lost the recollection of a great number of Scotish words and phrases, and I was too indolent, or too much occupied, to endeavour to recover them.

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fufceptibles de vanite." In one place he confiders himself as fuperior to the greatest man who perhaps ever exifted, the Czar Peter the Great:

Stand yon't proud Czar, I wadna niffer fame,
Wi' thee, for a' thy furs, an' paughty name.

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Burns had much more of the acer vis et fpiritus. With a great deal of fire he united a deep fenfibility, almost as exceffive as that of Rouffeau. He defcribed the emotions of his own feeling heart; he painted exactly the scenery of nature, and manners of rustic life; and confequently the charm of his writings will be always felt by him who has an observing eye, and a fympathifing mind. But, though Burns was a great genius, I do not think that his fancy had much range, that he belonged to the fame clafs, that he was moulded, if I may fay fo, in the fame model with a Homer, a Virgil, a Milton, or an Ariofto. Fitted to delineate the strong, but fleeting, emotion of the hour, I know not if he could have formed a large plan, and kept it steadily in his imagination, foaring, in order to enrich it, from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven. The high poetical Spirit does not perhaps confift in the Sybilline fury, in the agitation of an hour; it has much sensibility indeed, but its fenfibility is calm and dignified, and fubjected to the underfunding. Newton is faid to have declared, that his power of dif covery confifted chiefly in his patience, in his ftrength and steadiness of thought, which never loft fight of an object once fixed before it. Thus it was not carried away in the current of ideas; thus the object, which at first was scarcely feen by the dawnings of a faint light, fhone more and more, till it was illuminated by the glories of the perfect day. Such too feems to have been the genius of Milton; the feene which his imagination painted as lovely, and his understanding had approved, he could keep before him, undisturbed by the violence of paffionate tranfport; and when it was fketched in immortal verfe, he

But there was another and stronger reason, which induced me often to adopt an English term or phrase, even when a Scotish one, which pleased me better, presented itself, or, though fading in my memory, might easily have been revived. It is extremely disagreeable to read a work only by help of a glossary, and hence I resolved not to write such pure Scotish as Allan Ramsay had done in his Gentle Shepherd. In the passage already quoted, where Quintilian judiciously advises a sprinkling of old words, he adds, "Sed utendum modo, nec ex ultimis tenebris repetenda ;" and he perhaps would not add much to the popularity of his book who studiously searched for antiquated terms in the works of Gawin Douglas and of Thomas the Rhymer. The writings of Robert Burns, especially his more elevated compositions, seem upon the whole to be in a happy medium. The language of the following Pastoral is perhaps even less Scoticised than his, and is at the same time somewhat different, as the language of the district where the scene of the piece is laid is that of the east, not of the west country. «The dialect of the upper ward of Clydesdale (says a very intelligent writer, who gives the notice of the parish of Lanark in the Statistical Account) as to pronunciation, is the same with that spoken in Edinburgh, differing materially from that of the middle and lower wards." In the characters of Adam and Catharine (the gudeman and the gude wife) I have painted what Martial calls the "rus verum et barbarum." Their language is of

could calmly, or at least only with dignified and pleasing emotion, cre

ate a new one.

course more rusticated than that of the others, some of whom had been refined by education. The scenes in which these good people appear are however my own favourites. They are the scenes which I have read most frequently, and with the greatest pleasure.

DISSERTATION

DISSERTATION III.

Remarks on the general difesteem for paftoral poetry-Charms of that fpecies of writing, to what owing-Theocritus-Short account of pastoral poetry-The false notions of it generally entertained by poets and critics-This attributed chiefly to the character of the genius of Virgil-Of Sannazaro and Fracaftoro-Superiority of the Gentle Shepherd to the Italian pastorals-Remarks on the Drama of the Falls of Clyde; of the manners of its perfons, of the fongs, &c.-Of the great impropriety of fatirical criticifm.

Ils ne font formés fur le brillant modelle

De ces pasteurs galants, qu'a chantés Fontenelle.

Voltaire.

Ir is observed by Virgil, that the groves (by which he means pastoral poetry) delight not every person : did he live at present, he might say they give delight to nobody. We have heard so much of the gambols of lambkins, of murmuring rills, of the wings of Cupid, Flora, and the Zephyrs, that the very name of a pastoral poem leads us to expect a disgusting repetition of common place description, and of trivial and unnatural

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sentiments. Like the animals whose guides they pretend to describe, the writers of this sort have been indeed a race moutonniere; they have almost all of them followed their first leader to his accustomed glades and pastures, so that it is impossible, when reading them, not to exclaim,

Peut on être si pauvre en chantant la Nature

De Lille.

The great S. Johnson, perhaps more than any critic, has contributed to bring contempt on this species of composition. Like a hero in romance, entering full armed into an Arcadian scene, he has dispersed and terrified the gentle shepherdesses and sighing swains. But that which was the aversion of Johnson, and will be disliked by every reasonable person, was not so much the description of rural life; it was the silly exhibition of the Golden Age, of fawns and satyrs; it was the absurd fiction of writers like Shenstone, representing themselves as shepherds, and talking of the crook, the pipe, the sheep, and the kids. It must be owned, that the aversion Johnson had to this silly sort of composition, extended itself in some degree to pastoral writing in general *. Nor is

* We are told by Boswell, that Johnson did not seem to possess much relish for the picturefque beauties of nature, and are prefented with the following ludicions dialogue. “We (Johnson and Boswell) walked in the evening in Greenwich Park. He asked me, I fuppofe by way of trying my difpofition, Is not this very fine? Having no