animals, and the dumb objects of nature.  His tenderness toward flowers and the brute creation may be read in his lines To a Mountain Daisy, To a Mouse, and The Auld Farmer’s New Year’s Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare Maggie.  Next after love and good fellowship, patriotism is the most frequent motive of his song.  Of his national anthem, Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled, Carlyle said:  “So long as there is warm blood in the heart of Scotchman, or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war ode.”

Burns’s politics were a singular mixture of sentimental Toryism with practical democracy.  A romantic glamour was thrown over the fortunes of the exiled Stuarts, and to have been “out” in ’45 with the Young Pretender was a popular thing in parts of Scotland.  To this purely poetic loyalty may be attributed such Jacobite ballads of Burns as Over the Water to Charlie.  But his sober convictions were on the side of liberty and human brotherhood, and are expressed in The Twa Dogs, the First Epistle to Davie, and A Man’s a Man for a’ that.  His sympathy with the Revolution led him to send four pieces of ordnance, taken from a captured smuggler, as a present to the French Convention, a piece of bravado which got him into difficulties with his superiors in the excise.  The poetry which Burns wrote, not in dialect, but in the classical English, is in the stilted manner of his century, and his prose correspondence betrays his lack of culture by its constant lapse into rhetorical affectation and fine writing.

* * * * *

1.  James Thomson.  The Castle of Indolence. 2.  The Poems of Thomas Gray. 3.  William Collins.  Odes. 4.  The Six Chief Lives from Johnson’s Lives of the Poets.  Edited by Matthew Arnold.  Macmillan, 1878. 5.  Boswell’s Life of Johnson [abridged].  Henry Holt & Co., 1878. 6.  Samuel Richardson.  Clarissa Harlowe. 7.  Henry Fielding.  Tom Jones. 8.  Tobias Smollett.  Humphrey Clinker. 9.  Lawrence Sterne.  Tristram Shandy. 10.  Oliver Goldsmith.  Vicar of Wakefield and Deserted Village. 11.  William Cowper.  The Task and John Gilpin. (Globe Edition.) London:  Macmillan & Co., 1879. 12.  The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns. (Globe Edition.) London:  Macmillan & Co., 1884.

CHAPTER VII.

FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH OF SCOTT.

1789-1832.

The burst of creative activity at the opening of the 19th century has but one parallel in English literary history, namely, the somewhat similar flowering out of the national genius in the time of Elizabeth and the first two Stuart kings.  The later age gave birth to no supreme poets, like Shakspere and Milton.  It produced no Hamlet and no Paradise Lost; but it offers a greater number of important writers, a higher average of excellence, and a wider range and variety of literary work than any preceding era.