But the field in which Burns’s influence has been, as was to be expected, most important and most widely felt, is in the poems of working men.  He first proved that it was possible to become a poet and a cultivated man, without deserting his class, either in station or in sympathies; nay, that the healthiest and noblest elements of a lowly-born poet’s mind might be, perhaps must be, the very feelings and thoughts which he brought up with him from below, not those which he received from above, in the course of his artificial culture.  From the example of Burns, therefore, many a working man, who would otherwise have “died and given no sign,” has taken courage, and spoken out the thought within him, in verse or prose, not always wisely and well, but in all cases, as it seems to us, in the belief that he had a sort of divine right to speak and be heard, since Burns had broken down the artificial ice-wall of centuries, and asserted, by act as well as song, that “a man’s a man for a’ that.”  Almost every volume of working men’s poetry which we have read, seems to re-echo poor Nicoll’s spirited, though somewhat over-strained address to the Scottish genius: 

This is the natal day of him
   Who, born in want and poverty,
Burst from his fetters and arose,
   The freest of the free.

Arose to tell the watching earth
   What lowly men could feel and do,
To show that mighty heaven-like souls
   In cottage hamlets grew.

Burns! thou hast given us a name
   To shield us from the taunts of scorn: 
The plant that creeps amid the soil
   A glorious flower has borne.

Before the proudest of the earth
   We stand with an uplifted brow;
Like us, thou wast a toil-worn man,
   And we are noble now!

The critic, looking calmly on, may indeed question whether this new fashion of verse-writing among working men has been always conducive to their own happiness.  As for absolute success as poets, that was not to be expected of one in a hundred, so that we must not be disappointed if among the volumes of working men’s poetry, of which we give a list at the head of our article, only two should be found, on perusal, to contain any writing of a very high order, although these volumes form a very small portion of the verses which have been written, during the last forty years, by men engaged in the rudest and most monotonous toil.  To every man so writing, the art, doubtless, is an ennobling one.  The habit of expressing thought in verse not only indicates culture, but is a culture in itself of a very high order.  It teaches the writer to think tersely and definitely; it evokes in him the humanising sense of grace and melody, not merely by enticing him to study good models, but by the very act of composition.  It gives him a vent for sorrows, doubts, and aspirations, which might otherwise fret and canker within, breeding, as they too often do in the utterly dumb English peasant,