s that were easy, racy, graphic, and forcible,
and used language with absolute tact and courage as it seemed most fit
to give a clear impression. If you take even those English authors whom
we know Burns to have most admired and studied, you will see at once
that he owed them nothing but a warning. Take Shenstone, for instance,
and watch that elegant author as he tries to grapple with the facts of
life. He has a description, I remember, of a gentleman engaged in
sliding or walking on thin ice, which is a little miracle of
incompetence. You see my memory fails me, and I positively cannot
recollect whether his hero was sliding or walking; as though a writer
should describe a skirmish, and the reader, at the end, be still
uncertain whether it were a charge of cavalry or a slow and stubborn
advance of foot. There could be no such ambiguity in Burns; his work is
at the opposite pole from such indefinite and stammering performances;
and a whole lifetime passed in the study of Shenstone would only lead a
man further and further from writing the "Address to a Louse." Yet
Burns, like most great artists, proceeded from a school and continued a
tradition; only the school and tradition were Scottish, and not English.
While the English language was becoming daily more pedantic and
inflexible, and English letters more colourless and slack, there was
another dialect in the sister country, and a different school of poetry,
tracing its descent, through King James I., from Chaucer. The dialect
alone accounts for much; for it was then written colloquially, which
kept it fresh and supple; and, although not shaped for heroic flights,
it was a direct and vivid medium for all that had to do with social
life. Hence, whenever Scottish poets left their laborious imitations of
bad English verses, and fell back on their own dialect, their style
would kindle, and they would write of their convivial and somewhat gross
existences with pith and point. In Ramsay, and far more in the poor lad
Fergusson, there was mettle, humour, literary courage, and a power of
saying what they wished to say definitely and brightly, which in the
latter case should have justified great anticipations. Had Burns died at
the same age as Fergusson, he would have left us literally nothing worth
remark. To Ramsay and to Fergusson, then, he was indebted in a very
uncommon degree, not only following their tradition and using their
measures, but directly and avowedly imitating thei