ontact with
people who ought by experience and knowledge to know better than he. The
only thing that is probable is a falling-off, not an advance. I think it
highly doubtful whether a ploughman from Ayrshire, however superlative
his genius, would now be received at all in "the best houses" and by the
first men and women in Edinburgh; and if not in Edinburgh, surely
nowhere else would such a reception as that given to Burns await the
untutored poet. The world has seldom another chance permitted to it, and
in this case I cannot but think it would be worse and not better used.

[Illustration: BURNS'S MONUMENT]

CHAPTER III

THE SHAKSPEARE OF SCOTLAND

There are many variations in degree of the greatest human gifts, but
they are few in kind. The name we have ventured to place at the head of
this chapter is one not so great as that of Shakspeare, not so
all-embracing--though widely-embracing beyond any other second--not so
ideal, not so profound. Walter Scott penetrated with a luminous
revelation all that was within his scope, the most different kinds and
classes of men, those whom he loved (and he loved all whom it was
possible to love) and the few whom he hated, with the same comprehension
and power of disclosure. But Shakspeare was not restrained by the limits
of any personal scope or knowledge. He knew Lear and Macbeth, and Hamlet
and Prospero, though they were beings only of his own creation. He could
embody the loftiest passion in true flesh and blood, and show us how a
man can be moved by jealousy or ambition in the highest superlative
degree and yet be a man with all the claims upon our understanding and
pity that are possessed by any brother of our own. Nothing like Lear
ever came in our Scott's way: that extraordinary embodiment of human
passion and weakness, the forlorn and awful strength of the aged and
miserable, did not present itself to his large and genial gaze. It would
not have occurred to him perhaps had he lived to the age of Methuselah.
He knew not those horrors and dreadful depths of humanity that could
make such tragic passion possible. But he had his revenge in one way
even upon Shakspeare. Dogberry and Verges, as types of the muddle-headed
old watch--pompous, confused, and self-important--are always diverting;
but they would have been men not all ridiculous had Scott taken them in
hand--real creatures of flesh and blood, not watchmen in the abstract.
Our greater poet did not take trouble