abject adoration, and a hundred other variations of feeling; and in
several cases he maintained for years, by correspondence and
occasional visits, an intercourse with ladies on which no shadow of a
stain has ever been cast. Such were his relations with Margaret
Chalmers and Mrs. Dunlop. These facts have no controversial bearing,
but they are necessary to be considered if we are to have a complete
view of Burns's relations to society.

In estimating him as a poet, nothing is lost in keeping in mind the
historical relations which have been so strongly emphasized in recent
years. He himself would have been the last to resent being placed in a
national tradition, but, on the contrary, would have been proud to be
regarded as the last and greatest of Scottish vernacular poets.
Patriotic feeling is frequent in his verse; we have seen how
consciously he performed his work for Johnson and Thomson as a service
to his country; and to the "Guidwife of Wauchope House" he professed,
speaking of his youth,

E'en then, a wish (I mind its pow'r),
A wish that from my latest hour
Shall strongly heave my breast,
That I for poor auld Scotland's sake
Some usefu' plan or book could make,
Or sing a sang at least.

So in the line of the Scottish "makers" we place him, the inheritor of
the speech of Henryson and Dunbar, of the meters and modes of
Montgomery and the Sempills, Ramsay and Fergusson, the re-creator of
the perishing relics of the lost masters of popular song.

His relation to his English predecessors need not again be detailed,
so little of value did they contribute to the vital part of his work.
But some account should be taken of his connection with the English
literature of his own and the next generation.

The humanitarian movement was well under way before the appearance of
Burns, and the particular manifestations of it in, for example, the
poems of Cowper on animals, owed nothing to the influence of Burns.
But Cowper's hares never appealed to the popular heart with the force
of Burns's sheep and mice and dogs, and the tender familiarity and
wistful jocoseness of his poems to beasts have never been surpassed.
In writing these he was probably, consciously or unconsciously,
affected by the tendency of the time, as he was also in the democratic
brotherhood of _A Man's a Man for a' That_, but, in both cases, as we
have seen, part of the impulse, that part that made his utterance
reach his aud