etically most wholesome for us. For the votary misled by a
personal estimate of Shelley, as so many of us have been, are, and will
be,--of that beautiful spirit building his many-coloured haze of words
and images

'Pinnacled dim in the intense inane'--

no contact can be wholesomer than the contact with Burns at his archest
and soundest. Side by side with the

'On the brink of the night and the morning
My coursers are wont to respire,
But the Earth has just whispered a warning
That their flight must be swifter than fire . . .'

of _Prometheus Unbound_, how salutary, how very salutary, to place this
from _Tam Glen_--

'My minnie does constantly deave me
And bids me beware o' young men;
They flatter, she says, to deceive me;
But wha can think sae o' Tam Glen?'

But we enter on burning ground as we approach the poetry of times so
near to us--poetry like that of Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth--of
which the estimates are so often not only personal, but personal with
passion. For my purpose, it is enough to have taken the single case of
Burns, the first poet we come to of whose work the estimate formed is
evidently apt to be personal, and to have suggested how we may proceed,
using the poetry of the great classics as a sort of touchstone, to
correct this estimate, as we had previously corrected by the same means
the historic estimate where we met with it. A collection like the
present, with its succession of celebrated names and celebrated poems,
offers a good opportunity to us for resolutely endeavouring to make our
estimates of poetry real. I have sought to point out a method which
will help us in making them so, and to exhibit it in use so far as to
put any one who likes in a way of applying it for himself.

At any rate the end to which the method and the estimate are designed
to lead, and from leading to which, if they do lead to it, they get
their whole value,--the benefit of being able clearly to feel and
deeply to enjoy the best, the truly classic, in poetry,--is an end, let
me say it once more at parting, of supreme importance. We are often
told that an era is opening in which we are to see multitudes of a
common sort of readers, and masses of a common sort of literature; that
such readers do not want and could not relish anything better than such
literature, and that to provide it is becoming a vast and profitable
industry. Even if good literature entirely lost currency with