“O martyr sonded in virginitee!”

I answer:  It has not and cannot have them; it is the poetry of the builders of an age of prose and reason.

Though they may write in verse, though they may in a certain sense be masters of the art of versification, Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose.

Gray is our poetical classic of that literature and age; the position of Gray is singular, and demands a word of notice here.  He has not the volume or the power of poets who, coming in times more favorable, have attained to an independent criticism of life.  But he lived with the great poets, he lived, above all, with the Greeks, through perpetually studying and enjoying them; and he caught their poetic point of view for regarding life, caught their poetic manner.  The point of view and the manner are not self-sprung in him, he caught them of others; and he had not the free and abundant use of them.  But whereas Addison and Pope never had the use of them, Gray had the use of them at times.  He is the scantiest and frailest of classics in our poetry, but he is a classic.

And now, after Gray, we are met, as we draw towards the end of the eighteenth century, we are met by the great name of Burns.  We enter now on times where the personal estimate of poets begins to be rife, and where the real estimate of them is not reached without difficulty.  But in spite of the disturbing pressures of personal partiality, of national partiality, let us try to reach a real estimate of the poetry of Burns.  By his English poetry Burns in general belongs to the eighteenth century, and has little importance for us.

  “Mark ruffian Violence, distain’d with crimes,
  Rousing elate in these degenerate times;
  View unsuspecting Innocence a prey,
  As guileful Fraud points out the erring way;
  While subtle Litigation’s pliant tongue
  The life-blood equal sucks of Right and Wrong!"[106]

Evidently this is not the real Burns, or his name and fame would have disappeared long ago.  Nor is Clarinda’s[107] love-poet, Sylvander, the real Burns either.  But he tells us himself:  “These English songs gravel me to death.  I have not the command of the language that I have of my native tongue.  In fact, I think that my ideas are more barren in English than in Scotch.  I have been at Duncan Gray to dress it in English, but all I can do is desperately stupid."[108] We English turn naturally, in Burns, to the poems in our own language, because we can read them easily; but in those poems we have not the real Burns.