Robert Burns wrote and did some things unworthy of a great poet; but when Scotland thinks of him, she quotes the lines which he wrote for Tam Samson’s Elegy:—­

“Heav’n rest his saul, whare’er he be! 
Is th’ wish o’ mony mae than me: 
He had twa faults, or maybe three,
Yet what remead?[11]
Ae social, honest man want we.”

Burns’s Poetic Creed.—­We can understand and enjoy Burns much better if we know his object in writing poetry and the point of view from which he regarded life.  It would be hard to fancy the intensity of the shock which the school of Pope would have felt on reading this statement of the poor plowman’s poetic creed:—­

“Gie me ae spark o’ Nature’s fire,
That’s a’ the learning I desire;
Then tho’ I drudge thro’ dub an’ mire
At pleugh or cart,
My Muse, though hamely in attire,
May touch the heart."[12]

Burns’s heart had been touched with the loves and sorrows of life, and it was his ambition to sing so naturally of these as to touch the hearts of others.

With such an object in view, he did not disdain to use in his best productions much of the Scottish dialect, the vernacular of the plowman and the shepherd.  The literary men of Edinburgh, who would rather have been convicted of a breach of etiquette than of a Scotticism, tried to induce him to write pure English; but the Scotch words which he first heard from his mother’s lips seemed to possess more “o’ Nature’s fire.”  He ended by touching the heart of Scotland and making her feel more proud of this dialect, of him, and of herself.

[Illustration:  BURNS AND HIGHLAND MARY. From the painting by James Archer.]

Union of the Elizabethan with the Revolutionary Spirit.—­In no respect does the poetry of Burns more completely part company with the productions of the classical school than in the expression of feeling.  The emotional fire of Elizabethan times was restored to literature.  No poet except Shakespeare has ever written more nobly impassioned love songs.  Burns’s song beginning:—­

  “Ae fond kiss and then
    we sever”

seemed to both Byron and Scott to contain the essence of a thousand love tales.  This unaffected, passionate treatment of love had long been absent from our literature; but intensity of genuine feeling reappeared in Burns’s Highland Mary, I Love My Jean, Farewell to Nancy, To Mary in Heaven, O Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast, which last Mendelssohn thought exquisite enough to set to music.  The poetry of Burns throbs with varying emotions.  It has been well said that the essence of the lyric is to describe the passion of the moment.  Burns is a master in this field.

The spirit of revolution against the bondage and cold formalism of the past made the poor man feel that his place in the world was as dignified, his happiness as important, as that of the rich.  A feeling of sympathy for the oppressed and the helpless also reached beyond man to animals.  Burns wrote touching lines about a mouse whose nest was, one cold November day, destroyed by his plow.  When the wild eddying swirl of the snow beat around his cot, his heart went out to the poor sheep, cattle, and birds.