Whatever the French Revolution may have been, the French Revolution, as Mr Carlyle conceives it, will be the French Revolution of posterity. If he has been mistaken, it is not easy to see from what quarter rectification is to come. It will be difficult to take the "sea-green" out of the countenance of the Incorruptible; to silence Danton's pealing voice or clip his shaggy mane; to dethrone King Mirabeau. If, with regard to these men, Mr Carlyle has written wrongfully, there is to be found no redress. Robespierre is now, and henceforth in popular conception, a prig; Mirabeau is now and henceforth a hero. Of these men, and many others, Mr Carlyle has painted portraits, and whether true or false, his portraits are taken as genuine. And this new eye he has brought into ethics as well. A mountain, a daisy, a sparrow's nest, a moorland tarn, were very different objects to Wordsworth from what they were to ordinary spectators; and the moral qualities of truth, valour, honesty, industry, are quite other things to Mr Carlyle than they are to the ordinary run of mortalsnot to speak of preachers and critical writers. The gospel of noble manhood which he so passionately preaches is not in the least a novel one; the main points of it are to be found in the oldest books which the world possesses, and have been so constantly in the mouths of men that for several centuries past they have been regarded as truisms. That "work is worship;" that the first duty of a man is to find out what he can do best, and when found, "to keep pegging away at it," as old Lincoln phrased it; that on a lie nothing can be built; that this world has been created by Almighty God; that man has a soul which cannot be satisfied with meats or drinks, or fine palaces and millions of money, or stars and ribands-are not these the mustiest of commonplaces, of the utterance of which our very grandmothers might be

ashamed? It is true they are most common. place to the commonplace; that they have formed the staple of droning sermons which have set the congregation asleep; but just as Wordsworth saw more in a mountain than any other man, so in these ancient saws Mr Carlyle discovered what no other man in his time has. And then, in combination with this piercing insight, he has, above all things, emphasis. He speaks as one having authority-the authority of a man who has seen with his own eyes, who has gone to the bottom of things and knows. For thirty years this gospel he has preached, scornfully sometimes, fiercely sometimes, to the great scandal of decorous persons not unfrequently; but he has always preached it sincerely and effectively. All this Mr Carlyle has done; and there was not a single individual, perhaps, in his large audience at Edinburgh the other day, who was not indebted to him for something -on whom he had not exerted some spiritual influence more or less. Hardly one, perhaps— and there were many to whom he has been a sort of Moses leading them across the desert to what land of promise may be in store for them; some to whom he has been a many-counselled, wisely-experienced elder brother; a few to whom he has been monitor and friend. The gratitude I owe to him is, or should be, equal to that of most. He has been to me only a voice, sometimes sad, sometimes wrathful, sometimes scornful; but when I saw him for the first time with the eye of flesh stand up amongst us the other day, and heard him speak kindly, brotherly, affectionate words-his first appearance of that kind, I suppose, since he discoursed of Heroes and Hero Worship to the London people-I am not ashamed to confess that I felt moved towards him, as I do not think, in any possible combination of circumstances, I could have felt moved towards any other living man.

THOMAS CARLYLE.

BURNS.*

BORN 1795: DIED 1881.

WE are far from thinking that the problem of Burns's biography has yet been adequately solved. We do not allude so much to deficiency of facts or documents-though of these we are still every day receiving some fresh accession as to the limited and imperfect application of them to the great end of biography. Our notions upon this subject may perhaps appear

* Edinburgh Review, No. 96, 1828. Here given in an abridged form, with the author's permission.

extravagant; but if an individual is really of consequence enough to have his life and character recorded for public remembrance, we have always been of opinion that the public ought to be made acquainted with all the inward springs and relations of his character. How did the world and man's life, from his particular posi tion, represent themselves to his mind? How did coexisting circumstances modify him from without; how did he modify these from within! With what endeavours and what efficacy rule over them; with what resistance and what suffering sink under them? In one word, what

and how produced was the effect of society on him? what and how produced was his effect on society? He who should answer these questions, in regard to any individual, would, as we believe, furnish a model of perfection in biography. Few individuals, indeed, can deserve such a study; and many lives will be written, and, for the gratification of innocent curiosity, ought to be writtten, and read and forgotten, which are not in this sense biographies. But Burns, if we mistake not, is one of these few individuals; and such a study, at least with such a result, he has not yet obtained. Our own contributions to it, we are aware, can be but scanty and feeble; but we offer them with good-will, and trust they may meet with acceptance from those they are intended for.

