ly English heroics." If so, we can but say
how poor are the best! What is to be thought of such lines as

Poetic ardours in my bosom swell,
Lone wandering by the hermit's mossy cell, &c., &c.

Nor less stilted, forced, and artificial are the lines in the same
measure written at the Fall of Fyers.

The truth is, that Burns's _forte_ by no means lay in describing
scenery alone, and for its own sake. All his really inspired descriptions
of it occur as adjuncts to human incident or feeling, slips of
landscape let in as a background. Again, as Burns was never at his
best when called on to write for occasions--no really spontaneous
poet ever can be--so when taken to see much talked-of scenes, and (p. 072)
expected to express poetic raptures over them, Burns did not answer to
the call.

"He disliked," we are told, "to be tutored in matters of taste, and
could not endure that one should run shouting before him, whenever any
fine object came in sight." On one occasion of this kind, a lady at
the poet's side said, "Burns, have you nothing to say of this?"
"Nothing, madam," he replied, glancing at the leader of the party,
"for an ass is braying over it." Burns is not the only person who has
suffered from this sort of officiousness.

Besides this, the tours were not made in the way which most conduces
to poetic composition. He did not allow himself the quiet and the
leisure from interruption which are needed. It was not with such
companions as Ainslie or Nicol by his side that the poet's eye
discovered new beauty in the sight of a solitary reaper in a Highland
glen, and his ear caught magical suggestiveness in the words, "What!
you are stepping westward," heard by the evening lake.

Another hindrance to happy poetic description by Burns during these
journeys was that he had now forsaken his native vernacular, and taken
to writing in English after the mode of the poets of the day. This with
him was to unclothe himself of his true strength. His correspondent,
Dr. Moore, and his Edinburgh critics had no doubt counselled him to
write in English, and he listened for a time too easily to their
counsel. He and they little knew what they were doing in giving and
taking such advice. The truth is, when he used his own Scottish
dialect he was unapproached, unapproachable; no poet before or since
has evoked out of that instrument so perfect and so varied melodies.
When he wrote in English he was seldom more than