No More Learning

Then, in the Tam o' Shanter of his more mature and more
fully disciplined genius, he did actually achieve a splendid success
in a species of verse quite different from any of his earlier
pieces; and, given the leisure that assists inclination, he might
well have delighted the world with a series of similar tales.
But the melancholy fact is, that, apart from songs, it remains
almost the one solitary sign that he had it in him to fulfil the
promise of his Mossgiel productions by the execution of more
mature and finished work. Notwithstanding his repeatedly
expressed resolve 'to produce something worth preserving,' he
never did seriously set himself to carry out his meditated plans ;
no trace was found among his papers of even abortive attempts
to do so. The last nine years of his life-the period when his
powers might be supposed to be at their best-were, apart
from songs, almost a poetic blank. He may have been partly
led astray by a passing ambition to excel in English verse ; but


## p. 225 (#247) ############################################

x]
Worldly Disappointments
225
the chief explanation seems to be that, as he well might, he
partly succumbed, doubtless, at first, reluctantly, but, in the end,
apathetically, to his circumstances. The mere return to his old
farming tasks, implying, as it did, the definite dissipation of his
more sanguine day-dreams, was, however brave a face he might
put on it, a very disheartening experience; and, when, to the
old gin-horse round of toil and care was conjoined the old
impossibility of making farming pay, his highest poetic intentions
were bound to remain unfulfilled. By obtaining an excise com-
mission for his own rural district with a salary of fifty pounds, he
was able to save himself from bankruptcy; but this supplement
to his income did little more; and, all things considered, he
concluded that his only chance of bettering himself in life was
through the excise. Having, therefore, at a break in the lease,
relinquished his farm, he removed to Dumfries at a salary of
seventy pounds, which, in September 1792, when he was appointed
port officer, was raised to ninety pounds ; but this was the extent
of his promotion, for his outspoken approbation of the French
revolutionaries, both in conversation and in occasional verse,
brought him into bad odour with his official superiors and even
endangered the retention of his office. This greatly embittered
and disheartened him ; towards his closing years, he partly lost
hope ; and his higher poetic ambitions remained in suspense until
fate conclusively decided against them by the long painful illness
which, 21 July 1796, terminated in his death.
Happily, however, he all along found some encouragement and
opportunity for the exercise of his gifts as a song writer. While
in Edinburgh, he made the acquaintance of James Johnson, an
engraver and music-seller, who was then preparing the first volume
of his Scots Musical Museum. To the first volume, he con-
tributed two songs; and, from the autumn of 1787 almost until
his death, he was largely both literary and musical editor of the
work. He wrote the prefaces probably of volume II and certainly of
volumes III and iv; volume v did not appear until shortly after
his death, but it includes some of his best songs and adaptations,
among them A Red, Red Rose, Auld Lang Syne and It was a'
for our Richtfu King ; while volume vi, though not published
until 1803-doubtless largely due to the lack of his supervising
help—was in course of preparation before his death, and contains
some twenty of his contributions. All that he did for the publi-
cation was, with him, a mere labour of love. He received no re-
muneration for it, nor would he have accepted any. In his efforts
15
E, L XI.
CH. X.


## p. 226 (#248) ############################################

226
[CH.
Burns
6
on its behalf, he was influenced partly by the desire to help 'a
good, worthy, honest fellow' in a patriotic undertaking, the
lucrative character of which was very doubtful, and which,
without his guidance and help, seemed almost certain to collapse.
But to assist in it was, besides, a pure delight : he confided to the
poet Skinner that he had been absolutely crazed about the
project,' and was collecting stanzas and every information
respecting their origin, authors, etc. ' Most of this did not
involve any protracted mental effort. He could amend songs
with easy facility, and he could even partly compose others during
his labours on the farm, or in the course of his excise excursions,
which, also, supplied him with opportunities for obtaining old
songs and airs from tradition.
While Burns was still busy assisting Johnson, George Thomson
-a government clerk in Edinburgh and an amateur musician-
invited him, in September 1792, to contribute songs to his Scottish
Airs with Poetry, to which Pleyel had promised accompaniments;
and, without remitting his diligence in assisting Johnson, he could
not resist immediately informing Thomson how delighted he was
with his proposal, which, he said, 'will positively add to my enjoy-
ment in complying with it. ' But, though Thomson, also, mentioned
that he would pay him any reasonable price he might demand for
his contributions, Burns replied: 'As to remuneration, you may
think my songs either above or below price, for they shall
absolutely be the one or the other. ' In his difficult worldly
circumstances, it was a noble, though almost Quixotic, resolve ;
but, apart from the fact that he was not receiving any
remuneration from Johnson, he was determined to be influenced
by no other considerations than love of his art, and to be
perfectly free and independent in the exercise of it. He did not
object to change lines and words when he thought that, while
satisfying his own judgment, he might better meet the wishes of
Thomson ; he did not resent even Thomson's most absurd sug-
gestions; but he was adamant when convinced that any alterations
would be for the worse, though he told Thomson repeatedly, and
evidently with perfect candour, that he would not be in any degree
offended by his rejection of any songs that did not please him.
The prosecution of his art, even in this circumscribed fashion,
became, to Burns, the sheet-anchor of his life, and his main solace
during the troubles and frustrations of his later years. On the
whole, the best of his work was that which he did for Johnson.
He began it when hope was still high within him, and here he was,


## p. 227 (#249) ############################################

x]
Lyric Verse
227
a
besides, his own editor. Moreover, although, in his first letter to
Thomson, he had written : 'Apropos, if you are for English
verses there is an end of the matter,' he was ultimately induced,
entirely against his better judgment, to oblige Thomson by not
unfrequently breaking his resolution. Whether in the simplicity,'
so he had written, of the Ballad or the pathos of the Song, I can
only hope to please myself in being allowed at least a sprinkling
of my native tongue’; and the justness of his preference is
abundantly proved by his performances.
If lyric verse did not afford Burns adequate scope for the
exercise of his best poetic powers, it quite accorded with a certain
strain of his complex personality. He found an entirely con-
genial medium for the expression of poetic emotion and
sympathetic humour, and the exercise of his rare artistic
sensibilities, in writing new songs to old airs, in giving a new,
and an artistically improved, expression to some of the freer
songs of tradition, in inimitable amendments of other old songs-
sometimes merely by the substitution, here and there, of a new
word, or phrase, or line, or the partial reconstruction of a stanza ;
often by a combined process of omission, condensation and
addition, so that a merely halting and vulgar, if, in some respects,
clever, doggerel ditty, becomes transformed into a noble and
finished masterpiece; or, again, by utilising merely the burden
or chorus of an old song, or a mere fragment of verse preserved
in floating tradition, so as, while preserving the spirit and
essence of the sentiment, to inspire it with higher emotional
efficacy and provide it with the artistic setting necessary for its
full lyrical expression. Unlike many song writers, he, also, even
when the words were entirely his own, wrote his songs for
particular airs, and most of them for old traditional airs, some
of which he himself collected. His inspiration was thus, in part,
derived from the old national music.
Until (so he wrote to Thomson) I am a complete master of a tune in my
own singing (such as it is) I never can compose for it. My way is: I consider
the poetic sentiment corresponding to my idea of the musical expression;
then choose my theme.
Again, even of the advantage of having only the old title, when
the song has been lost, and composing the rest of the verses
to suit that line,' he says:
This has always a finer effect than composing English words, or words
with an idea foreign to the spirit of the old title. When old titles of songs
convey any idea at all, they will generally be found to be quite in the spirit of
the air.
15—2


