charges against him, shakes his head, and declines giving any opinion in so tremendous a case; so that though the judgment of the former critic is set aside, poor Burns remains just where he was, and nobody gains any thing by the cause but Mr. Wordsworth, in an increasing opinion of his own wisdom and purity.  “Out upon this half-faced fellowship!” The author of the Lyrical Ballads has thus missed a fine opportunity of doing Burns justice and himself honour.  He might have shewn himself a philosophical prose-writer, as well as a philosophical poet.  He might have offered as amiable and as gallant a defence of the Muses, as my uncle Toby, in the honest simplicity of his heart, did of the army.  He might have said at once, instead of making a parcel of wry faces over the matter, that Burns had written Tam o’Shanter, and that that alone was enough; that he could hardly have described the excesses of mad, hairbrained, roaring mirth and convivial indulgence, which are the soul of it, if he himself had not “drunk full ofter of the ton than of the well”—­unless “the act and practique part of life had been the mistress of his theorique.”  Mr. Wordsworth might have quoted such lines as—­

      “The landlady and Tam grew gracious,
      Wi’ favours secret, sweet, and precious";—­

or,

      “Care, mad to see a man so happy,
      E’en drown’d himself among the nappy";—­

and fairly confessed that he could not have written such lines from a want of proper habits and previous sympathy; and that till some great puritanical genius should arise to do these things equally well without any knowledge of them, the world might forgive Burns the injuries he had done his health and fortune in his poetical apprenticeship to experience, for the pleasure he had afforded them.  Instead of this, Mr. Wordsworth hints, that with different personal habits and greater strength of mind, Burns would have written differently, and almost as well as he does.  He might have taken that line of Gay’s,

      “The fly that sips treacle is lost in the sweets,”—­

and applied it in all its force and pathos to the poetical character.  He might have argued that poets are men of genius, and that a man of genius is not a machine; that they live in a state of intellectual intoxication, and that it is too much to expect them to be distinguished by peculiar sang froid, circumspection, and sobriety.  Poets are by nature men of stronger imagination and keener sensibilities than others; and it is a contradiction to suppose them at the same time governed only by the cool, dry, calculating dictates of reason and foresight.  Mr. Wordsworth might have ascertained the boundaries that part the provinces of reason and imagination:—­that it is the business of the understanding to exhibit things in their relative proportions and ultimate consequences—­of the imagination to insist on their immediate impressions, and to indulge their