upon Boswell as if he were, in rough sport, rubbing his huge foot upon a spaniel's back, and then, after monopolizing nearly all the talk to himself, with an inimitable self-complacency exclaiming, "What a fine conversation we have had!"-an exclamation which, considering the monstrous disproportion, was about as appropriate as if, on turning down the last leaf of one of the longest of these lectures, I were to say to you, "What a fine con versation we have had!" Now, if an admirer of Dr. Johnson should be disposed to think that I have thrown off the bridle of my tongue, let it be remembered what authority his work on the poets has exercised. Let it be borne in mind how he has scattered his harsh and scornful judgments, pronouncing Milton's exquisite "Masque of Comus" a drama inelegantly splendid and tediously instructive; his sonnets, "the best only not bad;" "Lycidas," "vulgar and disgusting;" and undoing his reluctant eulogy of the "Paradise Lost" by declaring its perusal a duty rather than a pleasure, and that we retire harassed and overburdened, besides condemning its diction as harsh and barbarous, and waging perpetual war against what has been well styled eminently the English metre how he could find in Milton's republicanism nothing but a selfish lawlessness; and how, after the lapse of more than a hundred years, he could venture to say of such a man as Milton, that, omitting public prayer, he omitted all. Let it be remembered, too, that the arch-critic could discover in Gray's fine odes nothing more than what he superciliously calls "a kind of strutting dignity, a glittering accumulation of ungraceful ornaments, image magnified by affectation, and lan guage laboured into harshness ;" and that he dismissed the true poetry of the hapless Collins with the contemptuous opinion that it may sometimes extort praise when it gives little pleasure. These were judgments, too, coming from one who claimed to be himself a poet, esteeming the high-sounding declamation of his "London" and “Vanity of Human Wishes" as poetry, and priding himself upon his hundred lines a day. For all the wrong— unconscious wrong and wilful wrong-that Johnson has done the poets I might take a malicious vengeance in a retaliative censoriousness on some of his own poems. Indeed, I had written something of the sort; but some admirer of Johnson's might say that is ill-natured and has nothing to do with the matter. I think myself it would have something to do with it: but let it pass. About the same time the "Lives of the Poets" was published, another work was also given to the world, which, though at first coldly received, and by Johnson treated with contempt, was destined to render good service to the cause of English literature. Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry" has been esteemed by high authorities as one of the chief agencies in reviving a genuine feeling for true poetry in the public mind. The traditionary minstrelsy, ancient ballads, and historical songs were collected, restored, and remodelled, and thus redeemed from their obscurity. It was a poetry which, to its own early generation, had ministered to an important public use by softening, and perhaps chastening, the rudeness of a martial and unlettered people. It was now to serve a widely-different purpose:-to help in restoring nature where it had been displaced by artifice, to give life again to what had grown cold, and to invigorate a poetry which was sickly from excessive refinement. But this poetry, which Dr. Percy brought in his collection to the acquaintance of scholars and men of reading, had a life elsewhere. It was composed of winged words that had taken their flight from one generation to another. Its home was not so much in books as in floating tradition preserved by affectionate memory. It was a music in the air; for it might be heard sung by reapers in the field one harvest after another, by women lightening with its oftrepeated strains their household labours, by mothers singing over their children, or in some single chanting to a fireside group. It was a poetry dwelling chiefly in the North of Britain, secluded from Southern refinements. There was, for instance, a Scottish gardener's wife, who had an inexhaustible store of the ballads; some simple, solemn ditties, which when she chanted them could bring tears down an old man's cheeks, and others spirit-stirring, at sound of which the fire flashed in the dark eyes of her listening child. That deep dark-eyed Scottish bairn was Robert Burns. His ear was attuned in childhood to the old minstrelsy; the sounds sunk into his spirit to come forth again in after-years, his imagination giving them a more glorious poetry than they had ever echoed to before. The obligation of the poet to his other parent was careful religious instruction, which, if it did not furnish safeguards against sad excesses of his impetuous passions in after-life, at least saved him from ever sinking into the recklessness of a reprobate. He has recorded also a debt of his infant and boyish days to an old woman domesticated under the same humble roof, remarkable, he says, for her ignorance, credulity, and superstition, and having the largest collec tion in the country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantrips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons, and other trumpery. "The household life of Burns's parents is represented in the imperishable portraiture of the 'Cotter's Saturday Night;' and the origin of those stanzas finely exhibits the continued presence of early salutary influences amid the tumultuous passions of the poet's heart." There was, he said, something peculiarly venerable to his thoughts in the phrase "Let us worship God," used by a decent, sober head of a family introducing family worship. That single simple sentiment, thus impressed in early life, was the germ which was expanded by his true poetic imagination into the admirable description above alluded to. The adversity that befell the elder Burns weighed heavily on the poet's boyhood. In consequence of the father's misfortunes, there fell to the share of the boys more labour than was good for them, the premature pressure which is too apt to force the young heart out of its true proportions. A good plain education led Burns to a course of reading which might shame many a one with better opportunities. But the poetic instinct in him was awakened, I imagine, less by what he saw on the pages of books than by the traditionary minstrelsy by which he was led along as by the music sung, up in the air, by the invisible Ariel. The earliest stirrings of his powers were rude rhymes half uttered when he was humming the tune, or, in Scottish phrase, crooning to himself, as he has described in one of the familiar poetical epistles he was fond of writing to his friends : "Amaist as soon as I could spell, Yet crooning to a body's sell The poetic fire was kindled by another fire; for the first of the long series of his love-stories dates in his fifteenth year, when the boy sought expression in verse for his devotion to his bonny partner in the harvest-field, where it was a Scottish custom to group the reapers in pairs, lad and lass. With one whose heart was like tinder, it was impulse enough to give speech to his imagination. The early trials of his strength were very speedily followed by the ambition of gaining for himself a name, and even more; and this shows how soon the consciousness of his might came to him,—the ambition of producing something to do honour to his country, his slighted country: "I mind it weel, in early date, When I was beardless, young, and blate, And first could thresh the barn, Or haud a yokin' at the pleugh, When first amang the yellow corn A man I reckoned was, An' wi' the lave ilk merry morn "E'en then a wish, (I mind its power,) Shall strongly heave my breast,— |