Fare thee weel, thou first and fairest ! Ae fond kiss, and then we sever; In all, indeed, that he has written best, Burns may be said to have given us himself,-the passion or sentiment which swayed or possessed him at the moment,-almost as much as in his songs. In him the poet was the same as the man. He could describe with admirable fidelity and force incidents, scenes, manners, characters, or whatever else, which had fallen within his experience or observation; but he had little proper dramatic imagination, or power of going out of himself into other natures, and, as it were, losing his personality in the creations of his fancy. His blood was too hot, his pulse beat too tumultuously, for that; at least he was during his short life too much the sport both of his own passions and of many other stormy influences to acquire such power of intellectual self-command and self-suppression. What he might have attained to if a longer earthly existence had been granted to him-or a less tempestuous onewho shall say? Both when his genius first blazed out upon the world, and when its light was quenched by death, it seemed as if he had been born or designed to do much more than he had done. Having written what he wrote before his twenty-seventh year, he had doubtless much more additional poetry in him than he gave forth between that date and his death at the age of thirty-seven-poetry which might now have been the world's for ever if that age had been worthy of such a gift of heaven as its glorious poet-if it had not treated him rather like an untameable howling hyæna, that required to be caged and chained, if not absolutely suffocated at once, than as a spirit of divinest song. Never surely did men so put a bushel upon the light, first to hide and at last to extinguish it. As it is, however, the influence of the poetry of Burns upon the popular mind of Scotland must have been immense. And we believe it has been all for good-enlarging, elevating, and refining the national heart, as well as awakening it. The tendency of some things, both in the character of the people and in their peculiar institutions, required such a check or counteraction as was supplied by this frank, generous, reckless poetry, springing so singularly out of the ironbound Calvinistic Presbyterianism of the country, like the flowing water from the rock in Horeb. What would not such a poet as Burns be worth to the people of the United States of America, if he were to arise among them at this moment? It would be as good as another Declaration of Independence. Nay, what would not such a popular poetry as his be worth in any country to any people? There is no people whom it would not help to sustain in whatever nobleness of character belonged to them, if it did not more ennoble them. For, whatever there may be to be disapproved of in the licence or indecorum of some things that Burns has written, there is at least nothing meansouled in his poetry, any more than there was in the man. It is never for a moment even vulgar or low in expression or manner: it is wonderful how a native delicacy of taste and elevation of spirit in the poet have sustained him here, with a dialect so soiled by illiterate lips, and often the most perilous subject. Burns, the peasant, is perhaps the only modern writer of Scotch (not excepting even Sir Walter Scott) who has written it uniformly like a gentleman. Not that his language is not sometimes strong or bold enough, and even, on two or three occasions coarse; but these momentary outbreaks of a wild levity have never anything in them that can be called base or creeping. On the other hand, some of the most tremulously passionate of his pieces are models of refinement of style. And such as is the poetry of Burns was his life. Even his faults of character and errors of conduct were those of a high nature; and on the whole were more really estimable, as well as more loveable, than the virtues of most other people. Misled he often was, as he has himself said in one of the pieces we have transcribed above— "Misled by fancy's meteor-ray, But yet the light that led astray REMAINING LITERATURE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. The remaining literature of the closing portion of the eighteenth century may be very summarily dismissed. This was an age of popular song in England, as well as in Scotland: while Burns was in the last years of his life enriching Thomson's Collection of Original Scottish Airs, and Johnson's Musical Museum with words for the old melodies of his country that have become a part of the being of every Scotsman, Charles Dibdin, like another Tyrtaeus, was putting new patriotism into every English heart by his inspiriting strains-some of the best of which Tyrtaeus never matched. Dibdin, who, besides his songs, wrote many pieces for the stage, survived till 1814, when he died about the age of seventy. In prose literature, although there was book-making enough, not much that has proved enduring was done in England during the last decade and a half of the eighteenth century, at least if we except a few works produced by one or two of the great writers of the preceding time who have been already noticed-such, for instance, as the three last volumes of Gibbon's History, published in 1788, and Burke's Reflections and other writings, chiefly on the subject of the French Revolution, which appeared between 1790 and his death in 1797. We may also mention here the publication in 1798, in five volumes 4to., of the first collected edition of the Works of Horace Walpole, comprising, along with other novelties, a volume of his always lively and entertaining and often brilliant Letters, the portion of his writings upon which his fame is probably destined chiefly to rest. His Memoirs of the Last Ten Years of the Reign of George II., in two quarto volumes, were not given to the world till 1822; and their continuation, his Memoirs of the Reign of George III., only appeared in 1844-5. In the Drama, with activity enough among a crowd of writers, very little was produced in this period that retains its place in our literature. Mrs. Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Thomas Morton, John O'Keefe, Charles Dibdin, and George Colman the Younger (already mentioned), Francis Reynolds, and Joseph George Holman were the principal writers who supplied the theatres with new pieces; and Holcroft's Road to Ruin (1792), Morton's Speed the Plough (1798), Mrs. Inchbald's Wives as they Were and Maids as they Are (1797), and Colman's Sylvester Daggerwood, originally entitled New Hay at the Old Market (1795), are all of more or less merit, and retain some popularity. No great comedy however belongs to this time. The tragedies produced were such as Madame d'Arblay's Edwy and Elgiva, brought out at Drury Lane in 1795, but never printed; Arthur Murphy's Arminius (1798), &c. In the department of fictitious narrative there was more to boast of. William Godwin, already distinguished by his Enquiry concerning Political Justice, made a great sensation in 1794 by his novel of Things as they Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams, a remarkable example, certainly, of what can be done to give verisimilitude to the improbable by mere earnestness and vehemence of narration; and in 1799 the same writer achieved perhaps a still greater triumph by a different application of the same kind of power, in his St. Leon, in which even the supernatural and impossible are invested with the strongest likeness to truth and reality. To her Evelina and Cecilia Miss Frances Burney (now Madame d'Arblay) added her Camilla in 1796. Mrs. Radcliffe (originally Miss Ann Ward) produced within this period her Romance of the Forest and her Mysteries of Udolpho; Mrs. Charlotte Smith (originally Miss Turner) her Romance of Real Life, and several other novels, all of superior merit; Dr. John Moore his Zeluco, his Edward, and his Mordaunt ; Mrs. Inchbald, her Simple Story (in 1791). In History, if we except the conclusion of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, no work that has any pretensions to be accounted classical was added to our literature. The first edition of Mitford's History of Greece was published in 1784; another History of Ancient Greece, in two volumes quarto, by Dr. John Gillies, who afterwards succeeded Dr. Robertson as Royal Historiographer for Scotland, appeared in 1786 (to which a continuation and completion in two more quartos was added in 1820); John Pinkerton published his Dissertation on the Scythians or Goths in 1787, his Inquiry into the History of Scotland preceding the Reign of Malcolm III. (forming an introduction to Lord Hailes's Annals) in 1789, and his History of Scotland from the Accession of the House of Stuart to that of Mary (filling up the interval between Hailes and Robertson) in 1797; all works of research and ingenuity, but of no merit as pieces of composition. The Rev. John Whitaker, who had previously made himself known by his History of Manchester, and his Genuine History of the Britons Asserted, published his Mary Queen of Scots Vindicated in 1787; and many minutiæ of the national antiquities were illustrated, in the Archæologia or in separate publications, by Gough, the editor of Camden's Britannia, Dr. Samuel Pegge, and other patient and laborious inquirers. In Biography, historical and literary, besides Boswell's great work, The Life of Samuel Johnson, which first appeared, in two quarto volumes, in 1790, there was Mr. Roscoe's elegant Life of Lorenzo de' Medici, published in 1795. The same writer's Life and Pontificate of Leo X. did not appear till 1805. Of criticism and commentatorship of all kinds there was abundance. At least a brilliant beginning was made in the study of the literature of India and other Eastern countries by a few adventurous inquirers, led by Sir William Jones, whose French version of the Life of Nadir Shah from the Persian appeared in 1770; his Persian Grammar in 1771; his Six Books of Commentaries, in Latin, on the Persian Poetry, in 1774; his translation of the Moallakat from the Arabic in 1783; his translation of the Sanscrit drama of Sacontala in 1790; his translation of the Ordinances of Menu in 1794; and his various disquisitions on the languages, learning, and history of the Oriental nations, printed in the Asiatic Researches, in the early volumes of that publication, begun in 1788. Jones also, besides his poetry already mentioned, and his Essay on the Law of Bailments and one or two other professional tracts, had in 1779 published a translation of the Speeches of Isaeus from the Greek. Other translations from the ancient languages published during this period were that of Aristotle's Treatise on Poetry by Pye (afterwards poet laureate) in 1788, that of the same work by the Rev. Thomas Twining in 1789, that of Aristotle's Ethics and Politics by Dr. Gillies in 1797, and that of the works of Tacitus by Arthur Murphy in 1793. Harris's Hermes, or a Philosophical Enquiry concerning Language and Universal Grammar, had appeared in 1757; the first volume of Lord Monboddo's Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of Language in 1774: but it was not till the year 1792 that the sixth and last volume of the latter saw the light. Meanwhile, the first part of what has proved a much more influential work, Horne Tooke's celebrated Diversions of Purley, appeared in 1786 in an octavo volume, afterwards ex |