## p. 228 (#250) ############################################

228
[CH.
Burns
But, apart from the burden, or the fragments, or the title,
or the air, much of his direct lyrical inspiration was derived
from, or modified by, the past. Here, it was not Ramsay or
Fergusson, or any other bards of the revival that he strove to
emulate, but 'the glorious old bards' of an earlier period. The
special character of his success, even when the theme was entirely
his own, was largely due to his comprehensive knowledge of
old minstrelsy; he was pervaded by its spirit, and, besides
fashioning his verses for its music, moulded them in the manner
of its expression. It was, also, mainly because of the large and
various inheritance of old verse, which he was free to manipulate
and reshape, that he was able to supply the world with so rich an
assortment of popular songs, and, more especially, to appeal in
them, so fully and irresistibly as he does, to Scottish senti
and emotion. The best of his lyrics—both those entirely or
mainly his own and those which he partly refashioned or almost
re-created—differ entirely in their manner and spirit from those
of the principal English poets. Much of their special virtue
derives from their antique ingenuousness and simplicity, and the
marvellous art of Burns is manifested in the manner in which,
while preserving the antique charm, he has enriched each song
with his own individual vitality. Only an exceptional poetic
artist could have so finely utilised Burns's opportunities, but his
opportunities were, themselves, exceptional. His peasant origin
and environment specially aided him in preserving the primi-
tive simplicity of the old songs ; and his achievements as lyrist
indicate, also, extraordinary gifts of sympathy, humour, senti-
ment and emotion, combined with a great mastery of expression
and a singularly delicate artistic sense; but they could never
have been so great, varied and unique as they are, except for his
partial partnership with older bards.
To give a few illustrations. The lyric by which he is best
known throughout the world is Auld Lang Syne : its universal
and immortal popularity depends on the fine fervour and
simplicity of its appeal to old memories of social fellowship;
but it is not wholly Burns's own : he got its burden and the
essence of its sentiment, however defectively it was expressed,
from an old anonymous song, itself derived from an ancient and
lost original. Again, of MacPherson's Farewell and specially
of the chorus, Carlyle remarks : ‘Who, except Burns, could have
given words to such a soul? ' This is true enough, but Carlyle
did not know that the chorus of Burns is merely a masterly


## p. 229 (#251) ############################################

x]
Utilisation of Old Songs
229
3
modification of that of a broadside, contemporary with
MacPherson's execution, from which, moreover, the whole outlaw
sentiment of the song-matchless though its expression of the
sentiment is—is borrowed. A much less striking but, so far as
the theme would permit, equally complete, example of the deftness
of Burns in utilising the burden and sentiment of an old song is
Up in the Morning Early. "The chorus of this,' he himself tells
us, ‘is old; the two stanzas are mine’; but, had he not got the
chorus, he would not have written the stanzas, nor could he have
written anything at all resembling them. Those three lyrics differ
widely in their sentiment and manner, but this, mainly, because
in each case, Burns borrowed the sentiment and the manner of
different old songs.
Of another, and quite dissimilar, method of utilisation we
have an example in the piquantly humorous sketch of rustic
courtship in Duncan Davison. The song was suggested by, and
borrowed something from, an old song of the same name in The
Merry Muses ; but its last stanza is, as regards the first half, a
mere assortment of lines borrowed from old ballads and songs, while
the second half was snatched almost verbally from the Herd MS.
As illustrating his art of re-creation, in which a matchless process
of revision is combined with condensation, omissions and slight
additions, it may suffice to mention How Lang and Drearie
is the Night, Charlie he's my Darling, A Red, Red Rose and
It was a' for our Richtfu King. The two last rank with the
very finest specimens of lyric verse; and many would rank them
above any of Burns's songs of which the motif was entirely his
True, most Scots probably agree with Carlyle that Scots
Wha hae is the best war ode 'ever written by any pen’; but,
here, there is a possibility of patriotic bias. There are some,
again, who think that Burns reached the height of his achievement
in 18 there for Honest Poverty, which, though a kind of parody of
an older song, or older songs, is, like Scots Wha hae, Burns to the
core, and, though not faultless as regards the temper of its philo-
sophy, offers, on the whole, a splendidly glowing forecast of the final
triumph of human worth over all artificial restrictions; but the
piece is apt to be overestimated or underestimated according to
the predilections of the reader.
Of the more purely lyrical pieces which he claims as his own,
though they are suggested by older songs, characteristic examples
are John Anderson My Jo, O Merry Hae I been, What Can
a Young Lassie, Wha is that at My Bower Door, O Leeze me
>
own.


## p. 230 (#252) ############################################

230
Burns
[CH.
on my Spinnin Wheel and Comin Thro' the Rye. On the other
hand, while the majority of his lyrics were not expressive of
sentiments due to his actual experience, and, though some of this
sort-especially the artificial kind produced for Thomson by
putting himself in the regimen of adoring a fine woman'—are
but mediocre, they also include such varied and excellent
specimens of his art as The Rantin Dog the Daddie O't, Of a'
the Airts, The Banks o' Doon, Ye Banks and Braes and
Streams Around, Yestreen I had a pint o' Wine, Willie Brew'd
a Peck o' Maut, The Blue-eyed Lassie, Mary Morison and o
Wert thou in the Cauld blast.
As regards his purely English songs, it may suffice to quote
two of his own remarks to Thomson : ‘You must not, my dear
Sir, expect your English songs to have superlative merit, 'tis
enough if they are passable'; and : ‘These English songs gravel
me to death. I have not the command of the language that I
have of my native tongue. In fact I think my ideas are more
barren in English than in Scottish. ' Some, even of his Scottish
songs or adaptations, are not of 'superlative merit'; the character
of the theme or sentiment does not always permit of this ; but
there are few that do not, in their tone or expression, exhibit
traces of his felicitous art; and, taken altogether, his achievement
as a lyrist-partly on account of its peculiar relations to the
older bards—is, for comprehensiveness and variety, unmatched by
any other poet. For the same reason, it is, in its character,
in some respects, unique ; and, while the general level of its
excellence is very high, it often, notwithstanding a pervading
rustic homeliness, exercises the complete captivating charm which
is the highest triumph of lyric verse.
Thus, while, in other respects, the poetical aims of Burns were
largely frustrated, he was, as a lyrist, even, in some respects,
peculiarly favoured by fate. Here, he fulfilled, and even more
than fulfilled, the promise of his earlier years ; and if, as seemed
to Carlyle, all the writings he has left us are no more than a
poor mutilated fraction of what was in him,' his very peasant
circumstances—which, in some ways, greatly hampered and
narrowed his endeavours—were, also, the means of enabling him
bequeath a poetic legacy more essentially Scottish than,
probably, it could otherwise have been, and, at the same time,
of such vital worth as to secure him a high place among the
greater poets of Britain.
to


## p. 231 (#253) ############################################

x]
Lady Writers of Songs
231
LESSER SCOTTISH VERSE
The Scottish literary revival inaugurated by Ramsay was
associated with a widespread interest among educated and
fashionable ladies in the old national airs and songs, and it is
not therefore surprising that several of the most talented of
them essayed song writing. Lady Grizel Baillie, Lady Wardlaw,
Mrs Cockburn and Jane Elliot have been already mentioned'.
These and other ladies, besides songs that have been published,
wrote various others which were circulated only privately among
their friends, and the fashion continued into the nineteenth
century. Here, however, our chronicle of poetesses begins with
Joanna Baillie, who was more of a professional authoress
than most of the others. In 1790, she published a volume of
Fugitive Pieces; and, while she devoted her main efforts, occa-
sionally with marked literary success, to playwriting, it is probably
mainly by her songs that she will be remembered. In 1823
appeared Metrical Legends, and her poems were published in one
volume in 1841. Burns considered her Saw Ye Johnie Comin,
which appeared anonymously in volume 1 of Johnson's Museum,
unparalleled for 'genuine humour in the verses and lively originality
in the air. ' Among her happier contributions to Thomson's Scottish
Airs are a version of Woo'd and Married and a’, beginning “My
Bride he is winsome and bonnie,' and Poverty parts Good Com-
pany,
both in the old Scottish manner; and the same sprightly
humour manifests itself in some of her ballad tales, as It was on
a morn and Tam o' the Lin, a parody of the Tomy Lin ballad in
Ritson's Northern Chorister, which is related to a very old rime.
The very popular sentimental song Auld Robin Gray, which
first appeared in a very imperfect form in Herbert Croft's novel
Love and Madness (1780), and, afterwards, in volume III of John-
son's Museum, was written by Lady Anne Lindsay of Balcarres
(afterwards Lady Anne Barnard) as words to the air of an old song
The Bridegroom Greets (weeps] When the Sun gae's doon, sung by
a much older lady at Balcarres, who 'did not,' says Lady Anne,
'object to its having improper words. A version revised by Lady
'
Anne, with a continuation, was, in 1829, edited for the Bannatyne
club by Sir Walter Scott, who was also entrusted with other poems
and songs by Lady Anne and other members of the Lindsay family
for publication; but the permission to publish was, afterwards,
6
1 See ante, vol. ix.


