After the time of Burns, as was to be expected, Scottish song multiplies itself tenfold.  The nation becomes awakened to the treasures of its own old literature, and attempts, what after all, alas! is but a revival; and like most revivals, not altogether a successful one.  Of the twelve hundred songs contained in Mr. Whitelaw’s excellent collection, whereof more than a hundred and fifty are either wholly or partly Burns’s, the small proportion written before him are decidedly far superior in value to those written after him; a discouraging fact, though not difficult to explain, if we consider the great social changes which have been proceeding, the sterner subjects of thought which have been arising, during the last half-century.  True song requires for its atmosphere a state rather of careless Arcadian prosperity, than of struggle and doubt, of earnest looking forward to an unknown future, and pardonable regret for a dying past; and in that state the mind of the masses, throughout North Britain, has been weltering confusedly for the last few years.  The new and more complex era into which we are passing has not yet sufficiently opened itself to be sung about; men hardly know what it is, much less what it will be; and while they are hard at work creating it, they have no breath to spare in talking of it.  One thing they do see and feel, painfully enough at times, namely, that the old Scottish pastoral life is passing away, before the combined influence of manufactures and the large-farm system; to be replaced, doubtless, hereafter, by something better, but in the meanwhile dragging down with it in its decay but too much that can ill be spared of that old society which inspired Ramsay and Burns.  Hence the later Scottish song-writers seldom really sing; their proses want the unconscious lilt and flash of their old models; they will hardly go (the true test of a song) without music.  The true test, we say again, of a song.  Who needs music, however fitting and beautiful the accustomed air may happen to be, to “Roy’s Wife of Aldivalloch,” or “The Bride cam’ out o’ the byre,” or either of the casts of “The Flowers of the Forest,” or to “Auld Lang Syne” itself?  They bubble right up out of the heart, and by virtue of their inner and unconscious melody, which all that is true to the heart has in it, shape themselves into a song, and are not shaped by any notes whatsoever.  So with many, most indeed, of Burns’s; and a few of Allan Cunningham’s; the “Wet sheet and a flowing sail,” for instance.  But the great majority of these later songs seem, if the truth is to be spoken, inspirations at second hand, of people writing about things which they would like to feel, and which they ought to feel, because others used to feel them in old times; but which they do not feel as their forefathers felt—­a sort of poetical Tractarianism, in short.  Their metre betrays them, as well as their words; in both they are continually wandering, unconsciously to themselves, into the elegiac—­except when on one subject, whereon the muse of Scotia still warbles at first hand, and from the depths of her heart—­namely, alas! the barley bree:  and yet never, even on this beloved theme, has she risen again to the height of Burns’s bacchanalian songs.