It is hardly reasonable to look for a hearty or genuine defence of Burns from the pen of Mr. Wordsworth; for there is no common link of sympathy between them.  Nothing can be more different or hostile than the spirit of their poetry.  Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry is the poetry of mere sentiment and pensive contemplation:  Burns’s is a very highly sublimated essence of animal existence.  With Burns, “self-love and social are the same”—­

      “And we’ll tak a cup of kindness yet,
      For auld lang syne.”

Mr. Wordsworth is “himself alone,” a recluse philosopher, or a reluctant spectator of the scenes of many-coloured life; moralising on them, not describing, not entering into them.  Robert Burns has exerted all the vigour of his mind, all the happiness of his nature, in exalting the pleasures of wine, of love, and good fellowship:  but in Mr. Wordsworth there is a total disunion and divorce of the faculties of the mind from those of the body; the banns are forbid, or a separation is austerely pronounced from bed and board—­a mensa et thoro.  From the Lyrical Ballads, it does not appear that men eat or drink, marry or are given in marriage.  If we lived by every sentiment that proceeded out of mouths, and not by bread or wine, or if the species were continued like trees (to borrow an expression from the great Sir Thomas Brown), Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry would be just as good as ever.  It is not so with Burns:  he is “famous for the keeping of it up,” and in his verse is ever fresh and gay.  For this, it seems, he has fallen under the displeasure of the Edinburgh Reviewers, and the still more formidable patronage of Mr. Wordsworth’s pen.

      “This, this was the unkindest cut of all.”

I was going to give some extracts out of this composition in support of what I have said, but I find them too tedious.  Indeed (if I may be allowed to speak my whole mind, under correction) Mr. Wordsworth could not be in any way expected to tolerate or give a favourable interpretation to Burns’s constitutional foibles—­even his best virtues are not good enough for him.  He is repelled and driven back into himself, not less by the worth than by the faults of others.  His taste is as exclusive and repugnant as his genius.  It is because so few things give him pleasure, that he gives pleasure to so few people.  It is not every one who can perceive the sublimity of a daisy, or the pathos to be extracted from a withered thorn!

To proceed from Burns’s patrons to his poetry, than which no two things can be more different.  His “Twa Dogs” is a very spirited piece of description, both as it respects the animal and human creation, and conveys a very vivid idea of the manners both of high and low life.  The burlesque panegyric of the first dog,

      “His locked, lettered, braw brass collar
      Shew’d him the gentleman and scholar”—­