buffoonery have I heard this Mr. Shepherd in those days run down the bishops then upon the bench, but especially those of any public pretensions or reputation, as Horsley and Porteus, and, in connexion with them, the pious Mrs. Hannah More ! Her he could not endure.

am

Of this gentleman, having said something disparaging, I bound to go on and add, that I believe him to have been at least a truly upright man-talking often wildly, but incapable of doing a conscious wrong to any man, be his party what it might; and, in the midst of fun or even buffoonery, a real, and, upon occasion, a stern patriot. Mr. Canning and others he opposed to the teeth upon the Liverpool hustings, and would take no bribe, as others did, from literary feelings of sympathy, or (which is so hard for an amiable mind to resist) from personal applications of courtesy and respect. Amusing it is to look back upon any political work of Mr. Shepherd's, as upon his "Tour to France," published in 1815, and to know that the pale pink of his Radicalism was then accounted deep, deep scarlet.

Nothing can better serve to expound the general force of intellect amongst the Liverpool coterie than the quality of their poetry, and the general standard which they set up in poetry. Not that even in their errors, as regarded poetry, they were of a magnitude to establish any standard or authority in their own persons. Imitable or seducing there could be nothing in persons who wrote verses occasionally, and as a άρeруov or by-labour, and were themselves the most timid of imitators. But to me, who, in that year, 1801, already knew of a grand renovation of poetic power-of a new birth in poetry, interesting not so much to England as to the human mind—it was secretly amusing to contrast the little artificial usages of their petty traditional knack with the natural forms of a divine art-the difference being pretty much as between an American lake, Ontario, or Superior, and a carp pond or a tench preserve. Mr. Roscoe had just about this time published a translation from the Balia of Luigi Tansillo. -a series of dullish lines, with the moral purpose of persuading young women to suckle their own children. The brilliant young Duchess of Devonshire, some half century ago, had, for a frolic-a great lady's caprice set a

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precedent in this way; against which, however, in that rank, medical men know that there is a good deal to be said; and in ranks more extensive than those of the Duchess it must be something of an Irish bull to suppose any general neglect of this duty, since, upon so large a scale, whence could come the vicarious nurses? There is, therefore, no great sense in the fundamental idea of the poem, because the abuse denounced cannot be large enough; but the prefatory sonnet, addressed to the translator's wife, as one at whose maternal breast "six sons successive" had hung in infancy-this is about the one sole bold, natural thought, or natural expression of feeling, to which Mr. Roscoe had committed himself in verse. Everywhere else, the most timid and blind servility to the narrowest of conventional usages, conventional ways of viewing things, conventional forms of expression, marks the style. For example, Italy is always Italia, Scotland Scotia, France Gallia; so inveterately had the mind, in this school of feeling, been trained, alike in the highest things and in the lowest, to a horror of throwing itself boldly upon the great realities of life: even names must be fictions for their taste. Yet what comparison between "France, an Ode,” and 66 Gallia, an Ode"?

Dr. Currie was so much occupied with his professional duties that of him I saw but little. His edition of Burns was just then published (I think in that very month), and in everybody's hands. At that time, he was considered not unjust to the memory of the man, and (however constitutionally phlegmatic, or with little enthusiasm, at least in external show) not much below the mark in his appreciation of the poet.1

So stood matters some twelve or fourteen years; after which period a “craze” arose on the subject of Burns, which allowed no voice to be heard but that of zealotry and violent partisanship. The first impulse to this arose out of an oblique collision between Lord Jeffrey and Mr. Wordsworth;

1 Dr. James Currie, born 1756, a native of Dumfriesshire, settled in Liverpool, in medical practice, in 1781. His edition of Burns, with memoir and criticism, published in 1800, was for the benefit of the widow and children of the poet, and realised £1400. Currie died in 1805.-M.

the former having written a disparaging critique upon Burns's pretensions a little, perhaps, too much coloured by the fastidiousness of long practice in the world, but, in the main, speaking some plain truths on the quality of Burns's understanding, as expressed in his epistolary compositions. Upon which, in his celebrated letter to Mr. James Gray, the friend of Burns, himself a poet, and then a master in the High School of Edinburgh, Mr. Wordsworth commented with severity, proportioned rather to his personal resentments towards Lord Jeffrey than to the quantity of wrong inflicted upon Burns. Mr. Wordsworth's letter, in so far as it was a record of embittered feeling, might have perished; but, as it happened to embody some profound criticisms, applied to the art of biography, and especially to the delicate task of following a man of original genius through his personal infirmities or his constitutional aberrations—this fact, and its relation to Burns and the author's name, have all combined to embalm it.1 Its momentary effect, in conjunction with Lord Jeffrey's article, was to revive the interest (which for some time had languished under the oppression of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron) in all that related to Burns. Fresh Lives appeared in a continued succession, until, upon the death of Lord Byron in 1824, Mr. Allan Cunningham, who had personally known Burns, so far as a boy could know a mature man, gave a new impulse to the interest, by an impressive paper in which he contrasted the circumstances of Burns's death with those of Lord Byron's, and also the two funerals --both of which, one altogether, and the other in part, Mr. Cunningham had personally witnessed. A man of genius, like Mr. Cunningham, throws a new quality of interest upon all which he touches; and, having since brought fresh research and the illustrative power of the arts to bear upon the subject, and all this having gone on concurrently with the great modern revolution in literature—that is, the great extension of a popular interest, through the astonishing reductions of price the result is, that Burns has, at length, become a

