sounds, or by piling up centos of poetic diction; but for the artificial flowers of poetry, he plucked the mountain-daisy under his feet; and a field-mouse, hurrying from its ruined dwelling, could inspire him with the sentiments of terror and pity.  He held the plough or the pen with the same firm, manly grasp; nor did he cut out poetry as we cut out watch-papers, with finical dexterity, nor from the same flimsy materials.  Burns was not like Shakspeare in the range of his genius; but there is something of the same magnanimity, directness, and unaffected character about him.  He was not a sickly sentimentalist, a namby-pamby poet, a mincing metre ballad-monger, any more than Shakspeare.  He would as soon hear “a brazen candlestick tuned, or a dry wheel grate on the axletree.”  He was as much of a man—­not a twentieth part as much of a poet as Shakspeare.  With but little of his imagination or inventive power, he had the same life of mind:  within the narrow circle of personal feeling or domestic incidents, the pulse of his poetry flows as healthily and vigorously.  He had an eye to see; a heart to feel:—­no more.  His pictures of good fellowship, of social glee, of quaint humour, are equal to any thing; they come up to nature, and they cannot go beyond it.  The sly jest collected in his laughing eye at the sight of the grotesque and ludicrous in manners—­the large tear rolled down his manly cheek at the sight of another’s distress.  He has made us as well acquainted with himself as it is possible to be; has let out the honest impulses of his native disposition, the unequal conflict of the passions in his breast, with the same frankness and truth of description.  His strength is not greater than his weakness:  his virtues were greater than his vices.  His virtues belonged to his genius:  his vices to his situation, which did not correspond to his genius.

It has been usual to attack Burns’s moral character, and the moral tendency of his writings at the same time; and Mr. Wordsworth, in a letter to Mr. Gray, Master of the High School at Edinburgh, in attempting to defend, has only laid him open to a more serious and unheard-of responsibility.  Mr. Gray might very well have sent him back, in return for his epistle, the answer of Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost:—­“Via goodman Dull, thou hast spoken no word all this while.”  The author of this performance, which is as weak in effect as it is pompous in pretension, shews a great dislike of Robespierre, Buonaparte, and of Mr. Jeffrey, whom he, by some unaccountable fatality, classes together as the three most formidable enemies of the human race that have appeared in his (Mr. Wordsworth’s) remembrance; but he betrays very little liking to Burns.  He is, indeed, anxious to get him out of the unhallowed clutches of the Edinburgh Reviewers (as a mere matter of poetical privilege), only to bring him before a graver and higher tribunal, which is his own; and after repeating and insinuating ponderous