The same song contains the conventional lines—
Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,
Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee.
The vigour and variety, the humour, the pity, the scorn, and the sentiment of Burns were all entirely new when he wrote, and his variety enabled him to please the most widely different tastes. Critics who were horrified by "The Jolly Beggars," and "The Holy Fair," and the reckless song to Anna found consolation in "The Cottar's Saturday Night," and the lament for "Highland Mary"
Thou ling'ring star with lessening ray,
in English. Poems in the manner of these two last are sometimes spoken of as "sentimental," but the sentiment was as real a mood, while it lasted, as the scorn, or the revelry.
Of Burns it may be said that, beloved as he has been, not always for his best qualities, by the uncritical, he has been no less admired by the greatest poets of the age that followed his own, Keats, Scott, and Wordsworth. No poet ever was more truly national; none had more of the genius of the popular past, and the aspirations of the popular future; none was more essentially and spontaneously lyrical; none was more at home with Mature, with human society (with the life of the animal world, too, as in "The Twa Dogs"), and, in the humorous tale, none has excelled "Tam o'Shanter". No poet wears better in the changes of circumstance and taste. His letters, though of capital biographical interest, are sometimes of a comic complexion; "the style of the Bird of Paradise" prevails, now and then, in his English prose. But his English verse, as Scott found to be the way with his countrymen when they had, in passionate moments, "gotten to their English," is sometimes the natural vehicle of high reflection or of sincere grief.
Charles Churchill.
Satire is the least worthy kind of poetry; for it is almost never sincere. The writer is always in a fatiguing state of virtuous indignation about matters for which he really cares very little, except when his virulence is brewed out of personal spite. Satire, in fact, is only tolerable when combined with the smiling humour of Horace, the occasional majesty of Juvenal, the grace, wit, and finish of Pope, or the airy contempt and sonorous lines of Dryden. Charles Churchill had little of the qualities of these poets, yet was, no doubt, the most popular writer of satire in the rhymed heroic couplet between Pope and Byron. He was born in 1731, the son of the Rector at Rainham; was at Westminster School a contemporary of Cowper and Warren Hastings; did not study at either University, though he was admitted to Trinity, Cambridge; married at 18, and married unwisely; took orders, and returned to lay costume and pursuits, and in 1761, looking about for a theme of satire that promised notoriety, had the happy thought of attacking the actors and actresses of the day in "The Rosciad". "The profession" is sensitive; the actors were not silent about their wrongs; there was plenty of hubbub, and the satire was remunerative. Any man who stoops to taunt actors, and even actresses, by personal attacks in rhyme, can make himself notorious. Perhaps the best-known rhymes of Churchill are
On my life
That Davies hath a very pretty wife.