pure and refined, Allan Ramsay sang a hundred years ago, are learning to think, and act, and emigrate, as well as to make love.  The age of Theocritus and Bion has given place to—­shall we say the age of the Caesars, or the irruption of the barbarians?—­and the love-singers of the North are beginning to feel, that if that passion is to retain any longer its rightful place in their popular poetry, it must be spoken of henceforth in words as lofty and refined as those in which the most educated and the most gifted speak of it.  Hence, in the transition between the old animalism and the new spiritualism, a jumble of the two elements, not always felicitous; attempts at ambitious description, after Burns’s worst manner; at subjective sentiment, after the worst manner of the world in general; and yet, all the while, a consciousness that there was something worth keeping in the simple objective style of the old school, without which the new thoughtfulness would be hollow, and barren, and windy; and so the two are patched together, “new cloth into an old garment, making the rent worse.”  Accordingly, these new songs are universally troubled with the disease of epithets.  Ryan’s exquisite “Lass wi’ the Bonny Blue Een,” is utterly spoiled by two offences of this kind.

She’ll steal out to meet her loved Donald again,

and—­

The world’s false and vanishing scene;

as Allan Cunningham’s still more exquisite “Lass of Preston Mill” is by one subjective figure: 

Six hills are woolly with my sheep,
   Six vales are lowing with my kye.

Burns doubtless committed the same fault again and again; but in his time it was the fashion; and the older models (for models they are and will remain for ever) had not been studied and analysed as they have been since.  Burns, indeed, actually spoiled one or two of his own songs by altering them from their first cast to suit the sentimental taste of his time.  The first version, for instance, of the “Banks and Braes o’ Bonnie Doon,” is far superior to the second and more popular one, because it dares to go without epithets.  Compare the second stanza of each: 

Thou’lt break my heart, thou bonnie bird,
   That sings upon the bough;
Thou minds me o’ the happy days
   When my fause love was true.

* * * *

Thou’lt break my heart, thou warbling bird,
   That wantons through the flowery thorn;
Thou minds me o’ departed joys,
   Departed never to return.

What is said in the latter stanza which has not been said in the former, and said more dramatically, more as the images would really present themselves to the speaker’s mind?  It would be enough for him that the bird was bonnie, and singing; and his very sorrow would lead him to analyse and describe as little as possible a thing which so painfully contrasted with his own feelings; whether the thorn was flowery or not, would not have mattered to him, unless he had