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 axletree." 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. 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 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 very well have sent him back, in return for his epistle, the answer of Holofernes in Love's Labour 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, Buonaparte, 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. Words worth, in an increasing opinion of his own wisdom and party "Out upon this half-faced fellowship!" The author of the Lyrical Ballads has thus missed a fine opportunity of doing Burns yustice and himself honour. He might have shown himself a phule sophical prose-writer, as well as a philosophical poet. He might have offered as amiable and as gallant a defence of the Mass as my uncle Toby, in the honest simplicity of his heart, dad 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 mistrem of his theorique." Mr. Wordsworth might have quoted such lines as

"The landlady and Tam grew gracious,
Wi' favours, secret, sweet, and precious;”—

or,

“Care, mad to see a man so happy,

Een drowned himself amang the nappy,

and fairly confessed that he could not have written sa
from a want of proper habits and previous syn pathy
till some great puritanical genius should arise to do the
equally well without any knowledge of them, the wpł
forgive Burns the injuries he had done his health and

his poetical apprenticeship to experience, for the please he
had affi rded them. Instead of this, Mr. Wordsworth how that,
with different personal habits and greater strength of n th
Burns would have written differently, and almost as we
does He might have taken that line of Gay's,

• The fly that sips treacle is lost in the sweets,” -

and applied it in all its force and pathos to the poetical character. He might have argued that poets are men of genius, and that a man of genius is not a machine; that they live in a state of intellectual intoxication, and that it is too much to expect them to be distinguished by peculiar sang froid, circumspection, and sobriety. Poets are by nature men of stronger imagination and keener sensibilities than others; and it is a contradiction to suppose them at the same time governed only by the cool, dry, calculating dictates of reason and foresight. Mr. Wordsworth might have ascertained the boundaries that part the provinces of reason and imagination :-that it is the business of the understanding to exhibit things in their relative proportions and ultimate consequences of the imagination to insist on their immediate impressions, and to indulge their strongest impulses; but it is the poet's office to pamper the imagination of his readers and his own with the extremes of present ecstasy or agony, to snatch the swift-winged golden minutes, the torturing hour, and to banish the dull, prosaic, monotonous realities of life, both from his thoughts and from his practice. Mr. Wordsworth might have shown how it is that all men of genius, or of originality and independence of mind, are liable to practical errors, from the very confidence their superiority inspires, which makes them fly in the face of custom and prejudice, always rashly, sometimes unjustly; for, after all, custom and prejudice are not without foundation in truth and reason, and no one individual is a match for the world in power, very few in knowledge. The world may altogether be set down as older and wiser than any single person in it.

Again, our philosophical letter-writer might have enlarged on the temptations to which Burns was exposed from his struggles with fortune and the uncertainty of his fate. He might have shown how a poet, not born to wealth or title, was kept in a constant state of feverish anxiety with respect to his fame and the means of a precarious livelihood: that, "from being chilled with poverty, steeped in contempt, he had passed into the sunshine of fortune, and was lifted to the very pinnacle of public favour;" yet even there could not count on the continuance of success, but was, "like the giddy sailor on the mast, ready with

every blast to topple down into the fatal bowels of the deep He might have traced his habit of ale-house tippling to the inst long precious draught of his favourite usquebaugh, which he took in the prospect of bidding farewell forever to his native land; and his conjugal infidelities to his first disappointment in love, which would not have happened to him if he had been born to a small estate in land, or bred up behind a counter

Lastly, Mr. Wordsworth might have shown the invertbility between the Muses and the Excise, which never agreed well together, or met in one seat, till they were unaccountally reconciled on Rydal Mount He must know (no man beter) the distraction created by the opposite calls of business and of fancy, the torment of extents, the plague of receipts land in order or mislaid, the disagreeableness of exacting penalties or paving the forfeiture; and how all this (together with the broaching of casks and the splashing of beer-barrels) must have proves upon a mind like Burns's, with more than his natural sensitility and none of his acquired firmness

Mr. Coleridge, alluding to this circumstance of the promoties of the Scottish Bard to be "a ganger of ale-firkins,” ma poes. cal epistle to his friend Charles Lamb, calls upon him m· burst of heart-felt indignation, to gather a wreath of henban, nettles, and nightshade,

If, indeed, Mr. Lamb had undertaken to write a letter in deft, of Burns, how different would it have been from this ơ Wordsworth's How much better than I can even

to have been done ↑

It is hardly resonable to look for a hearty or genume defin ́e of Burns from the pen of Mr. Wordsworth; for there is no e mon hink of syrupathy between them Nothing can be different or hostile than the spirit of their poetry

Mr. Wor

worth's poetry is the poetry of mere sentiment and peneve com. templation Burns a very highly sub-imated esetre of anunal existence With Burns, "selt jove and social are the mme" -

"And we'll tak a cup of kindness yet,

For auld lang syne."

Mr. Wordsworth is "himself alone," a recluse philosopher, or a reluctant spectator of the scenes of many-coloured life; moralising on them, not describing, not entering into them. Robert Burns has exerted all the vigour of his mind, all the happiness of his nature, in exalting the pleasures of wine, of love, and good fellowship: but in Mr. Wordsworth there is a total disunion and divorce of the faculties of the mind from those of the body the banns are forbid, or a separation is austerely pronounced from bed and board-a mensâ et thoro. From the Lyrical Ballads, it does not appear that men eat or drink, marry or are given in marriage. If we lived by every sentiment that proceeded out of mouths, and not by bread or wine, or if the species were continued like trees (to borrow an expression from the great Sir Thomas Brown,) Mr. Wordsworth's poetry would be just as good as ever. It is not so with Burns: he is "famous for the keeping it up," and in his verse is ever fresh and gay. For this, it seems, he has fallen under the displeasure of the Edinburgh Reviewers, and the still more formidable patronage of Mr. Wordsworth's pen.

"This, this was the unkindest cut of all."

I was going to give some extracts out of this composition in support of what I have said, but I find them too tedious. Indeed (if I may be allowed to speak my whole mind, under correction) Mr. Wordsworth could not be in any way expected to tolerate or give a favourable interpretation to Burns's constitutional foibles-even his best virtues are not good enough for him. He is repelled and driven back into himself, not less by the worth than by the faults of others. His taste is as exclusive and repugnant as his genius. It is because so few things give him pleasure that he gives pleasure to so few people. It is not every one who can perceive the sublimity of a daisy, or the pa thos to be extracted from a withered thorn!

To proceed from Burns's patrons to his poetry, than which no two things can be more different. His "Twa Dogs" is a very spirited piece of description, both as it respects the animal and