## p. 232 (#254) ############################################

i
1
1
232
Lesser Scottish Verse
[ch.
withdrawn. The only other piece known to be by Lady Anne is
a
a short poem in The Scots Magazine for May 1805, Why Tarries
My Love. Susanna Blamire, the muse of Cumberland,' though of
English descent and birth, spent much time in Scotland, owing to her
elder sister's marriage to colonel Graham, of Gartmore, and became
specially interested in old Scottish songs and airs. To Johnson's
Museum, she contributed two songs, somewhat in the Scottish
style: What ails this heart of Mine, and the better known And
Ye shall walk in Silk Attire ; and her Nabob is a kind of parody of
Auld Lang Syne. Mrs Grant of Carron (afterwards Mrs Murray
of Bath) is the authoress of the sprightly Roy's Wife of Aldival-
loch, admirably suited to the air The Ruffians Rant, to which it
is set. It appeared in volume III of Johnson's Museum (1792);
and, some time after its publication there, Burns, in his long critical
letter to Thomson, of September 1793, thus refers to it:
I have the original, set as well as written by the Lady who composed it (it
was probably sent to the editor of Johnson's Museum after the publication of
the song there), and it is superior to anything the public has yet seen;
but this version of the song has disappeared. Mrs Grant of Laggan,
authoress of Letters from the Mountains, 1806, published, in 1803,
a volume of Poems, and, in 1814, Eighteen hundred and Thirteen
a Poem; but only her song, O Where tell me Where, has escaped
oblivion. Elizabeth Hamilton, authoress of the Scottish tale The
Cottagers of Glenburnie and other works, is known as the writer
of only one song, the simple and homely, but very happily expressed,
My Ain Fireside. Mrs John Hunter, wife of the famous anatomical
professor, published a volume of Poems in 1802. Her song, Adieu
Ye Streams that Swiftly Glide, appeared in The Lark, in 1765, as
a proposed setting to the old air The Flowers of the Forest, and it
is the third set to that tune in volume I of Johnson's Museum;
but, of course, it is quite overshadowed by the first two versions,
by Mrs Cockburn and Jane Elliot respectively; and she is now
mainly remembered by her My Mother bids me bind my hair,
which was set to music by Haydn. Burns sent to Johnson's
Museum two songs by Mrs Maclehose (Clarinda'), Talk not of
Love and To a Blackbird. They are quite as good as most of the
sentimental English lyrics of the period; but it was mere flattery
on his part to assert of the former that the latter half of its first
stanza 'would have been worthy of Sappho. '
Caroline Oliphant, Lady Nairne, who began to write as the
career of Burns was prematurely drawing to a close, outvies all
other songstresses of Scotland in the average excellence and
a


## p. 233 (#255) ############################################

x]
Lady Nairne
233
variety of her songs. Early though she began to write, most of
her best-known songs were first published—under the signature
B. B. -in The Scottish Minstrel'. Though she was largely inspired
by the example of Burns, and, like him, wrote many new versions
of old songs, she has been likened to him rather inaptly; for the
feminine strain is even more marked in most of her songs than it
is in several of the songs of the women already mentioned. Such
a strain in a woman writer is, of course, rather an excellence than
a defect, just as the strong manliness of Burns lends a special
compelling charm to his verse. At the same time, Lady Nairne's
love songs, such as The Lass of Gowrie and Hunting Tower,
somewhat lack afflatus, and are rather hackneyed and conventional
in their sentiment. On the other hand, pathetic feeling is finely
expressed in such songs as The Auld Hoose, Here's to them that
are Gane, The Rowan Tree and The Land of the Leal, though the
last has not been improved by the traditional substitution of ‘Jean’
for 'John'as the person addressed—a change perpetuated, partly,
because of the quite mistaken supposition that the song was meant
to express the dying words of Burns—for the sentiment of the
song is essentially that of a woman. Caller Herrin, a kind of
blend of humour and pathos, is, as set to the air by Niel Gow,
a very realistic representation of the cries of picturesque New-
haven fishwives in Edinburgh streets, mingled with the peal of
bells in St Andrew's church, George street. John Tod and The
Laird of Cockpen—the latter suggested by an older song—are
wittily humorous portraits of antique eccentrics; and The Hun-
dred Pipers is quite irresistible in its combination of Jacobite
defiance and comical mirth. Though written when Jacobitism
had become little more than a pious opinion or a romantic memory,
Lady Nairne's Jacobite songs are inspired by a fervent Jacobite
ardour, derived from old family predilections. Among the best
known are Wha'l be King but Charlie, Will Ye no come back
again? , He's O'er the Hills that I lo'e weel and Charlie is
My Darling, a more Jacobite, but very inferior, reading of the
Burns adaptation in Johnson's Museum.
Among the more voluminous contributors to Johnson's Museum
was Burns's friend, the blind poet, Dr Blacklock; but the character
of his lyrics is sufficiently indicated in the words of Burns, so far as
they apply to his friend. 'He,' he says, in his tactfully and modestly
polite fashion, as well as I, often gave Johnson verses, trifling
enough perhaps, but they served as a vehicle for the music. '
1 Edited by Smith, R. A. , in six volumes (1821–4).


## p. 234 (#256) ############################################

234
Lesser Scottish Verse
[CH.
Blacklock's contributions, all in pure English, are, in fact, quite
commonplace and characterless. There is, however, some poetic
feeling in the contributions, mainly in English, of Richard Gall, an
Edinburgh printer, whose Poems and Songs were published post-
humously at Edinburgh, in 1819; but, neither his Farewell to
Ayrshire, sent by him to Johnson's Museum with the name of
Burns attached to it, nor his Now Bank and Brae, wrongly
ascribed to Burns by Cromek, is of greater merit than the more
indifferent lyrics of Burns. John Hamilton, a music-seller in
Edinburgh-mainly remembered for the additions to Of a' the
Airts, which he ventured to make as he was accustomed to do to
other songs which he sold with the music in sheets—contributed
several songs to Johnson's Museum; but none of them call for
mention here. Burns sent to the Museum two songs by the John
Lapraik of his poetic Epistles : When I upon thy Bosom Lean, the
song that pleased me best’ of the Epistle, and Jenny was Frail
and Unkind. Because of a somewhat different version of the former
song having appeared in Ruddiman's Magazine in 1773, Lapraik's
authorship of it has been questioned ; but he included it in his
published Poems (1788). John Lowe, an episcopal clergyman of
Kirkcudbrightshire, is represented in volume 1 of Johnson's Museum
I
by the tragic song, in pure English, Mary's Dream, of which a forged
vernacular version, doubtless by Allan Cunningham, appeared in
.
buted to Lowe by Burns ; but it appeared in The Blackbird in
1764, when Lowe was only fourteen years old.
Hector MacNeil, though the senior of Burns by thirteen years,
did not publish his ballad legend The Harp until 1789. His poetic
tales, Scotland's Scaith or the History of Will and Jean (1795),
and the sequel, The Waes of War or the Upshot of the History of
Will and Jean (1796), were meant to expose the evils of the con-
vivial habits of the period. The stories, rather trite in their general
tenor, are tersely rimed; and their homely commonplace and
moral wisdom secured them a wide circulation among the people;
but neither these nor other tales by him in prose and verse, also of
didactic intent, are any longer read; and his memory is kept green
mainly by various excellent contributions to Johnson's Museum.
The ballad Donald and Flora, in that publication, though well
expressed, is rather mannered and artificial; but, in the vernacular
Mary of Castle Cary, My Boy Tammy (founded on an old
song of which at least one broadside copy still exists), Come
Under my Plaidie and Dinna think Bonnie Lassie, homeliness
Rena
emais. Cromek's Reliques as the original. Pompey's Ghost
, also, is attri-