1 Wordsworth's publication was in 1816, under the title A Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns, occasioned by an intended Republication of the Account of the Life of Burns by Dr. Currie. By William Wordsworth.-M.

national, and, therefore, in a certain sense, a privileged subject; which, in a perfect sense, he was not, until the controversial management of his reputation had irritated the public attention. Dr. Currie did not address the same alert condition of the public feeling, nor, by many hundred degrees, so diffused a condition of any feeling which might imperfectly exist, as a man must consciously address in these days, whether as the biographer or the critic of Burns. The lower-toned enthusiasm of the public was not of a quality to irritate any little enthusiasm which the worthy Doctor might have felt. The public of that day felt with regard to Burns exactly as with regard to Bloomfield-not that the quality of his poems was then the staple of the interest, but the extraordinary fact that a ploughman or a lady's shoemaker should have written any poems at all. The sole difference in the two cases, as regarded by the public of that day, was that Burns's case was terminated by a premature, and, for the public, a very sudden death this gave a personal interest to his case which was wanting in the other; and a direct result of this was that his executors were able to lay before the world a series of his letters recording his opinions upon a considerable variety of authors, and his feelings under many ordinary occasions of life.

Dr. Currie, therefore, if phlegmatic, as he certainly was, must be looked upon as upon a level with the public of his own day—a public how different, different by how many centuries, from the world of this present 1837! One thing

I remember which powerfully illustrates the difference. Burns, as we all know, with his peculiarly wild and almost ferocious spirit of independence, came a generation too soon. In this day, he would have been forced to do that, clamorously called upon to do that, and would have found his pecuniary interest in doing that, which in his own generation merely to attempt doing loaded him with the reproach of Jacobinism. It must be remembered that the society of Liverpool wits on whom my retrospect is now glancing were all Whigs — all, indeed, fraternizers with French Republicanism. Yet so it was that not once, not twice, but daily almost, in the numerous conversations naturally elicited by this Liverpool monument to Burns's memory-I

heard every one, clerk or layman, heartily agreeing to tax Burns with ingratitude and with pride falsely directed, because he sate uneasily or restively under the bridle-hand of his noble self- called "patrons." Aristocracy, then, the essential spirit of aristocracy-this I found was not less erect and clamorous amongst partisan democrats-democrats who were such merely in a party sense of supporting his Majesty's Opposition against his Majesty's Servants-than it was or could be among the most bigoted of the professed feudal aristocrats. For my part, at this moment, when all the world was reading Currie's monument to the memory of Burns and the support of his family, I felt and avowed my feeling most loudly-that Burns was wronged, was deeply, memorably wronged. A £10 bank note, by way of subscription for a few copies of an early edition of his poemsthis is the outside that I could ever see proof given of Burns having received anything in the way of patronage; and doubtless this would have been gladly returned, but from the dire necessity of dissembling.

Lord Glencairn is the "patron" for whom Burns appears to have felt the most sincere respect. Yet even he—did he give him more than a seat at his dinner table? Lord Buchan again, whose liberalities are by this time pretty well appreciated in Scotland, exhorts Burns, in a tone of one preaching upon a primary duty of life, to exemplary gratitude towards. a person who had given him absolutely nothing at all. The man has not yet lived to whose happiness it was more essential that he should live unencumbered by the sense of obligation; and, on the other hand, the man has not lived upon whose independence as professing benefactors so many people practised, or who found so many others ready to ratify and give value to their pretences.1 Him, whom

1 Jacobinism-although the seminal principle of all political evil in all ages alike of advanced civilization-is natural to the heart of man, and, in a qualified sense, may be meritorious. A good man, a high-minded man, in certain circumstances, must be a Jacobin in a certain sense. The aspect under which Burns's Jacobinism appears is striking there is a thought which an observing reader will find often recurring, which expresses its peculiar bitterness. It is this: the necessity which in öld countries exists for the labourer humbly to beg permission that he may labour. To eat in the sweat of a man's