Here, in fairness, the reader should be asked to consider an eloquent passage of comparison between the knowledge of Burns and of Will, quoted by Mr. Greenwood {97b} from Mr. Morgan. {97c}

Genius, says Mr. Morgan, “did not guide Burns’s untaught pen to write of Troy or Egypt, of Athens and Cyprus.”  No! that was not Burns’s lay; nor would he have found a public had he emulated the contemporary St. Andrews professor, Mr. Wilkie, who wrote The Epigoniad, and sang of Cadmeian Thebes, to the delight of David Hume, his friend.  The public of 1780-90 did not want new epics of heroic Greece from Mossgiel; nor was the literature accessible to Burns full of the mediaeval legends of Troy and Athens.  But the popular literature accessible to Will was full of the mediaeval legends of Thebes, Troy, and Athens; and of these, not of Homer, Will made his market.  Egypt he knew only in the new English version of Plutarch’s Lives; of Homer, he (or the author of Troilus and Cressida) used only Iliad VII., in Chapman’s new translation (1598).  For the rest he had Lydgate (perhaps), and, certainly, Caxton’s Destruction of Troy, still reprinted as a popular book as late as 1713.  Will did not, as Mr. Morgan says, “reproduce the very counterfeit civilisations and manners of nations born and buried and passed into history a thousand years before he had been begotten. . . " He bestowed the manners of mediaeval chivalrous romance on his Trojans and Greeks.  He accommodated prehistoric Athens with a Duke.  He gave Scotland cannon three hundred years too early; and made Cleopatra play at billiards.  Look at his notion of “the very manners” of early post-Roman Britain in Cymbeline and King Lear!  Concerning “the anomalous status of a King of Scotland under one of its primitive Kings” the author of Macbeth knew no more than what he read in Holinshed; of the actual truth concerning Duncan (that old prince was, in fact, a young man slain in a blacksmith’s bothy), and of the whole affair, the author knew nothing but a tissue of sophisticated legends.  The author of the plays had no knowledge (as Mr. Morgan inexplicably declares that he had) of “matters of curious and occult research for antiquaries or dilettanti to dig out of old romances or treaties or statutes rather than for historians to treat of or schools to teach!”

Mon Dieu! do historians not treat of “matters of curious research” and of statutes and of treaties?  As for “old romances,” they were current and popular.  The “occult” sources of King Lear are a popular tale attached to legendary “history” and a story in Sidney’s Arcadia.  Will, whom Mr. Morgan describes as “a letterless peasant lad,” or the Author, whoever he was, is not “invested with all the love” (sic, v.1. “lore"), “which the ages behind him had shut up in clasped books and buried and forgotten.”