## p. 235 (#257) ############################################

6
x] James Tytler and Others
235
of sentiment is blended to very good purpose with quiet or lively
humour.
A considerable contributor to the Museum was James Tytler-
known as 'Balloon Tytler,' from his construction of a balloon in
which he made the first ascent in Scotland—latterly an Edinburgh
hackwriter (until, owing to his revolutionary principles, he emi-
grated to America, where he became somewhat more prosperous),
but of good education and of accomplishments ranging from science
to theology. He was editor, and largely compiler, of the second
and third editions of The Encyclopaedia Britannica, at, according
to Burns, the remarkable salary of half a guinea a week, though, it
is said, with an advance in the case of the third edition. Burns
describes him as an unknown drunken mortal,' who‘drudges about
Edinburgh as a common printer, with leaky shoes, a skylighted
hat and knee-breeches as unlike George by the Grace of God as
Solomon the Son of David. ' Of the songs which he contributed to
the Museum, the best known are two in the vernacular: The
Bonnie Brucket Lassie, which preserves two lines of an old
free song of that name, and I hae laid a Herring in Saut, an
adaptation from a song in the Herd MS related to a very old
wooing song, containing the line ‘I canna come every day to Woo. '
John Mayne, born in Dumfries the same year as Burns, con-
tributed to The Dumfries Journal, in the office of which he was
a printer, twelve stanzas of The Siller Gun, published, in 1779, in
an expanded form in two cantos. Written in the six-line stave in
rime couée, it gives a spirited vernacular account of the annual
shooting-match at Dumfries for the silver gun presented by
James VI. From his Halloween, published in Ruddiman's Maga-
zine, in 1780, Burns got some hints for his poem of that name. In
1787, Mayne became editor of The London Star, where, in 1789,
appeared his version of Logan Water-founded on an older song
—which, in popular esteem, has justly superseded the semi-political
version by Burns, composed, he tells Thomson, 'in my elbow chair,
in three quarters of an hour's lucubrations. '
Sir Alexander Boswell, of Auchinleck, the eldest son of John-
son's biographer, inherited his father's love of literature. As an
Ayrshire man, he was specially interested in the career of Burns,
in honour of whom he initiated the movement for the erec-
tion of a monument on the banks of Doon. Boswell's pastoral
dialogue Ah! Mary, sweetest maid, Farewell, first published as
a sheet song, appeared in the sixth volume of Johnson's Museum;
and he contributed songs to George Thomson's Welsh Airs, his


## p. 236 (#258) ############################################

236
Lesser Scottish Verse
[CH.
Irish Airs and his Scottish Airs and to Campbell's Albyn's
Anthology. In 1803, he published, anonymously, Songs Chiefly
in the Scottish Dialect; in 1812, he wrote Sir Albyn, a burlesque
of Sir Walter Scott's poetic methods ; and, at his private
printing press at Auchinleck, he published various short poems
written by himself, as well as reprints of some old works. His
squib, The New Whig Song in The Glasgow Sentinel, led to a
challenge from James Stuart, of Dunearn, and, in the duel which
followed, 26 March 1822, Boswell was fatally wounded. His
Taste Life's Glad Moments and Paddy O'Rafferty are still well
known; but his most characteristic pieces are his humorous ver-
nacular sketches and songs, such as Skeldon Haughs or the Sow
Aitted, Jenny's Bawbee and Jenny Dang the Weaver, and the
singularly realistic domestic quarrel and reconciliation detailed
in The East Neuk of Fife.
In striking contrast with the songs of Boswell are the love
lyrics of the Paisley weaver and chief of many Paisley poets,
Robert Tannahill, who published a volume of Poems and Songs in
1817. The rather monotonous amorousness of Tannabill's songs
is
relieved by the felicity of his references to nature : he conveys the
impression that he is quite as much enamoured by nature's charms,
as by those of the imaginary sweethearts he elects to bear him
company in his saunterings. The truth is that, having been at an
early period of life disappointed in a very serious love affair, he
was, henceforth, a lover merely in a poetical or a reminiscent sense.
He first won general fame by his Jessie the Flower of Dunblane
(an imaginary personage), which was set to music by his fellow
townsman, R. A. Smith, afterwards of Edinburgh ; and, among
other songs still popular are The Lass of Arrinteenie (not in
Paisley, but on the banks of loch Long ! ), Gloomy Winter's noo
Awa', The Bonnie Wood of Craigielea, Loudon's bonnie Woods
and Braes and The Braes o' Balquither. He is, also, the author
.
of a clever humorous song Rob Roryson's Bonnet. Another
Paisley poet, who began life as a weaver, and then blossomed
into a travelling packman, was Alexander Wilson, who, in 1790,
got a volume of his poems printed, which he sold on his
itineraries. Later, he resided in Edinburgh and became a poetic
contributor to The Bee; but, on account of republican sentiments
inspired by the French revolution, he emigrated to America, where
he won lasting fame as an ornithologist by his work on American
birds. Wilson's lengthy and rather homespun and squalid ballad
Watty and Meg, published anonymously, in 1792, was hawked


## p. 237 (#259) ############################################

x]
Paisley Poets
237
а
through Dumfries by one Andrew Hislop, as a new ballad by
Robert Burns; upon which Burns is stated to have said to him:
“That's a lee Andrew, but I would make your plack a bawbee if it
were mine’: a dark saying, which could hardly be meant, as is
often supposed, as a compliment to the merits of the ballad. Of
higher social station and literary pretension than either Tannahill
or Wilson was William Motherwell, who, though a native of
Glasgow, where he was born in 1797, was brought up in Paisley,
under the care of his uncle, and, after some years spent in the
sheriff-clerk's office there, became editor of The Paisley Advertiser
and, later, of The Glasgow Courier. In 1817, he also began The
Harp of Renfrewshire, to which he contributed various songs as
well as an essay on the poets of Renfrewshire. In 1827, he pub-
lished his Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern, which included various
ballad versions collected and, probably, somewhat 'improved' by
himself. His Poems Narrative and Lyrical appeared in 1832; and,
together with James Hogg, he brought out, in 1834–5, an edition
of the Works of Burns. He was a facile versifier, with small poetic
inspiration; he wrote some ballads in an affectedly antique style,
but is best known by his vernacular songs, which, however, have
little individuality ; Jeanie Morrison is a little too cloying in its
sentimentality.
Next to Burns, by far the most considerable poet of humble
birth was James Hogg, the Ettrick shepherd; and, though, in rich-
ness of natural endowments, he is not to be compared to Burns, his
poetic career was, in some respects, more astonishing. His record,
in his autobiography, of how he became the poet that he was, is
a plain and simple statement of unexaggerated fact; but it reads
almost like a sheerly impossible romance. In all, he was not more
than six months at school, and, when he left, at the age of seven,
he had only 'advanced so far as to get into the class that read the
Bible'; and, in writing, he was able only to scrawl the letters,
nearly an inch in length. ' In his early years, his poetic tendencies
did not receive any instruction or fostering influence except that
derived from his peasant mother's imperfect recital of ballads
and fairy tales. From his eighth year, his hours from daybreak to
sunset were spent in the fields as a herdboy and, later, as a
shepherd. Until his eighteenth year, the only verses that he had
seen in print were the metrical Psalms of David, and, when he
obtained access to The Life and Adventures of Sir William Wallace
and The Gentle Shepherd, he could make very slow progress in
reading them: “The little reading that I had learned,' he says,
>


## p. 238 (#260) ############################################

238
[CH.
Lesser Scottish Verse
6
'I had nearly lost, and the Scottish dialect quite confounded
me. ' While a shepherd with Laidlaw, of Blackhouse, he was, how-
ever, supplied by him with a number of books, which, he says, he
‘began to read with considerable attention’; and, ‘no sooner,' he
relates, ‘did I begin to read so as to understand them, than, rather
prematurely' (he was, however, twenty-six years of age) 'I began
to write. ' His first compositions were songs and ballads made up
for the lassies to sing in chorus. ' 'I had no more difficulty,' he
naïvely tells us, ‘in composing them than I have at present, and
I was equally well pleased with them. His main difficulty was in
writing them out after he had composed and corrected them in his
mind; he had no method of learning to write save by following
the Italian alphabet’; and, with laborious toil, he could not do
more than 'four or six lines at a sitting. ' So isolated was he in
his southern solitudes, that, he says, the first time I heard of
Burns was in 1797, the year after he died,' when a half-daft man
came to him on the hill and surprised and entranced him by
repeating to him Tam o' Shanter. This 'formed,' so he writes,
'a new epoch of my life. Every day I pondered on the genius
and fate of Burns. I wept and always thought with myself what
is to hinder me from succeeding Burns ? '
The ambition of Hogg-recorded by him with characteristically
ingenuous vanity-may well seem rather extravagant. His career
as a poet, remarkable though it was, cannot be said to entitle him to
rank as a second Burns. Save that, like Burns, he was. a Scottish
peasant, he has very little in common with him. He lacks his pre-
decessor's marked intellectuality as well as his strongly passionate
temperament. Emotion, imagination, a good musical ear, a faculty
for riming, a strong sympathy with nature, created by years of
solitary converse with her, were his principal gifts. He had an
excellent eye for scenery, and his descriptions are remarkably fine
and truthful; but he is somewhat superficial; the vigour and
penetration of Burns are beyond him. As he possessed, however,
a peculiarly lightsome and joyful disposition, his hardships, dis-
appointments and misfortunes did not, as in the case of Burns, give
him any very deep concern.
One may think ſhe writes], on reading over this memoir, that I have worn
out a life of misery and wretchedness; but the case has been quite the reverse.
I never knew either man or woman who has been so universally happy as I
have been; which has been partly owing to a good constitution, and partly
from the conviction that a heavenly gift, conferring the powers of immortal
song, was inherent in
soul.
The wide difference in the individualities of Burns and Hogg is
my


