CRITICISM. - Bagehot; Literary Studies, Vol. I.; William Cowper. Contains some good remarks on Society as a proper object for the exercise of the poetic imagination, with a comparison between Pope, the poet of Town Life, and Cowper, the poet of Rural Life.

Sainte-Beuve; Causeries du Lundi, Tome Onzième; William Cowper, ou De La Poésie Domestique. The nature of this study is sufficiently indicated by the sub-title. A translation will be found in English Portraits, by C. A. SainteBeuve (Henry Holt & Co., N.Y.).

Leslie Stephen; Hours in a Library (Third Series); Cowper and Rousseau. Dwells almost exclusively on the moral sentiments common to Cowper and Rousseau.

THE WINTER MORNING WALK.

This poem forms the fifth book of The Task. The poet evidently writes with his 'eye on the object;' he sees a good deal and he sees it accurately and minutely. Though occasionally commonplace, he is never insincere either in thought or in diction.

1-40. Spiry. See note on beakéd promontory,' Lycidas, 94. bents = stalks of stiff, wiry grass. This word has no etymological connection with bend,' but is cognate with the German 'Binse,' a rush. With lines 21-32 compare Thomson's Winter, 232-242.

41-57. The Woodman and His Dog ; — perhaps the best specimen of Cowper's Naturalism. Homer could hardly have painted this lurcher; a cross between the greychurl. See note on the Bear,' Il Pen

vignette with more fidelity. hound and the collie.

seroso, 87.

Kind family,

58-76. pale. See note on Il Penseroso, 156. race. Thomson has the word in this sense in Winter, 261; also Chaucer, in The Wife of Bath's Tale, 245.

77-95. Compare Thomson's Winter, 242-256. See note on Il Penseroso, 10.

pensioners.

Modern usage

96-126. Indurated. Cowper accents this word on the second syllable; Goldsmith (Traveller, 232) on the first. prefers the latter. that (106), object of throws.

127-168. Imperial mistress. Anne, Empress of Russia, niece of Peter the Great, erected this ice-palace in St. Petersburg in 1740. It was fifty feet long, with six large windows in front, the frames of which were painted to represent green marble. A balustrade adorned with ice-statues surrounded the building. Orange trees, dolphins and an elephant, all carved from ice, adorned the court thus formed; ice-cannon and mortars defended the approaches. Elaborately carved ice-furniture filled the rooms, and ice-logs were laid ready

to impart a comfortable chill to the bracing atmosphere. When the Empress visited the palace, the ice-cannon succeeded in firing a small salute without breaking, and the elephant shot forth a stream of burning naphtha. Aristæus; Cyrene. See Cl. Myths, § 130. lubricity the state or quality of being slippery; hence, figuratively, 'instability,' ' evanescence.' This beautiful description of the Ice Palace is a remarkable instance of the idealizing power of the imagination, when we remember that Cowper had never seen any more impressive ice-formations than those of the sluggish Ouse. What would he have said of Niagara in mid-winter!

ROBERT BURNS, the son of a Scotch peasant-farmer, was born near the town of Ayr in 1759. Inspired by love, he wrote his first song at the age of fifteen; the same passion (though with varying objects) found expression in the profusion of beautiful lyrics he poured out during the next ten years, and relieved for him the monotonous farm-drudgery that was breaking his young manhood. His first volume of poems was published at Kilmarnock in 1786; it immediately attracted the attention of the Edinburgh literati, who received Burns with open arms. Burns' manliness and self-respect did not forsake him when thus suddenly elevated from the society of peasants and smugglers to that of Noble. men, University Professors and Lord-Justices. A couple of winters in Edinburgh seemed to exhaust their interest in the greatest of Scotch poets; a small place in the Excise was thrown to Burns and he was dispatched to the uncongenial tasks of gauging whiskey-barrels and scraping sterile acres at Ellisland. Here he lived from 1788 to 1791, making a manful fight in the struggle for existence that always presses so hard upon the Scotch peasant. 'God help the children of Dependence,' he writes, when abandoning the hopeless attempt to wring a living out of the Scotch soil. Removing to Dumfries, his duties as Exciseman brought him into contact with low convivial company to which he was by nature inclined; much of his magnificent power was frittered away in tavern-songs and political squibs. Penury and despair dogged his few remaining years and sat by his death-bed; when his mighty spirit was at last given surcease of woe, Mr. Pitt-to whose disgrace be it recorded that he had long known of Burns' necessities and could have relieved them with a stroke of his pen- Mr. Pitt condescendingly remarked that since Shakespeare no verse has the appearance of coming so sweetly from nature as Burns'.

