sociations of many of the Protestant ministers, finally made
the speech of the Scottish pulpit, and later of Scottish religion in
general, if not English, at least as purely English as could be
achieved.

The process thus begun was carried farther in the next generation
when, in 1603, James VI of Scotland became King of England, and the
Court removed to London. England at that time was, of course, much
more advanced in culture than its poorer neighbor to the north, and
the courtiers who accompanied James to London found themselves marked
by their speech as provincial, and set themselves to get rid of their
Scotticisms with an eagerness in proportion to their social
aspirations. Scottish men of letters now came into more intimate
relation with English literature, and finding that writing in English
opened to them a much larger reading public, they naturally adopted
the southern speech in their books. Thus men like Alexander, Earl of
Stirling, and William Drummond of Hawthornden belong both in language
and literary tradition to the English Elizabethans.

Religion, society, and literature having all thrown their influence
against the native speech of Scotland, it followed that the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the progressive disuse of
that speech among the upper classes of the country, until by the time
of Burns, Scots was habitually spoken only by the peasantry and the
humbler people in the towns. The distinctions between social classes
in the matter of dialect were, of course, not absolute. Occasional
members even of the aristocracy prided themselves on their command of
the vernacular; and among the country folk there were few who could
not make a brave attempt at English when they spoke with the laird or
the minister. With Burns himself, Lowland Scots was his customary
speech at home, about the farm, in the tavern and the Freemasons'
lodge; but, as we have seen, his letters, being written mainly to
educated people, are almost all pure English, as was his conversation
with these people when he met them.

The linguistic situation that has been sketched finds interesting
illustration in the language of Burns's poems. The distinction which
is usually made, that he wrote poetry in Scots and verse in English,
has some basis, but is inaccurately expressed and needs qualification.
The fundamental fact is that for him Scots was the natural language
of the emotions, English of the intellect. The Scots poems are in