hand, and so forth.  Whether his books treat of love or political economy, theology or geology, it is there, the history of the man legibly printed, for those who care to read it.  In these poems and letters of Burns, we apprehend, is to be found a truer history than any anecdote can supply, of the things which happened to himself, and moreover of the most notable things which went on in Scotland between 1759 and 1796.

This latter assertion may seem startling, when we consider that we find in these poems no mention whatsoever of the discoveries of steamboats and spinning-jennies, the rise of the great manufacturing cities, the revolution in Scottish agriculture, or even in Scottish metaphysics.  But after all, the history of a nation is the history of the men, and not of the things thereof; and the history of those men is the history of their hearts, and not of their purses, or even of their heads; and the history of one man who has felt in himself the heart experiences of his generation, and anticipated many belonging to the next generation, is so far the collective history of that generation, and of much—­no man can say how much—­of the next generation; and such a man, bearing within his single soul two generations of working-men, we take Robert Burns to have been; and his poems, as such, a contemporaneous history of Scotland, the equal to which we are not likely to see written for this generation, or several to come.

Such a man sent out into such an age, would naturally have a hard and a confused battle to fight, would probably, unless he fell under the guidance of some master-mind, end se ipso minor, stunted and sadly deformed, as Burns did.  His works are after all only the disjecta membra poetae; full of hints of a great might-have-been.  Hints of the keenest and most dramatic appreciation of human action and thought.  Hints of an unbounded fancy, playing gracefully in the excess of its strength, with the vastest images, as in that robe of the Scottish Muse, in which

Deep lights and shades, bold mingling, threw
      A lustre grand,
And seem’d to my astonished view
      A well-known land.

The image, and the next few stanzas which dilate it, might be a translation from Dante’s “Paradiso,” so broad, terse, vivid, the painter’s touch.  Hints, too, of a humour, which, like that of Shakespeare, rises at times by sheer depth of insight into the sublime; as when

Hornie did the Laigh Kirk watch
Just like a winking baudrons.

Hints of a power of verbal wit, which, had it been sharpened in such a perpetual word-battle as that amid which Shakespeare lived from the age of twenty, might have rivalled Shakespeare’s own; which even now asserts its force by a hundred little never-to-be-forgotten phrases scattered through his poems, which stick, like barbed arrows, in the memory of every reader.  And as for his tenderness—­the quality without which all other poetic excellence is barren—­it