In a letter to Miss Helen Craik written in 1793, Burns has drawn his own character with sad truthfulness: 'Take a being of our kind; give him a stronger imagination and a more delicate sensibility, which between them will ever engender a more ungovernable set of passions than are the usual lot of man; implant in him an irresistible impulse to some idle vagary

send him

adrift after some pursuit which shall eternally mislead him from the paths of lucre and yet curse him with a keener relish than any man living for the pleasures that lucre can purchase; lastly, fill up the measure of his woes by bestowing on him a spurning sense of his own dignity; and you have created a wight nearly as miserable as a poet.'

LIFE AND TIMES.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Burns' life is best studied in his Letters, now published with any good edition of his works. Of the elaborate biographies, Chambers' (published in 1851) has not been superseded; of the shorter, Shairp's (E. M. L.) is superior in insight and sympathy to Blackie's (Gt. Wr.). A thorough study of Burns carries one back, of course, to Ramsay, Fergusson and the ballads preserved by Scott in The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.

CRITICISM. Carlyle; Essay on Burns. This famous Essay must stand as the best interpretation of Burns, in spite of some extraordinary literary blunders, such as the statements; (1) that Burns had 'models only of the meanest sort;' (2) that The Jolly Beggars is 'refined;' (3) that Tam O'Shanter is merely 'a piece of sparkling rhetoric.' But it must be remembered that in Carlyle the ethical so overshadowed the aesthetical that he could see in Keats little but 'weak-eyed maudlin sensibility.' The Hero as Man of Letters. 'Wit, wild laughter, energy, directness, sincerity: these were in both [Mirabeau and Burns].'

Christopher North; Essay on The Genius and Character of Burns. Speech at the Burns Festival (1844). These are elaborate and sympathetic studies, tinged with that over-enthusiasm for Burns which may naturally be felt by a fellow-countryman.

Classes Burns as a

Emerson; Speech at the Burns Centenary (1859). reformer with Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Butler. Longfellow; Poem entitled Robert Burns.

Ross; Burnsiana; A Collection of Literary Odds and Ends relating to Robert In this bushel of chaff will be found a few grains of excellent wheat.

Burns.

THE COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT.

This poem, which appeared in the Kilmarnock edition, owes something to Fergusson's 'Farmer's Ingle.' The person to whom it is dedicated would have died unknown had not Burns preserved him immortal in this inscription. If we had to part with any one poem of Burns, this is the last we should be willing to lose; not because it shows him at his best as a poet, — admirable as it is, but because it shows him at his best as a man.

I-9. For a poet who had models only of the meanest sort,' this handling of the Spenserian stanza is a deft performance!

10-18. Notice with what graceful strength, in the homely passages, Burns drops into his native Ayrshire dialect. sugh sough, a murmuring or rushing sound. moil drudgery. The verb 'to moil' (from the Latin mollis, soft) means originally 'to wet, to moisten; then, 'to soil by labor or toil.' the morn to

connection with care,' but is from the Old French charger, to load. toil; pronounced 'tile' as shown by the rime here and in Johnson's London, 218–219:

On all thy hours security shall smile,

And bless thy evening walk and morning toil.

28-36. Belyve = ere long. ca' =

drive. This word is cognate

tentie

with 'calk,' as in 'The ship's-carpenter calked the seams.' Compare ca'd,' Tam O'Shanter, 25.

=

attentive.

penny

money-wages, as distinguished from wages paid in board and

lodging.

inquires.

=

uncos = un+known (things): Anticipation.

37-45. spiers news. See note on uncouth,' L'Allegro, 5.

Compare the first two lines of Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes and the criticism thereon. Gars = causes. When Johnson asked Boswell Senior what Cromwell had done for his country, the doughty old Laird replied, 'Gad, Doctor, he gart kings ken they had a lith [joint] in their necks!'

signifies the inner room of a cottage as distinguished from the but or outer room. See note on 'bower,' L'Allegro, 87.

cracks

talks. Compare our colloquial 'He cracks jokes,'' He cracks up his

73-90. Lines 80-81 are evidently an echo from L’Allegro, 67–8. For the sentiment of the whole stanza in which they occur, compare Clough's A London Idyll, 1-12:

On grass, on gravel, in the sun

Or now beneath the shade,
They went, in pleasant Kensington,
A prentice and a maid.

That Sunday morning's April glow,
How should it not impart

A stir about the veins that flow

=

To feed the youthful heart.

Ah! years may come, and years may bring

The truth that is not bliss,

But will they bring another thing

That can compare with this?

(originally) a liquor with something soaked in

cow; specifically, a white-faced cow. hallan;