Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 4.djvu/632

570 and rogues, and are made to sit &quot; on the hills like gods together, careless of mankind,&quot; and to launch their Titan thunders of rebellion against the world.

&quot; A fig for those by law protected ; Liberty s a glorious feast ; Courts for cowards were erected, Churches built to please the priest.&quot; A similar mixture of drollery and defiance appears in the justly-celebrated &quot;Address to the Deil,&quot; which, mainly whimsical, is relieved by touches of pathos curiously quaint. &quot; The effect of contrast,&quot; it has been observed, &quot; was never more happily displayed than in the conception of such a being straying in lonely places and loitering among trees, or in the familiarity with which the poet lectures so awful a personage,&quot; we may add, than in the inimitable outbreak, anticipatory of Professor Maurice, at the close &quot;0 would you tak a thought an men .&quot; Mr Carlyle, in reference to this passage, cannot resist the suggestion of a parallel from Sterne. &quot; He is the father of curses and lies, said Dr Slop, and is cursed and damned already. I am sorry for it, quoth my Uncle Toby.&quot; Burns fared ill at the hands of those who were not sorry for it, and who repeated with glib complacency every terrible belief of the system in which they had been trained. The most scathing of his Satires, under which head fall many of his minor and frequent passages in his major pieces, are directed ^against the false pride of birth, and what he conceived to be the false pretences of religion. . The apologue of &quot; Death and Dr Hornbook,&quot; &quot; The Ordination,&quot; the song &quot; No churchman am I for to rail and to write,&quot; the &quot;Address to the Unco Guid,&quot; &quot; Holy Willie,&quot; and above all &quot; The Holy Fair,&quot; with its savage caricature of an ignorant ranter of the time called Moodie, and others of like stamp, not unnaturally provoked offence. As regards the poet s attitude towards some phases of Calvinism prevalent during his life, it has to be remarked that from the days of Dunbar till now there has been a degree of antagonism between Scotch verse and the more rigid forms of Scotch theology. It must be admitted that in protesting against hypocrisy he has occasionally been led beyond the limits prescribed by good taste. He is at times abusive of those who differ from him. This, with other offences against decorum, which here and there disfigure his pages, can only be condoned by an appeal to the general tone of his writing, which is reverential. Burns had a firm faith in a Supreme Being, not as a vague mysterious Power, but as the Arbiter of human life. Amid the vicissitudes of his career he responds to the cottar s summons,&quot; Let us worship God.&quot;

&quot; An atheist s laugh s a poor exchange For Deity offended &quot; is the moral of all his verse, which treats seriously of religious matters. His prayers in rhyme give him a high place among secular Psalmists. Like Chaucer, Burns was a great moralist, though a rough one. In the moments of his most intense revolt against conventional prejudice and sanctimonious affecta tion, he is faithful to the great laws which underlie change, loyal in his veneration for the cardinal virtues Truth, Justice, and Charity, and consistent in the warnings, to which his experience gives an unhappy force, against trans gressions of Temperance. In the &quot; Epistle to a Young Friend,&quot; the shrewdest advice is blended with exhortations appealing to the highest motive, that which transcends the calculation of consequences, and bids us walk in the straight path from the feeling of personal honour, and &quot;for the glorious privilege of being independent,&quot; Burns, like Dante, &quot; loved well because he hated, hated wickedness that hinders loving,&quot; and this feeling, as in the lines &quot; Dweller in yon dungeon dark,&quot; sometimes breaks bounds ; but his calmer moods are better represented by the well-known passages in the &quot; Epistle to Davie,&quot; in which he preaches acquiescence in our lot, and a cheerful acceptance of our duties in the sphere where we are placed. This philosophic douce, never better sung by Horace, is the prevailing refrain of our author s Songs. On these there are few words to add to the acclaim of a century. They have passed into the air we breathe; they are so real that they seem things rather than words, or, nearer still, living beings. They have taken all hearts, because they are the breath of his own ; not polished cadences, but utterances as direct as laughter or tears. Since Sappho loved and sung, there has been no such national lyrist as Burns. Fine ballads, mostly anony mous, existed in Scotland previous to his time ; and shortly before a few authors had produced a few songs equal lo some of his best. Such are Alexander Ross s &quot; Wooed and married,&quot; Lowe s &quot; Mary s Dream,&quot; &quot;Auld Hobin Gray,&quot; &quot; The Land o the Leal,&quot; and the two versions of &quot; The Flowers o the Forest.&quot; From these and many of the older pieces in Eamsay s collection, Biirns admits to have derived copious suggestions and. impulses. He fed on the past literature of his country as Chaucer on the old fields of English thought, and

Still the elements o sang, In formless jumble, right and wrang, Went floating in his bruin.&quot; But he gave more than he received ; he brought forth on hundred-fold ; he summed up the stray material of the past, and added so much of his own that one of the most conspicuous features of his lyrical genius is its variety in new paths. Between the first of war songs, composed in a storm on a moor, and the pathos of &quot; Mary in Heaven,&quot; he has made every chord in our northern life to vibrate. The distance from &quot; Duncan Gray &quot; to &quot; Auld Lang Syne ;&amp;gt; is nearly as great as that from Falstaff to Ariel. There is the vehemence of battle, the wail of woe, the march of veterans &quot; red-wat-shod,&quot; the smiles of meeting, the tears of parting friends, the gurgle of brown burns, the roar of the wind through pines, the rustle of barley rigs, the thunder on the hill all Scotland is in his verse. Let who will make her laws, Burns has made the songs, which her emigrants recall &quot;by the long wash of Australasian seas,&quot; in which maidens are wooed, by which mothers lull their infants, which return &quot; through open casements unto dying ears &quot; they are the links, the watchwords, the masonic symbols of our race. In his &quot; Vision &quot; the poet imagines his Muse (probably as real to him as to Homer) descending to address her votary beside the plough. After paying through her lips a generous tribute to his predecessors, he draws, as usual, a lesson from his own career, &quot; by passion driven.&quot; The goddess counsels him to &quot;preserve the dignity of man &quot; and &quot; trust the universal plan,&quot; and leaving a wreath of green holly to deck his brows, passes &quot; in light away.&quot; The poet passed away in darkness, but his name will never disappear from our literature. He stands before us as a feature of Nature ; and the fact that he cannot be moved from the hearts of his countrymen, that they recognize and respect a man who has refused to mutilate human nature, and who at once celebrates and strives to harmonize its ethnical and Christian elements, marks a gulf still fixed between Scotland and the Spain with which Mi- Buckle has associated it. &quot; The generous verse of Burns,&quot; says Dr Craik, &quot;springs out of the iron-bound Calvinism of the land like flowing water from Horeb s rock.&quot;