## p. 239 (#261) ############################################

x]
James Hogg
239
shown in their relations with Edinburgh. Lacking the personal
prestance of Burns, Hogg could not attain there to the great personal
success commanded by Burns; his rustic simplicity, combined with
his vanity and certain eccentricities of manner, partly created by his
early circumstances, even made him a kind of butt in the higher
literary circles of which he was proud to be reckoned a member ;
and, to many, he is now best known by the unfair caricature of him
as the irrepressible ‘Shepherd,' in Noctes Ambrosianae. But,
unlike Burns, he made a definite attempt, and, considering his ante-
cedents, with quite marvellous success, to establish himself as a
littérateur in Edinburgh. Having lost, in farming, the money gained
by the publication of The Mountain Bard, he, as late as 1810—when
he was forty years of age-set out to the capital on his adventurous
quest. 'I tost,' he writes, 'my plaid about my shoulders, and
marched away to Edinburgh, determined, since no better could be,
to push my fortunes as a literary man. ' He even set up, as he puts
it, for 'a connoisseur in manners, taste and genius,' by founding
a weekly critical journal The Spy; and, fresh from wielding his
shepherd's crook in the wilds of Ettrick, essayed to supply literary
guidance and direction to the enlightened denizens of the metro-
polis. This paper-a literary curiosity of which, unhappily, no
copy is now known to survive—written three-fourths by himself,
was carried on for more than a year; and, largely for his own
mental discipline, he set on foot a debating society, the Forum,
where his speeches must have been sufficiently amusing. But,
by his publication of The Queen's Wake, he more than surprised
even his warmest admirers. “Od,' said one of his vernacular
acquaintances, 'wha wad hae thought there was as muckle in that
sheep's head o' yours ? ' It firmly established his reputation as
a poet; but, owing to the failure of his publishers, his fortunes
were yet to seek, when the duke of Buccleuch bestowed on him
the farm of Altrive in Yarrow, at a nominal rent. Here, until his
death in 1835—with occasional visits to Edinburgh and the lakes
- he continued to spend a life in which farming and sports were,
not in a pecuniary sense very successfully, but, otherwise, happily
enough, combined with literary labours, his conviction of his
supreme success in which made him blissfully content with his,
from a worldly point of view, comparatively humble lot: 'Yes,' so
he wrote in his old age :
Yes-I hae fought and won the day;
Come weel, come woe, I care na by;
I am a King! My regal sway
Stretches o'er Scotia's mountains high


## p. 240 (#262) ############################################

240
[ch.
Lesser Scottish Verse
And o'er the fairy vales that lie
Beneath the glimpses of the moon,
Or round the ledges of the Sky
In twilight's everlasting noon.
The poetry of Hogg is more akin to that of Scott than that of
Burns. Properly, he does not belong to the Scottish poetic school
.
of the revival. His poetic powers were first nourished by, and
received their special bent from, old border tales and ballads.
He was nearly thirty years of age before he had even heard of
Burns; and if, latterly, he was well read in Scottish vernacular
verse, he, while employing a kind of Scots in certain of his pieces,
did not make any use of the old traditional Scottish staves. Long
before he had studied the vernacular bards, he had become
acquainted with the works of various English poets. Thus, unlike
Burns, he never had, in a literary sense, any strong vernacular
bias; and, since a great period of poetic revival had now begun,
both in Scotland and England, he, necessarily, received from it
much stimulus and guidance; in fact, it was with these later poets
he loved to be classed, and he reckoned himself by no means the
least of the brilliant galaxy. While, therefore, his verse, like himself,
displays, now and again, a certain naïve rusticity, and is occasion-
ally marred by superficial solecisms, it is not only distinguished
by the native charm derived from his early nurture on adventurous
ballad tales and fairy lore, and from his mode of life as a solitary shep-
herd in a beautiful pastoral region, but, also, bears tokens of cultured
refinement. Unlike Burns, he wrote English verse with perfect
facility. His excessive fluency, his extempore voluminousness, his
inability to condense—due, partly, to his insufficient mental dis-
cipline in early life—is, in truth, the occasion of his chief literary
sins as a writer both of prose and verse; his larger poems as well
as his ballads are, generally, too long drawn out. Yet, he has his
passages of high inspiration. The concluding portion of The Witch
of Fife in The Queen's Wake is a quaintly unique specimen of
fantastic eeriness, touched with humour, e. g. the flight of the
bewitched old man from Carlisle:
>
His armis war spred and his heid was hiche,
And his feite stack out behynde;
And the laibis of the auld manis cote
War wauffing in the wynde.
And aye he nicherit, and aye he flew,
For he thochte the ploy sa raire;
It was like the voice of the gainder blue,
Quhan he flees throw the ayr.
1


## p. 241 (#263) ############################################

x]
James Hogg
241
Bonny Kilmeny—which most critics unite to praise-in the same
poem, is in a quite different vein. Though it has certain superficial
faults, he here succeeds with delicate imaginative art in invoking
to admirable purpose the old mystic fairy spells, faintly preserved
in what remains of the old ballad stories of tradition. Many, also, of
the ballad imitations in the same poem, though lacking in concise-
ness, have much spirit; the eleventh bard's song, The Fate of
Macgregor (Macgregor, Macgregor remember our Foemen'), is,
also, a splendidly vivid and impressive recital, and the poem
abounds in finely descriptive passages, somewhat after the manner
of Scott, with others more airily mystical. In Mador of the Moor,
he employs the Spenserian stanza with perfect success: he tells
us, in characteristic fashion, that he 'had the vanity to believe,
that he was going to give the world a new specimen of this stanza
in its proper harmony'; and, if the story is badly constructed, the
narrative flows on with perfect ease and smoothness. He is, also,
pretty near the truth when he remarks, with his usual self-satisfac-
tion, “There is no doubt whatever that my highest and most
fortunate efforts in rhyme are contained in some of the descrip-
tions of nature in that poem'; and the remark applies more
particularly to the delineation of the hunting episodes, the
mountain and river scenery and the weather effects in canto I.
In the rather fantastic Pilgrims of the Sun, he attempts more
daring imaginative flights, but not always quite happily; and, in
the long historic poem Queen Hynde, he still more mistook his
powers, notwithstanding his firm opinion that it was the best
epic poem that ever had been produced in Scotland. '
The reputation of Hogg now rests, mainly, on The Queen's Wake,
and several of his shorter pieces. In 1810, he published The Forest
Minstrel, two-thirds of which were written by himself, and the rest
by his acquaintances, including the pathetic Lucy's Flittin by
William Laidlaw, Scott's steward. Of the songs in this volume,
Hogg himself frankly says: 'In general they are not good,
but the worst of them are all mine, for I inserted every ranting
rhyme that I had made in my youth, to please the circles about the
firesides in the evening. Such was the shepherd's own opinion of
what were, in present day slang, uncommon good 'folk songs';
and, on the whole, his opinion of them is correct. They are, most
of them, merely ranting rhymes,' much better versified and
written and cleverer than the average example of their genus, but,
on the whole, best fitted for the appreciation of those for whom
they were primarily intended. On the other hand, there is
16
E. L, XI.
CH. X.


