better the invention; but they do not invent for themselves.  To this order of artists Burns like Shakespeare, and among the lesser men Tennyson, belongs.  In all his plays Shakespeare is known to have invented only one plot; in many he is using not only the structure but in many places the words devised by an older author; his mode of treatment depends on the conventions common in his day, on the tragedy of blood, and madness and revenge, on the comedy of intrigue and disguises, on the romance with its strange happenings and its reuniting of long parted friends.  Burns goes the same way to work; scarcely a page of his but shows traces of some original in the Scottish vernacular school.  The elegy, the verse epistle, the satirical form of Holy Willie’s Prayer, the song and recitative of The Jolly Beggars, are all to be found in his predecessors, in Fergusson, Ramsay, and the local poets of the south-west of Scotland.  In the songs often whole verses, nearly always the refrains, are from older folk poetry.  What he did was to pour into these forms the incomparable richness of a personality whose fire and brilliance and humour transcended all locality and all tradition, a personality which strode like a colossus over the formalism and correctness of his time.  His use of familiar forms explains, more than anything else, his immediate fame.  His countrymen were ready for him; they could hail him on the instant (just as an Elizabethan audience could hail Shakespeare) as something familiar and at the same time more splendid than anything they knew.  He spoke in a tongue they could understand.

It is impossible to judge Burns from his purely English verse; though he did it as well as any of the minor followers of the school of Pope he did it no better.  Only the weakest side of his character—­his sentimentalism—­finds expression in it; he had not the sense of tradition nor the intimate knowledge necessary to use English to the highest poetic effect; it was indeed a foreign tongue to him.  In the vernacular he wrote the language he spoke, a language whose natural force and colour had become enriched by three centuries of literary use, which was capable, too, of effects of humour and realism impossible in any tongue spoken out of reach of the soil.  It held within it an unmatched faculty for pathos, a capacity for expressing a lambent and kindly humour, a power of pungency in satire and a descriptive vividness that English could not give.  How express in the language of Pope or even of Wordsworth an effect like this:—­

“They reeled, they set, they cross’d, they cleekit,
 Till ilka carlin swat and reekit,
 And coost her duddies to the wark,
 And linket at it in her sark.”

or this—­

“Yestreen when to the trembling string,
 The dance gaed thro’ the lighted ha’
 To thee my fancy took its wing—­
 I sat but neither heard nor saw: 
 Tho’ this was fair, and that was braw,
 And yon the toast of a’ the toun,
 I sigh’d and said amang them a’,
 You are na Mary Morison.”