jects of all his greater and more elaborate poems. It is impossible to consider without astonishment, that amazing fertility of invention which is displayed, under the regulation of a sound judgment, and a correct taste, in the Twa Dogs; the Address to the Deil; Scotch Drink; the Holy Fair; Hallowe'en; the Cottar's Saturday Night; To a Haggis; To a Louse; To a Mountain Daisy; Tam o' Shanter; on Captain Grose's peregrinations; the humble Petition of Bruar Water; the Bard's Epitaph. Shoemakers, footmen, threshers, milk-maids, peers, stayiuakers, have all written verses, such as deservedly attracted the notice of the world; but in the poetry of these people, while there was commonly some genuine effusion of the sentiments of agitated nature, some exhibition of such imagery as at once impressed itself upon the heart; there was also much
to be ever excused in consideration of their ignorance, their extravagance of fancy, their want or abuse of the advantages of a liberal education. Burns has no pardon to demand for defects of this sort He might scorn every concession which we are ready to grant to his peculiar circumstances, without being on this account reduced to relinquish any part of his claims to the praise of poetical excellence. He touches his lyre, at all times, with the hand of a master. He demands to be ranked, not with the Woodhouses, the Ducks, the Ramsays, but with the Miltons, the Popes, the Grays. He cannot be denied to have been largely endowed with that strong common sense which is necessarily the very source and principle of all fine writing.
The next remarkable quality in this man's character, seems to have consisted in native' strength, ardour, and delicacy of feelings, passions, and affections, Si vis me Jlere, dolendum primurn est ipsi tibi. All that is valuable in poetry, and, at the same time, peculiar to it, consists in the effusion of particular, not general, sentiments, and in the picturing out of particular imagery. But education, reading, a wide converse with men in society, the most extensive observation of external nature, houever useful to improve, cannot, even all combined, confer the power of apprehending either imagery or sentiment with such force and vivacity of conception as may enable one to impress whatever he may choose upon the souls of others, with full, irresistible, electric energy; this is a power which nought can bestow, save native fondness, delicacy, quickness, ardour, force of those parts of our bodily organization, of those energies in the structure of our minds, on which depend all our sensations, emotions, appetites, passions, and affections. Who ever knew a man of high original genius, whose senses were imperfect, his feelings dull and callous, his passions all languid and stagnant, his affections without ardour, and without constancy? others may be artisans, speculatists, imitators in the fine arts; none but the man who is thus richly endowed by nature, can be a poet, an artist, an illustrious inventor in philosophy. Let any person first possess this original soundness, vigour, and delicacy of the primary energies of mind ; and then let him receive some impression upon his imagination, which shall excite a passion for this or that particular pursuit: he will scarcely fail to distinguish himself by manifestations of exalted and original genius. Without having, first, those simple ideas which belong, respectively, to the different senses, no man can ever form for himself the complex notions, into the composition of which such simple ideas necessarily enter. Never could Burns, without this delicacy, this strength, this vivacity of the powers of bodily sensation, and of mental feeling, which I would here claim as the indispensable native endowments of true genius without these, never could he have poured forth those sentiments, or pourtrayed those images which have so powerfully impressed every imagination, and penetrated every heart. Almost all the sentiments and images diffused throughout the poems of Burns, are fresh from the mint of nature. He sings what he had himself beheld with
