gordon declared, in a latter
day, that no man ever carried her so completely off her feet as Robert
Burns.

It is one of the delusions of the poet's critics and biographers, that
the sources of his inspiration are to be found in the great classic
poets of the land, with some of whom he had from his youth been
familiar: there is little or no trace of them in any of his
compositions. He read and wondered--he warmed his fancy at their
flame, he corrected his own natural taste by theirs, but he neither
copied nor imitated, and there are but two or three allusions to Young
and Shakspeare in all the range of his verse. He could not but feel
that he was the scholar of a different school, and that his thirst was
to be slaked at other fountains. The language in which those great
bards embodied their thoughts was unapproachable to an Ayrshire
peasant; it was to him as an almost foreign tongue: he had to think
and feel in the not ungraceful or inharmonious language of his own
vale, and then, in a manner, translate it into that of Pope or of
Thomson, with the additional difficulty of finding English words to
express the exact meaning of t