## p. 242 (#264) ############################################

242
[Ch.
Lesser Scottish Verse
admirable spirit and fire in such later war odes and Jacobite songs
as M Kinnon, Rise Rise Lowland and Highland Man, Lock the
Door Lauriston, Cam Ye by Athol and The Gathering of the
Clans; his grotesque sketch of the wicked village of 'Balmqu-
happle,' in Fife, is quite worthy of Burns; and, while his love songs,
for the most part, are a little cold and commonplace, 0 Weel Befa'
(in The Haunted Glen : not the longer version of the song) and
When the Kye comes Hame are charmingly fine pastorals; though
the most perfect of his lyrics and of his shorter pieces is The
Skylark, itself sufficient to justify his proud conviction that he
possessed in his soul the gift of immortal song.
John Leyden, like Hogg, the son of a shepherd, was associated
with him in supplying Scott with ballad versions for The Minstrelsy
of the Scottish Border; and he also contributed to it two imitation
ballads, Lord Soulis and The Cout of Keeldar, an Ode to Scottish
Music, and The Mermaid; and he wrote a few lyrics for The
Scots Magazine, which he edited for some months in 1802. Before
proceeding, in 1803, as a surgeon to India—where he afterwards
held the chair of Hindustani in Bengal and distinguished himself
by his linguistic and ethnological researches—he wrote, as a sort
of farewell, a long reminiscent poem Scenes of Infancy, somewhat
after the manner of Thomson, which, though tastefully written, can
hardly be termed poetical. The Mermaid is his only poem which
displays true poetic glamour.
Allan Cunningham, a native of Dumfriesshire—who, though of
middle-class descent, became a stonemason, but, later, was secre-
tary to the sculptor Chantrey, and combined with his secretarial
duties miscellaneous literary work for the magazines and pub-
lishers—supplied Richard Hartley Cromek with most of the pieces
and information contained in his Remains of Nithsdale and
Galloway Song (1810); its poetic contents being mainly fabricated
by him, though, in some cases, he merely modified traditional
versions of old songs. In 1820, he published a drama, Sir Marma-
duke, which, though praised by Scott as poetry, did not find
acceptance on the stage; and, in 1833, The Maid of Elvar, a
rustic epic in twelve parts. His Songs of Scotland Ancient and
Modern (four volumes, 1825), include some of his own compositions.
In his imitations of the older minstrelsy, Cunningham showed
varied dexterity, his attempts including traditional ballads, love
lyrics, Jacobite songs and plaintively pious covenanting effusions,
though their fictitious character becomes evident enough on a
careful perusal. The Young Maxwell, for example, is too much
Robert
a


## p. 243 (#265) ############################################

x]
Allan Cunningham
243
o
>
a mere echo of ballads in general; Hame Hame, Hame is too
prettily sentimental for an original Jacobite song ; She's Gane to
dwell in Heaven is far too elaborately refined in expression to
express the sentiments of the average pious peasant; and the
heroine of Bonie Lady Anne, evidently, never had any existence
in Nithsdale or elsewhere. Several, however, both of his acknow-
ledged and unacknowledged pieces, enjoy a wide popularity-among
them the humorous John Grumlie, a condensed revision of The
Wyfe of Auchtirmwychty; the funnily vituperative, if not very
witty, Wee, Wee German Lairdie; My Nannie 0, a kind of
modified version of the song by Burns and quite as good
as the original, and the classic sea-song A Wet Sheet and a
Flowing Sea.
Thomas Mounsey Cunningham, an elder brother of Allan, is
now best known by his Hills o' Gallowa, which, when it appeared
anonymously, was attributed to Burns, but only echoes some of his
mannerisms. In 1797, Cunningham's Hairst Kirn (harvest home)
appeared in Brash and Reid's Poetry Ancient and Select, and he
contributed to Hogg's Forest Minstrel, The Scots Magazine and
The Edinburgh Magazine.
William Tennant, a native of Anstruther, who, in 1834, became
professor of oriental languages in St Andrews university, pub-
lished, in 1812, while a schoolmaster at Denino, in Fife, his Anster
Fair, a kind of móck heroic description, in English verse, of
that now discontinued rural gathering, not lacking in cleverly
humorous or even in poetic touches. His The Dingin doon 0
The Cathedral descriptive of the destruction of St Andrews
cathedral by the reformation mob—and his Tangier's Giant are
good specimens of graphic vernacular; but his Thane of Fife, and
his two dramas Cardinal Bethune and John Baliol, all in English,
are now quite forgotten.
Of the songs and other pieces of the still less important versifiers
of the later period which have escaped oblivion, it may suffice to
mention the rapturous and rather finely imaginative Cameronian's
Dream of John Hyslop; Robert Gilfillan's plaintive emigrant song
O Why Left I my Hame; the weird Brownie of Blednock by
William Nicholson, known as the Galloway poet'; William Glen's
Wae's me for Prince Charlie ; and the grotesque masterpiece
Kate Dalrymple, at one time claimed for professor Tennant, but
now known to be by William Watt, a Lothian poet, who also
wrote the picturesque Tinkler's Waddin.
By the side of the purely secular verse of the revival there also
a
77721
6
162


## p. 244 (#266) ############################################

244
Lesser Scottish Verse [CH. X
>
a
flourished intermittently a kind of school of sacred verse of which
the earliest and most elaborate specimen is Blair's Grave, noted
elsewhere? A chronic controversy still prevails in Scotland as to
the authorship of several of the metrical paraphrases of Scripture
adopted by the general assembly of the church of Scotland in
1781. Two students of humble birth, Michael Bruce and John
Logan, studied together at Edinburgh university Bruce died in
1767, at the age of twenty-one; and, in 1770, Logan published,
from papers supplied by the family, Poems on Several Occasions
by Michael Bruce, with the information that with a view to make
up a miscellany some poems wrote by different authors are in-
serted. ' In 1781, Logan, now minister of South Leith parish,
published a volume of poems containing an improved version of
The Cuckoo, which had appeared in Bruce's volume, and a number
of the paraphrases adopted by the church of Scotland. The
Cuckoo and the paraphrases have been claimed for Bruce; but
Logan's Braes of Yarrow and other poems in the volume show as
great poetic aptitude as any pieces by Bruce. In 1783, Logan's
tragedy Runnamede was accepted for Covent garden theatre, but
was condemned by the censor on account of its political allusions.
Among Bruce's poems is one on loch Leven, after the manner of
Thomson, and an Elegy on Spring, a pious farewell to nature in
view of his approaching death from consumption. James Grahame,
à native of Glasgow, who, finally, became curate at Sedgefield,
Durham, published various volumes of verse, including the dramatic
poem Mary Queen of Scots (1801), and The Birds of Scotland
(1806), but is best known by his meditative poem The Sabbath
(1804), in blank verse, in which commonplace musing and pattern
sentiments are conjoined with elegant and tasteful, if rather
tedious, description.
Our record closes with Robert Pollok’s Course of Time, pub-
lished in 1827, a long elaborate dissertation in blank verse,
modelled upon Milton, on human destiny, which professor Wilson
considered, though not a poem, 'to overflow with poetry,' and
which, at one time, enjoyed much popularity in more serious
circles, but which has now ceased to be read.
1 See ante, vol. ix, p. 167.


## p. 245 (#267) ############################################

CHAPTER XI
THE PROSODY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
In dealing with the subject of the present chapter, the pro-
cedure of our last chapter on that subject has to be directly
reversed. We had, there, to give account of complicated and
largely changing practice, with hardly any contemporary theory to
accompany it-with almost no theory in a developed and extant
form. In the present case, a very short survey of the practice will
suffice. But we shall have to take into consideration a body of
prosodic study, no member of which is of very great interest in
itself, but which practically founded that study in English literature.
Yet, if the space allotted to metrical practice at the time is
small, it is not because that practice is negligible. On the
contrary, the sentence in our earlier chapter that ‘it established in
the English ear a sense of rhythm that is truly rhythmical’ de-
serves repetition and emphasis. So strongly was this establishment
based, buttressed and built upon, that it practically survived all
the apparent innovations in practice of the nineteenth century
itself, and has only been attacked in very recent years and, as yet,
with no real success. But it was, almost, of the nature of this
process that the prosodic exercises of the eighteenth century should
be comparatively few and positively simple. With the exception of
the rhythmical prose-verse or verse-prose of Ossian, which, with its
partial derivative, that of Blake, may be left to separate treatment
later, and of the recovery of substitution by Chatterton, which
may also be postponed, almost the entire practical prosody
of the period confines itself to two main, and a very few sub-
ordinate, forms, all of which are governed by one general prosodic
principle. This principle directs the restriction of every line-
with the fewest and most jealously guarded licenses--to a fixed
number of syllables, the accentual or quantitative order of which
varies as little as possible. Over the decasyllabic couplet, the
sovereign of the prosodic seas at this time, over its attendant
frigate the octosyllabic, over the not very numerous lyrical
1 Ante, vol. viii, chap. ix.


