the local color of Scotch life, the sentimental themes assumed the freshness of novelty.  Giving a new ardor to revolutionary tendencies,—­Burns revolted against the orthodoxy of the “Auld Lichts,” depicting its representatives as ludicrously hypocritical.  He protested against distinctions founded on birth or rank, as in A Man’s a Man for A’ That; and, on the other hand, he idealized the homely feelings and manners of the “virtuous populace” in his immortal Cotter’s Saturday Night.  He scorned academic learning, and protested that true inspiration was rather to be found in “ae spark o’ Nature’s fire,”—­or at the nearest tavern: 

  Leese me on drink!  It gies us mair
  Than either school or college.

Like Sterne, who boasted that his pen governed him, Burns praised and affected the impromptu: 

  But how the subject theme may gang,
  Let time or chance determine;
  Perhaps it may turn out a sang,
  Perhaps turn out a sermon.

His Muse was to be the mood of the moment.  Herein he brought to fulfillment the sentimental desire for the liberation of the emotions; but his work, taken as a whole, can scarcely be said to vindicate the faith that the emotions, once freed, would manifest instinctive purity.  At his almost unrivalled best, he can sing in the sweetest strains the raptures or pathos of innocent youthful love, as in Sweet Afton or To Mary in Heaven; but straightway sinking from that elevation of feeling to the depths of vulgarity or grossness, he will chant with equal zest and skill the indulgence of the animal appetites.[1] He hails the joys of life, but without discriminating between the higher and the lower.  Yet these exuberant animal spirits which, unrestrained by conscience or taste, drove him too often into scurrility, gave his work that passion—­warm, throbbing, and personal—­which had been painfully wanting in earlier poets of sensibility.  It was his emotional intensity as well as his lyric genius that made him the most popular poet of his time.

In Burns, sentimentalism was largely temperamental, unreflective, and concrete.  In William Blake, the singularity of whose work long retarded its due appreciation, sentimentalism was likewise temperamental; but, unconfined to actuality, became far broader in scope, more spiritual, and more consistently philosophic.  Indeed, Blake was the ultimate sentimentalist of the century.  A visionary and symbolist, he passed beyond Shaftesbury in his thought, and beyond any poet of the school in his endeavor to create a new and appropriate style.  His contemporary, Erasmus Darwin, author of The Botanic Garden, was trying to give sentimentalism a novel interpretation by describing the life of plants in terms of human life; but, Darwin being destitute of artistic sense, the result was grotesque.  Blake, by training and vocation an engraver, was primarily an artist; but, partly under Swedenborgian influences, he had grasped the innermost