'See! the whyte moone sheenes onne hie; Gon to hys deathe-bedde, Al under the wyllowe-tree. 'Heere, uponne mie true loves grave, Mie love ys dedde, Gonne to hys deathe-bedde, Al under the wyllowe-tree. 'Wythe mie hondes I'lle dent the brieres Heere mie boddie stille schalle bee. Gon to hys deathe-bedde, Al under the wyllowe-tree. Comme, wythe acorne-coppe and thorne, Drayne my hartys blood awaie ; Lyfe and all yttes goode I scorne, Daunce bie nete, or feaste by daie. Gon to hys deathe-bedde, Al under the wyllowe-tree. 1 Sic in edit. 4to, 1782, p. 255; but did not Chatterton write ouf (oaf) aut fairie? 'Waterre wytches, crownede wythe reytes, I die; I comme; mie true love waytes. To proceed to the more immediate subject of the present Lecture, the character and writings of Burns. Shakspeare says of some one, that 'he was like a man made after supper of a cheese-paring.' Burns the poet was not such a man. He had a strong mind, and a strong body, the fellow to it. He had a real heart of flesh and blood beating in his bosom, you can almost hear it throb. Some one said that if you had shaken hands with him, his hands would have burned yours. The Gods indeed 'made him poetical;' but Nature had a hand in him first. His heart was in the right place. He did not create a soul under the ribs of death,' by tinkling siren sounds, or by piling up centos of poetical diction; but for the artificial flowers of poetry, he plucked the mountain-daisy under his feet, and a field-mouse hurrying from its ruined dwelling, could inspire him with the sentiments of terror and pity. He held the plough or the pen with the same firm, manly grasp; nor did he cut out poetry as we cut out watch-papers, with finical dexterity, nor from the same flimsy materials. Burns was not like Shakspeare in the range of his genius; but there is something of the same magnanimity, directness, and unaffected character about him. He was not a sickly sentimentalist, a namby-pamby poet, a mincing metre ballad-monger, any more than Shakspeare. He would as soon hear 'a brazen candlestick tuned, or a dry wheel grate on the axle-tree.' He was as much of a man, not a twentieth part as much of a poet, as Shakspeare. With but little of his imagination or inventive power, he had the same life of mind; within the narrow circle of personal feeling or domestic incidents, the pulse of his poetry flows as healthily and vigorously. He had an eye to see, a heart to feel,-no more. His pictures of good fellowship, of social glee, of quaint humour, are equal to anything; they come up to Nature, and they cannot go beyond it. The sly jest collected in his laughing eye at the sight of the grotesque and ludicrous in manners; the large tear rolled down his manly cheek at the sight of another's distress. He has made us as well acquainted with himself as it is possible to be, has let out the honest impulses of his native disposition, the unequal conflict of the passions in his breast, with the same frankness and truth of description. His strength is not greater than his weakness; his virtues were greater than his L vices; his virtues belonged to his genius; his vices to his situation, which did not correspond to his genius. It has been usual to attack Burns's moral character and the moral tendency of his writings at the same time; and Mr. Wordsworth, in a letter to Mr. Gray, Master of the High School at Edinburgh, in attempting to defend, has only laid him open to a more serious and unheard-of responsibility. Mr. Gray might well have sent him back in return for his epistle the answer of Holofernes in Love's Labour 's Lost,'-' Via, goodman Dull, thou hast spoken no word all this while.' The author of this performance, which is as weak in effect as it is pompous in pretension, shows a great dislike of Robespierre, Bonaparte, and of Mr. Jeffrey, whom he, by some unaccountable fatality, classes together as the three most formidable enemies of the human race that have appeared in his (Mr. Wordsworth's) remembrance; but he betrays very little liking to Burns. He is indeed anxious to get him out of the unhallowed clutches of the Edinburgh Reviewers (as a mere matter of poetical privilege), only to bring him before a graver and higher tribunal, which is his own; and after repeating and insinuating ponderous charges against him, shakes his head, and declines giving any opinion in so tremendous a case; so that though the judgment of the former critic is set aside, poor Burns remains just where he was, and nobody gains anything by the cause but Mr. Wordsworth in an increasing opinion of his own wisdom and purity. 'Out upon this half-faced fellowship!' The author of the Lyrical Ballads' has thus missed a fine opportunity of doing Burns justice and himself honour. He might have shown himself a philosophical prose-writer as well as a philosophical poet. He might have offered as amiable and as gallant a defence of the Muses as my Uncle Toby, in the honest simplicity of his heart, did of the army. He might have said at once, instead of making a parcel of wry faces over the matter, that Burns had written Tam o' Shanter,' and that that alone was enough; that he could hardly have described the excesses of mad, hairbrained, roaring mirth and convivial indulgence, which are the soul of it, if he himself had not drunk full ofter of the tun than of the well,' unless the act and practique part of life had been the mistress of his theorique.' Mr. Wordsworth might have quoted such 'The landlady and Tam grew gracious, |