Page:Varia.djvu/145

 Rh drinker had no time and no breath to waste in singing. Burns, indeed, a rare exception, gave to Scotland those reckless verses which Mr. Arnold found "insincere" and "unsatisfactory," and from which more austere critics have shrunk in manifest disquiet. Perhaps the reproach of insincerity is not altogether undeserved. There are times when Burns seems to exult over the moral discomfort of his reader, and this is not the spirit in which good love-songs, or good war-songs, or good drinking-songs are written. Yet who shall approach the humor of that transfigured proverb which Solomon would not have recognized for his own; or the honest exultation of these two lines:—

or, best of all, the genial gayety of "Willie Brew'd a Peck o' Maut,"—sovereign, says Mr. Saintsbury, of the poet's Bacchanalian verse?—