If you take even those English authors
whom we know Burns to have most admired and studied, you will
see at once that he owed them nothing but a warning. Take
Shenstone, for instance, and watch that elegant author as he
tries to grapple with the facts of life. He has a
description, I remember, of a gentleman engaged in sliding or
walking on thin ice, which is a little miracle of
incompetence. You see my memory fails me, and I positively
cannot recollect whether his hero was sliding or walking; as
though a writer should describe a skirmish, and the reader,
at the end, be still uncertain whether it were a charge of
cavalry or a slow and stubborn advance of foot. There could
be no such ambiguity in Burns; his work is at the opposite
pole from such indefinite and stammering performances; and a
whole lifetime passed in the study of Shenstone would only
lead a man further and further from writing the ADDRESS TO A
LOUSE. Yet Burns, like most great artists, proceeded from a
school and continued a tradition; only the school and
tradition were Scotch, and not English. While the English
language was becoming daily more pedantic and inflexible, and
English letters more colourless and slack, there was another
dialect in the sister country, and a different school of
poetry tracing its descent, through King James I.
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