## p. 246 (#268) ############################################

246 The Prosody of the Eighteenth Century [CH.
fly-boats that complete the squadron, this flag of syllabic and
accentual regularity floats-only one or two privateer or picaroon
small craft daring to disregard it.
The heroic couplet of Dryden, already sufficiently discussed,
underwent, in the earliest years after Dryden's death, changes
which, considering the natural tendencies of humanity, may be
called inevitable. By his own almost inimitable combination
of skill and strength, and by the mechanical devices of triplet
and Alexandrine, Dryden himself had kept off the monotony
which the regular stopped couplet invites. But the invitation
was sure to be accepted by others; indeed, they might plead that
they were only realising the ideal of the form. As Waller and
others before Dryden, wittingly or unwittingly, had hit upon the
other devices of sententious balance and a split in the individual
lines, and of pendulum repetition in the couplets : so, after
Dryden, first Garth and then Pope, no doubt with their eyes
open, rediscovered these ; and the extraordinary craftsmanship
of Pope carried the form to its highest possible perfection. If
--and it is difficult to see how the assertion can be denied the
doctrine expressed in various ways but best formulated by De
Quincey that ‘nothing can go wrong by conforming to its own
ideal' be true, the couplet of Pope, in and by itself, is invulnerable
and imperishable.
But it very soon appeared that a third adjective of the same
class, which indicates almost a necessary quality of the highest
poetic forms, could not be applied to it. It was not inimitable.
The admitted difficulty, if not impossibility, of deciding, on internal
evidence, as to the authorship of the books of The Odyssey trans-
lated by Pope himself, as compared with those done by Fenton
and Broome, showed the danger; and the work of the rest of the
century emphasised it. Men like Savage, Churchill and Cowper went
back to Dryden, or tried a blend of Dryden and Pope; men like
Johnson and Goldsmith new-minted the Popian couplet, in the one
case by massive strength, in the other by easy grace of thought
and phrase and form. But the dangers of monotony and of
convention remained ; and, towards the end of the period, they
were fatally illustrated in the dull insignificance of Hoole and the
glittering frigidity of Darwin.
From one point of view, it is not fanciful or illogical to regard
all other serious, and most other light, measures of this time as
escapes from, or covert rebellions against, this supremacy of a
single form of heroic ; but, as has been pointed out above, one


## p. 247 (#269) ############################################

-
XI] Popular Forms of Verse
247
metre stands in somewhat different case. The octosyllabic couplet
had been little practised by Dryden, though, when he tried it, he
showed his usual mastery; and it evidently did not much appeal
to Pope. But Butler had established it with such authority that,
till well into the nineteenth century, it was called specifically
'Hudibrastic'; and two of the greatest verse writers of the early
eighteenth, Swift and Prior, had used it very largely and very
successfully, so that it could not be regarded as in any way in-
significant, oldfashioned, or contraband. It was, in fact, as much
the recognised metre of the century for light or brief narrative
and miscellaneous purposes not strictly lyrical, as the heroic was
for
graver and larger work. But, as Dyer showed early and others
later, it served—owing to the earlier practice of Milton more
especially—as a not ineffectual door for smuggling in variations
of line-length and foot-arrangement which were contraband, but
of very great value and efficacy.
Another of these centres of free trade in verse was the
Spenserian stanza. The dislike of stanzas of all kinds which, as
we saw, grew during the seventeenth century, was, as shown below,
seriously formulated at the beginning of the eighteenth, and may
be said to have been more or less orthodox throughout its course.
But the exceptional charm of Spenser broke through this; and
no small body of imitations—bad enough, as a rule, but saved by
the excellence of at least part of The Castle of Indolence, and,
perhaps, The Schoolmistress, as well as by the influence, if not the
intrinsic merit, of The Minstrel—found its way into print.
The most formidable rival, however, of the heroic was blank
verse. The practice of this inevitably arose from, and, in most
instances, continued to be the imitation of, Milton, which, sparse
and scanty for the first generation after his death, grew more
abundant as the eighteenth century itself went on and, in
The Seasons, almost ceased to be mere imitation. Fine, however,
as Thomson's blank verse is, and sometimes almost original, it
suffered not a little, while all the blank verse of the century
before Cowper's latest suffered more, from undue generalisa-
tion in almost all cases, and in most from positive caricature,
of Milton's mannerisms. The worst of these (so far as prosody
is concerned) was the exaggeration of his occasional, and always
specially effective, use of the full stop in the interior of a verse
by chopping up line after line in this fashion to an extent
ridiculous to the eye and mind, and destructive of all harmony
to the ear. The practitioners of blank verse, also, too often agreed


## p. 248 (#270) ############################################

248 The Prosody of the Eighteenth Century [CH.
with its enemy Johnson that, if it was not ‘tumid and gorgeous,' it
was mere prose; and, though they frequently failed to make it
gorgeous, they almost invariably succeeded in making it tumid.
Even in Yardley Oak, Cowper's masterpiece of the form, these
defects exist : and the eighteenth century strain in Wordsworth
himself never completely freed itself from them.
It is, however, in lyric measures that the limitations of this
period of more or less rigid drill show themselves most. In what
has been called 'the greater ode,' the terrible irregular 'Pindarics'
of the later seventeenth century continued; but they gradually
died out, and the establishment of stricter forms (in which respect
Congreve is not to be forgotten), speedily and luckily inspired
with fuller poetic spirit by Gray and Collins, did much to appease
the insulted ghost of the great Boeotian. In smaller and lighter
work, the adoption of the anapaest by Prior was almost as fortunate
as his patronage of the octosyllable, and we have not a few grace-
ful trifles—'free' in no evil sense-not merely by Prior himself but
by Gay and by Byrom, by Chesterfield, Pulteney, Shenstone and
others.
Still, as a rule, the lyric poet of the eighteenth century was
confined, or confined himself, to very few metres. Stiff and
sing-song 'common’ or ballad measure; rather better, but too
uniform, long' measure oroctosyllabic quatrains alternately
rimed ; and (somewhat curiously) the old romance-six or rime
;
couée (8 8 6 886 a abccb) with occasional decasyllabic quatrains,
of which the great Elegy is the chief, will probably account for
three-quarters, if not even more, of the lyrical verse of the
period; and almost the whole of it displays that submission to
a cast-iron law of syllabic number and accentual distribution to
which reference has been made. The reason of this we shall
understand better when we have surveyed the preceptist or theo-
retical literature of prosody which, almost for the first time since
the Elizabethan period, makes its reappearance.
For if, during this period, practical prosody enjoyed or suffered
from a kind of stationary state, it was very much the reverse
with prosodic theory. It is, in fact, from the second year of the
eighteenth century that attempts to deal with English prosody as
a subject practically date. Gascoigne's examination was too slight,
Puttenham's too ineffectually systematised, the studies of the other
Elizabethans, directed too much to one particular, and for the
most part non-essential, point (classical versing) and all too little
historical ; while the, possibly, more pertinent treatises of Jonson
6


## p. 249 (#271) ############################################

6
XI]
The Theorists. Bysshe 249
and Dryden are not extant, and the very distribution or trend of
them is only to be guessed.
In 1702, there appeared, written or compiled by an obscure
person by name Edward Bysshe, an Art of Poetry, which (after
a custom set on the continent for some considerable time past
and already followed here by Joshua Poole) consisted principally
of a riming dictionary and an anthology of passages containing
similes and so forth. The book became popular and was often
reprinted (at first with considerable additions) during the century.
The bulk of it has long been mere waste-paper; indeed, a riming
dictionary may be said to be, in itself, almost the greatest achieved,
if not the greatest possible, insult to the human understanding.
But its brief introduction, 'Rules for Making English Verses,' is
one of the two or three most important points de repère of the
whole subject; though, even at the present day, and even by
serious students of prosody, that importance is sometimes denied
and oftener belittled. It has even been said that Bysshe merely
represents the traditional view'; to which it can only be replied
that exhaustive examination of every previous treatment of the
subject has failed to discover any expressed tradition of the kind
or any sign that such tradition had 'materialised itself' to anybody
outside an extremely variable practice.
What Bysshe does is to formulate, with extraordinary fidelity,
a system of versification to which the practice of the foregoing
century had certainly been more and more tending, but which had
never been expressed in theory before. His own principle is
strictly syllabic. There are no feet in English-merely a certain
number of syllables. Moreover, he would preferentially admit
only verses of ten (with an extra one for double rimes), eight and
seven ; though he does not absolutely exclude others. These
syllables, in a heroic, must be arranged so that there is a pause at
the fourth, fifth or sixth, and a strong accent on the second, fourth
and sixth. So absolutely devoted is he to syllables and accents
that he only approaches verses of triple (dactylic or anapaestic)
t' fime (while he uses none of these terms), by the singularly round-
about way of describing them as 'verses of nine or seven syllables
with the accent on the last,' and dismisses them as “low,''burlesque'
and disagreeable, unless they occur in 'compositions for music. '
He is, of course, a severe advocate of elision: the 'e' of the article
must always be cut off before a vowel; 'violet' is, or may be, 'vi'let. '
But he disapproves of the seventeenth century practice of eliding
such vowels as the 'y' of 'by. As for stanzas of intermixed rime
6
9