Burns first came upon the world as a prodigy; and was, in that character, entertained by it, in the usual fashion, with loud, vague, tumultuous wonder, speedily subsiding into censure and neglect; till his early and most mournful death again awakened an enthusiasm for him, which, especially as there was now nothing to be done, and much to be spoken, has prolonged itself even to our own time. It is true, the "nine days" have long since elapsed; and the very continuance of this clamour proves that Burns was no vulgar wonder. Accordingly, even in sober judgments, where, as years passed by, he has come to rest more and more exclusively on his own intrinsic merits, and may now be well-nigh shorn of that casual radiance, he appears not only as a true British poet, but as one of the most considerable British men of the eighteenth century. Let it not be objected that he did little. He did much, if we consider where and how. If the work performed was small, we must remember that he had his very materials to discover; for the metal he worked in lay hid under the desert moor, where no eye but his had guessed its existence; and we may almost say, that with his own hand he had to construct the tools for fashioning it. For he found himself in deepest obscurity, without help, without instruction, without model; or with models only of the meanest sort. An educated man stands, as it were, in the midst of a boundless arsenal and magazine, filled with all the weapons and engines which man's skill has been able to devise from the earliest time; and he works, accordingly, with a strength borrowed from all past ages. How different is his state who stands on the outside of that storehouse, and feels that its gates must be stormed, or remain for ever shut against him! His means are the commonest and rudest; the mere work done is no measure of his strength. A dwarf behind his steamengine may remove mountains; but no dwarf will hew them down with the pickaxe; and he must be a Titan that hurls them abroad with his arms.

It is in this last shape that Burns presents himself. Born in an age the most prosaic Britain had yet seen, and in a condition the most disadvantageous, where in his mind, if it accom plished aught, must accomplish it under the pressure of continual bodily toil, nay of penury and desponding apprehension of the worst evils, and with no furtherance but such knowledge as dwells in a poor man's hut, and the rhymes of a Ferguson or Ramsay for his standard of beauty, he sinks not under all these impediments: through the fogs and darkness of that obscure region, his lynx eye discerns the true relations of the world and human life; he grows into intellectual strength, and trains himself into intellectual expertness. Impelled by the expansive movement of his own irrepressible soul, he struggles forward into the general view; and with haughty modesty lays down before us, as the fruit of his labour, a gift, which time has now pronounced imperishable. Add to all this, that his darksome drudging childhood and youth was by far the kindliest era of his whole life; and that he died in his thirtyseventh year: and then ask, if it be strange that his poems are imperfect, and of small extent, or that his genius attained no mastery in its art? Alas, his sun shone as through a tropical tornado; and the pale shadow of death eclipsed it at noon! Shrouded in such baleful vapours, the genius of Burns was never seen in clear azure splendour, enlightening the world: but some beams from it did, by fits, pierce through; and it tinted those clouds with rainbow and orient colours, into a glory and stern grandeur, which men silently gazed on with wonder and tears!

We are anxious not to exaggerate; for it is exposition rather than admiration that our readers require of us here: and yet to avoid some tendency to that side is no easy matter. We love Burns, and we pity him; and love and pity are prone to magnify. Criticism, it is sometimes thought, should be a cold business. We are not so sure of this; but, at all events, our concern with Burns is not exclusively that of critics. True and genial as his poetry must appear, it is not chiefly as a poet, but as a man, that he interests and affects us. He was often advised to write a tragedy; time and means were not lent him for this; but through life he enacted a tragedy, and one of the deepest. We question whether the world has since witnessed so utterly sad a scene; whether Napoleon himself left to brawl with Sir Hudson Lowe, and perish on his rock, "amid the melancholy main," presented to the reflecting mind such a of pity and fear," as did this intrinsically nobler, gentler, and perhaps greater soul, wasting itself away in a hopeless struggle with base entanglements, which coiled closer and closer round him, till only death opened him an outlet. Conquerors are a class of men with whom, for most part, the world could well dispense; nor can the hard intellect, the unsympathising lofti.

