Burns is the best of British song-writers. His songs are singable; they are not merely lyrical poems. They were meant to be sung, and they are sung. They were mostly set to old Scottish airs, and sometimes they were built up from ancient fragments of anonymous, popular poetry, a chorus, or stanza, or even a single line. Such are, for example, Auld Lang Syne, My Heart's in the Highlands, and Landlady, Count the Lawin. Burns had a great, warm heart. His sins were sins of passion, and sprang from the same generous soil that nourished his impulsive virtues. His elementary qualities as a poet were sincerity, a healthy openness to all impressions of the beautiful, and a sympathy which embraced men, animals, and the dumb objects of nature. His tenderness toward flowers and the brute creation may be read in his lines To a Mountain Daisy, To a Mouse, and The Auld Farmer's New Year's Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare Maggie. Next after love and good {220} fellowship, patriotism is the most frequent motive of his song. Of his national anthem, Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled, Carlyle said: "So long as there is warm blood in the heart of Scotchman, or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war ode."
Burns's politics were a singular mixture of sentimental toryism with practical democracy. A romantic glamour was thrown over the fortunes of the exiled Stuarts, and to have been "out" in '45 with the Young Pretender was a popular thing in parts of Scotland. To this purely poetic loyalty may be attributed such Jacobite ballads of Burns as Over the Water to Charlie. But his sober convictions were on the side of liberty and human brotherhood, and are expressed in the Twa Dogs, the First Epistle to Davie, and A Man's a Man for a' that. His sympathy with the Revolution led him to send four pieces of ordnance, taken from a captured smuggler, as a present to the French Convention, a piece of bravado which got him into difficulties with his superiors in the excise. The poetry which Burns wrote, not in dialect, but in the classical English, is in the stilted manner of his century, and his prose correspondence betrays his lack of culture by his constant lapse into rhetorical affectation and fine writing.
1. T. S. Perry's English Literature in the Eighteenth Century.
2. James Thomson. The Castle of Indolence.
3. The Poems of Thomas Gray.
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4. William Collins. Odes.
5. The Six Chief Lives from Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Edited by Matthew Arnold. Macmillan, 1878.
6. Boswell's Life of Johnson [abridged]. Henry Holt & Co., 1878.
7. Samuel Richardson. Clarissa Harlowe.