## p. 250 (#272) ############################################

250 The Prosody of the Eighteenth Century [[
CH.
>
(i. e. Spenserian, rime royal, etc. ), ‘they are now wholly laid aside'
in longer poems.
Now, this gives us a miserably restricted prosody; but, in the
first place, it is the prosody of the eighteenth century, and, in the
second place, it had never been thus formulated before.
But, although hardly any poets except Chatterton and Blake
(for Gray and Collins themselves do not show any formal rebellion)
were rebels to this until Southey and Coleridge broke it down at the
end of the century, the preceptive prosodists—who, in most cases,
were not poets at all—by no means showed equal docility, although
their recalcitrance was seldom of the right kind. Pope, indeed, in
almost his only prosodic passage, the early Letter to H. Cromwell
(1710), follows Bysshe literally in some points, virtually, in almost
all. On the other hand, Pope's enemy Gildon (who, like Dennis,
has of late years been ‘taken up’in some quarters) revolted against
Bysshe's syllables and accents, and, though in a vague manner,
introduced a system of employing musical terms and notes to
prosody-a specious proceeding which has had many votaries since.
He, also, with John Brightland and one or two more, started
another hare—the question of accent v. quantity—which has been
coursed ever since, and which, also, will probably never be run
down. This latter point attracted much attention, especially as it
connected itself with a contemporary discussion, to which Foster,
Enni Gally and others contributed, on classical accentuation. Henry
Pemberton was so ferocious a champion of accentuation that he
would have rewritten Milton, altering, for instance
And towards the gate rolling her bestial train
into
And rolling towards the gate her bestial train.
Edward Mainwaring followed the musical line, and began a
practice, frequently revived to the present day, of turning the
heroic topsy-turvy and beginning with an anacrusis or single
syllable foot
And | mounts exſulting on triumphant | wings.
The catalogue of eighteenth century prosodists, thenceforward, is
a long one, and it cannot be said that a thorough student of the
subject is justified in neglecting even one of the following:
Harris (Hermes Harris), Say, Lord Kames, Lord Monboddo, Webb,
Abraham Tucker, Herries, Thomas Sheridan, Steele, Tyrwhitt,
Young, Nares and Fogg. But, with some notice of Steele and
i Nov. 25. This was the subject of one of Pope's extraordinary falsifications. He
changed it into one to Walsh dated four years still earlier.


## p. 251 (#273) ############################################

XI]
Joshua Steele
251
Young, we may pass here to half-a-dozen others (four of whom
are of general interest and one of real importance)Shenstone,
Gray, Johnson, John Mason, Mitford and Cowper.
Joshua Steele undoubtedly exercised great influence on many
prosodic students, some of whom acknowledged it and some did
not, while he has been recently hailed as 'a master' by authorities
who deserve respect. Yet, these same authorities, strangely enough,
acknowledge that Steele's actual scansion is ‘utterly wild. ' It is
not incumbent on a survey like the present to attempt the re-
conciliation, or at any length to expose the incompatibility, of two
such statements. It is, perhaps, sufficient to say, on the first head,
that Steele’s ‘mastery' seems to be shown in the fact that, for the
first time, he proclaimed verse to be essentially matter of musical
rhythm, and applied musical methods frankly and freely to the
notation of metre; that he discarded syllabic feet; and that he
gave the metrical franchise to pauses as well as to spoken syllables.
As to the second head, it should be still more sufficient to state that
he allowed from six to eight 'cadences’ in a heroic line; that he
scans a famous verse
0 | happiness | our | being's | end and I aim
and starts Paradise Lost as
Of | Man's | first disobedience and the fruit.
By what logic it can be contended that a system which leads
to such “monstrosities' (the word is that of an admirer of Steele)
as this is ‘masterly,' some readers, at any rate, will find it
difficult to imagine. Either Steele's scansions are justified by his
principles or they are not. If they are, these principles are self-
condemned ; if they are not, the perpetrator of the scansions must
have been a man of so loose a way of thinking that he cannot be
taken into serious consideration. In either case, he cannot have
.
had an ear; and a prosodist without an ear may surely be asked
to 'stand down. ' There is much of a similar kind to be said of
Young. On the other hand, Tyrwhitt, in his justly famous edition of
Chaucer, showed himself a real prosodist and, early as it was, came
to very sound conclusions by the simple process of taking the
verse first and getting it satisfactorily scanned. Of the rest, most
are chiefly remarkable for curiosities of a theory which always
neglects large parts of English poetry, and sometimes sets at
naught even the practice that it recognises. Perhaps the best is
Johnson's despised “Sherry,' whose prosody is, certainly, in many
points heretical, if Johnson's own is orthodox.
6


## p. 252 (#274) ############################################

252 The Prosody of the Eighteenth Century [CH.
Wrong as they generally went, fruitless as were, too often, their
attempts, flitting shadows in an arid desert as some may think
them, history cannot entirely omit these enquirers; but she cer-
tainly turns to a few others with some satisfaction. Shenstone,
Gray, Johnson and Cowper were poets? who turned their attention
definitely to prosody. Mason (John, not William) and Mitford
were prosodists who, in the first case, at least, appreciated the
beauty of poetry, and, in the second, made large excursions into
the more than contemporary history of it. Shenstone's actual
poetical value may not be very high ; but the merest glance at the
variety of his poetical forms should prove something of a tell-tale
about him, and his prose works, if only in a few scattered observa-
tions, emphasise the warning. He seems to have been the very
first person in the century who definitely perceived the wanton
asceticism of unvarying elision and sighed for the dactyl,' as he
called it; he is the first, also, who laid express stress on the value
of 'full' rimes and the colouring force of particular phrases.
Gray, a much greater poet and not himself much of a practitioner
of trisyllabics, was, on the other hand, the first to recognise the
presence and the continuity of the trisyllabic foot in generally
disyllabic metres from middle English downward; and he exhibits
in his (unfortunately fragmentary) Metrum many other signs of
historic knowledge and metrical vision. Johnson, in his prosodic
remarks on Milton, Spenser and a few others, is, professedly, at
least, of the straitest sect of believers in fixed syllabism, regular
iambic arrangement and middle caesura. Yet, as is constantly the
case with him in other departments of criticism, he shows, in an
almost Drydenian manner, his consciousness of the other side ;
and, indeed, gives that side practically all it can ask by admitting
that perfect 'purity,' though, as enforced above, the most complete
harmony of which a single verse is capable,' is, if preserved con-
tinuously, not only ‘very difficult' but 'tiresome and disgusting';
and that variation of the accents, though ‘it always injures the
harmony of the line,' compensates the loss by relieving us of this
tyranny. He did not extend the same indulgence to what he calls
elision,' that is to say, the presence of extra syllables or trisyllabic
feet; or to pauses far from the centre. But the concession as to
'pure' and 'mixed' measures was itself a Trojan horse. If, the
nearer you approach to purity and perfection, in one part of the
6
1 Goldsmith devoted one of his essays to the subject, and some have thought it
valuable. In form, it is as agreeable as everything its author wrote: to the present
writer, its matter seems smatter, insufficiently veiled by motherwit.


## p. 253 (#275) ############################################

xi]
John Mason
253
system, the more likely your result is to be tiresome and disgusting,
it will go near to be thought shortly that the system itself is
rotten somewhere.
Although it would be rather dangerous to say what book of his
own time Johnson had not read, there is not, to the knowledge of
the present writer, any sign in his Works or in his Life, of his having
come across the speculations on prose, verse and elocution of John
Mason, which were published in three little tracts shortly before
The Rambler appeared.