Dogs_ and _The Brigs of Ayr_ in his _Planestanes and Causey_, and
_Kirkyard Eclogues_. In later years Burns grew somewhat more critical
of Ramsay, especially as a reviser of old songs; but for Fergusson he
retained to the end a sympathetic admiration. When he went to
Edinburgh, one of his first places of pilgrimage was the grave of him
whom he apostrophized thus,

O thou, my elder brother in misfortune,
By far my elder brother in the muse!

And he later obtained from the managers of the Canongate Kirk
permission to erect a stone over the tomb.

The fact, then, that Burns owed much to the tradition of vernacular
poetry in Scotland and especially to his immediate predecessors is no
new discovery, however recent critics may have plumed themselves upon
it. Burns knew it well, and was ever ready to acknowledge it. What is
more important than the mere fact of his inheritance is the use he
made of it. In taking from his elders the fruits of their experience
in poetical conception and metrical arrangement, he but did what
artists have always done; in outdistancing these elders and in almost
every case surpassing their achievement on the lines they had laid
down, he did what only the greater artists succeed in doing. It is not
in mere inventiveness and novelty but in first-hand energy of
conception, in mastering for himself the old thought and the old form
and uttering them with his personal stamp, in making them carry over
to the reader with a new force or vividness or beauty, that the poet's
originality consists. In these respects Burns's originality is no whit
lessened by an explicit recognition of his indebtedness to the stock
from which he grew.

His relation to the purely English literature which he read is
different and produced very different results. Shakespeare he
reverenced, and that he knew him well is shown by the frequency of
Shakespearean turns of phrase in his letters, as well as by direct
quotation. But of influence upon his poetry there is little trace. He
had a profound admiration for the indomitable will of Milton's Satan,
and he makes it clear that this admiration affected his conduct. The
most frequent praise of English writers in his letters is, however,
given to the eighteenth-century authors--to Pope, Thomson, Shenstone,
Gray, Young, Blair, Beattie, and Goldsmith in verse, to Sterne,
Smollett, and Henry Mackenzie in prose. Echoes of these poets are
common in his work, and the most frigid of