This is unfortunate, perhaps, for the world; for we question whether a man of talents in anywise to be compared with those of the Ettrick Shepherd has followed in the footsteps of Burns.  Poor Tannahill, whose sad story is but too well known, perished early, at the age of thirty-six, leaving behind him a good many pretty love-songs of no great intrinsic value, if the specimens of them given in Mr. Whitelaw’s collection are to be accepted as the best.  Like all Burns’s successors, including even Walter Scott and Hogg, we have but to compare him with his original to see how altogether unrivalled on his own ground the Ayrshire farmer was.  In one feature only Tannahill’s poems, and those later than him, except where pedantically archaist, like many of Motherwell’s, are an improvement on Burns:  namely, in the more easy and complete interfusion of the two dialects, the Norse Scotch and the Romanesque English, which Allan Ramsay attempted in vain to unite; while Burns, though not succeeding by any means perfectly, welded them together into something of continuity and harmony—­thus doing for the language of his own country very much what Chaucer did for that of England—­a happy union, in the opinion of those who, as we do, look on the vernacular Norse Scotch as no barbaric dialect, but as an independent tongue, possessing a copiousness, melody, terseness, and picturesqueness which makes it, both in prose and verse, a far better vehicle than the popular English for many forms of thought.

Perhaps the young peasant who most expressly stands out as the pupil and successor of Burns, is Robert Nicoll.  He is a lesser poet, doubtless, than his master, and a lesser man, if the size and number of his capabilities be looked at; but he is a greater man, in that, from the beginning to the end of his career, he seems to have kept that very wholeness of heart and head which poor Burns lost.  Nicoll’s story is, mutatis mutandis, that of the Bethunes, and many a noble young Scotsman more.  Parents holding a farm between Perth and Dunkeld, they and theirs before them for generations inhabitants of the neighbourhood, “decent, honest, God-fearing people.”  The farm is lost by reverses, and manfully Robert Nicoll’s father becomes a day-labourer on the fields which he lately rented:  and there begins, for the boy, from his earliest recollections, a life of steady sturdy drudgery.  But they must have been grand old folk, these parents, and in no wise addicted to wringing their hands over “the great might-have-been.”  Like true Scots Bible lovers, they do believe in a God, and in a will of God, underlying, absolute, loving, and believe that the might-have-been ought not to have been, simply because it has not been; and so they put their shoulders to the new collar patiently, cheerfully, hopefully, and teach the boys to do the same.  The mother especially, as so many great men’s mothers do, stands out large and heroic, from the time when, the farm being gone, she, “the ardent book-woman,”