spectacle

these poems, marred and defective as they are, which forbids the most fastidious student of poetry to pass them by. Some sort of enduring quality they must have, for, after fifty years of the wildest vicissitudes in poetic taste, they still continue to be read; nay, are read more and more eagerly, more and more extensively and this not only by literary virtuosos, and that class upon whom transitory causes operate most strongly, but by all classes, down to the most hard, unlettered, and truly natural class, who read little, and especially no poetry, except because they find pleasure in it. The grounds of so singular and wide a popularity, which extends, in a literal sense, from the palace to the hut, and over all regions where the English tongue is spoken, are well worth inquiring into. After every just deduction, it seems to imply some rare excellence in these works. What is that excellence?

To answer this question will not lead us far. The excellence of Burns is, indeed, among the rarest, whether in poetry or prose; but, at the same time, it is plain and easily recognised: his sincerity, his indisputable air of truth. Here are no fabulous woes or joys; no hollow fantastic sentimentalities; no wire-drawn refinings, either in thought or feeling: the passion that is traced before us has glowed in a living heart; | the opinion he utters has risen in his own understanding and been a light to his own steps. He does not write from hearsay, but from sight and experience; it is the scenes that he has lived and laboured amidst that he describes; those scenes, rude and humble as they are, have kindled beautiful emotions in his soul, noble thoughts, and definite resolves; and he speaks forth what is in him, not from any outward call of vanity or interest, but because his heart is too full to be silent. He speaks it with such melody and modulation as he can; "in homely rustic jingle;" but it is his own, and genuine. This is the grand secret for finding readers and retaining them: let him who would move and convince others be first moved and convinced himself. Horace's rule, Si vis me flere, is applicable in a wider sense than the literal one. To every poet, to every writer, we might say: Be true if you would be believed. Let a man but speak forth with genuine earnestness the thought, the emotion, the actual condition of his own heart; and other men, so strangely are we all knit together by the tie of sympathy, must and will give heed to him. In culture, in extent of view, we may stand above the speaker or below him; but in either case his words, if they are earnest and sincere, will find some response within us; for in spite of all casual varieties in outward rank, or inward, as face answers to face, so does the heart of man to man.

This may appear a very simple principle, and one which Burns had little merit in discovering. True, the discovery is easy enough, but the prac

tical appliance is not easy-is indeed the fundamental difficulty which all poets have to strive with, and which scarcely one in the hundred ever fairly surmounts. A head too dull to discriminate the true from the false; a heart too dull to love the one at all risks, and to hate the other in spite of all temptations, are alike fatal to a writer. With either, or, as more commonly happens, with both, of these deficiencies, combine a love of distinction, a wish to be original, which is seldom wanting; and we have Affectation, the bane of literature, as Cant, its elder brother, is of morals. How often does the one and the other front us in poetry as in life! Great poets themselves are not always free of this vice; nay, it is precisely on a certain sort and degree of greatness that it is most commonly ingrafted. A strong effort after excellence will sometimes solace itself with a mere shadow of success; he who has much to unfold will sometimes unfold it imperfectly. Byron, for instance, was no common man; yet if we examine his poetry with this view, we shall find it far enough from faultless. Generally speaking, we should say that it is not true. He refreshes us, not with the divine fountain, but too often with vulgar strong waters, stimulating indeed to the taste, but soon ending in dislike, or even nausea. Are his Harolds and Giaours, we would ask, real menwe mean, poetically consistent and conceivabis men? Do not these characters, does not the character of their author, which more or less shines through them all, rather appear a thing put on for the occasion; no natural or possible mode of being, but something intended to look much grander than nature? Surely all these stormful agonies, this volcanic heroism, superhuman contempt, and moody desperation, with so much scowling, and teeth-gnashing, and other sulphurous humour, is more like the brawling of a player in some paltry tragedy which is to last three hours than the bearing of a man in the business of life which is to last threescore and ten years. To our minds, there is a taint of this sort--something which we should call theatrical, false, affected, in every one of these otherwise so powerful pieces. Perhaps "Don Juan," especially the latter parts of it, is the only thing approaching to a sincere work he ever wrote-the only work where he showed himself, in any measure, as he was; and seemed so intent on his subject as for moments to forget himself. Yet Byron hated this vice; we believe, heartily detested it: nay, he had declared formal war against it in words. So difficult is it even for the strongest to make this primary attainment, which might seem the simplest of all: to read its own consciousness without mistakes, without errors involuntary or wilful! We recollect no poet of Burns's susceptibility who comes before us from the first, and abides with us to the last, with such a total want of affectation. He is an honest man and an honest writer. In his suc

