SOURCE: "Apotheosis," in Dirt & Deity: A Life of Robert Burns, HarperCollins Publishers, 1995, pp. 413–44.

Here, Mclntyre presents a survey of critical and public reaction to Burns over the span of two hundred years.

… The critics had continued to give as much attention to the defects of Burns's moral character as to the qualities of his poetry. The publication of Cromek's Reliques of Robert Burns in 1808 had occasioned two influential unsigned reviews—that by Francis Jeffrey in the Whig Edinburgh Review, and that by Walter Scott in the first issue of the Quarterly Review, recently established as a rival Tory voice. Jeffrey, who was later to begin his demolition of Wordsworth's The Excursion with the notorious 'This will never do!' was alive to the value of a provocative opening:

Burns is certainly by far the greatest of our poetical prodigies—from Stephen Duck down to Thomas Dermody. They are...