cesses and his failures, in his greatness and his littleness, he is ever clear, simple, true, and glitters with no lustre but his own. We reckon this to be a great virtue-to be, in fact, the root of most other virtues, literary as well as moral. Here, however, let us say it is to the poetry of Burns that we now allude; to those writings which he had time to meditate, and where no special reason existed to warp his critical feeling or obstruct his endeavour to fulfil it. Certain of his letters, and other fractions of prose composition, by no means deserve this praise. Here, doubtless, there is not the same natural truth of style, but on the contrary, something not only stiff but strained and twisted-a certain high-flown inflated tone, the stilting emphasis of which contrasts ill with the firmness and rugged simplicity of even his poorest verses. Thus no man, it would appear, is altogether unaffected. Does not Shakespeare himself sometimes premeditate the sheerest bombast! But even with regard to these letters of Burns, it is but fair to state that he had two excuses. The first was his comparative deficiency in language. Burns, though for most part he writes with singular force, and even gracefulness, is not master of English prose as he is of Scottish verse-not master of it, we mean, in proportion to the depth and vehemence of his matter. These letters strike us as the effort of a man to express something which he has no organ fit for expressing. But a second and weightier excuse is to be found in the peculiarity of Burns's social rank. His correspondents are often men whose relation to him he has never accurately ascertained, whom, therefore, he is either forearming himself against, or else unconsciously flattering, by adopting the style he thinks will please them. At all events, we should remember that these faults, even in his letters, are not the rule but the exception. Whenever he writes, as one would ever wish to do, to trusted friends and on real interests, his style becomes simple, vigorous, expressive, sometimes even beautiful. His letters to Mrs Dunlop are uniformly excellent.

Virgins of the Sun, and our Knights of the Cross, malicious Saracens in turbans, and coppercoloured chiefs in wampum, and so many other truculent figures from the heroic times or the heroic climates, who on all hands swarm in our poetry. Peace be with them! But yet, as a great moralist proposed preaching to the men of this century, so would we fain preach to the poets "a sermon on the duty of staying at home." Let them be sure that heroic ages and heroic climates can do little for them. That form of life has attraction for us, less because it is better or nobler than our own than simply because it is different; and even this attraction must be of the most transient sort. For will not our own age one day be an ancient one, and have as quaint a costume as the rest, not contrasted with the rest, therefore, but ranked along with them in respect of quaintness? Does Homer interest us now because he wrote of what passed beyond his native Greece, and two centuries before he was born? or because he wrote of what passed in God's world, and in the heart of man, which is the same after thirty centuries? Let our poets look to this is their feeling really finer, truer, and their vision deeper than that of other men, they have nothing to fear, even from the humblest subject; is it not so-they have nothing to hope but an ephemeral favour, even from the highest.

The poet, we imagine, can never have far to seek for a subject; the elements of his art are in him and around him on every hand; for him the ideal world is not remote from the actual but under it and within it: nay, he is a poet precisely because he can discern it there. Wher ever there is a sky above him, and a world around him, the poet is in his place; for here, too, is man's existence, with its infinite longings and small acquirings; its ever-thwarted, everrenewed endeavours; its unspeakable aspira tions; its fears and hopes that wander through eternity; and all the mystery of brightness and of gloom that it was ever made of in any age or climate since man first began to live. Is there not the fifth act of a tragedy in every death-bed, though it were a peasant's, and a bed of heath? And are wooings and weddings obsolete that there can be comedy no longer? Or are men suddenly grown wise that Laughter must no longer shake his sides but be cheated of his farce? Man's life and nature is as it was, and as it will ever be. But the poet must have an eye to read these things, and a heart to understand them, or they come and pass away before him in vain. He is a vates, a seer; a gift of vision has been given him. Has life no meanings for him which another cannot equally decipher? then he is no poet, and Delphi itself will not make him one. In this respect Burns, though not perhaps ab

bility, better proves the truth of his genius, than if he had, by his own strength, kept the whole